Affiliate Referral Sources » Software

How to Get Free Website Traffic Using Link Exchanges

Jim Hutchinson — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:00:57 +0000

Exchange Links with Related Sites to Get More Visitors

Look for industry-related sites and request that they either link to you or exchange links with you. The one-way links are best because each link is a virtual “vote” for your site and used by the search engines to help rank your site in the search results for your topic.

Reciprocal links also get traffic to your sites because you are exchanging “votes” for each other. You will also be sending traffic between your sites if the sites compliment each other. If your product or service can be used as an add-on to the services of the other site, or vice versa, then you will have a good match and both of you can benefit from the link exchange.

Linking to or between unrelated sites does not provide your visitors with useful information. If you link to affiliate sites, make sure those links are not on your main page and they are kept at a minimum. Having a whole page of affiliate links, especially products or services that are not related to your site, will drive your visitors away. They will get the idea that you are only after making sales, not providing them with useful information to gain their trust.

When looking for sites to exchange links with, look for criteria such as the number of links on their site; Stay away from “link farms” – sites that have hundreds of unrelated links on one page; The Google Page Rank of that site – available with the Google Toolbar and online at WebsiteManagers.net in the marketing section.

Link managers come in various packages with some of the more complex scripts costing usually $50 to $100. Those are the ones that allow you to create categories, ban users, along with many other features. One of the full featured programs is AutoLinksPro Link Exchange Software.

PHP Junkyard has a free link manager named PHP Link Manager, also known as LinkMan that I often use. The setup is fairly easy, but requires editing some files with a plain text editor.

Once the files are in place, you will use the Admin section to maintain the links that others put on your links list. This software will check the linking site to make sure it contains a link back to your website. If the link is not there, the reciprocal link is removed from your list.

A Word of Caution: Not keeping your list cleaned can get you a negative Google Page Rank. Yes, negative. I made the mistake of allowing some links stay on the list that were unrelated to mine, added a “nofollow” tag to the links so the search engines would not follow them, and the links page achieved a Page Rank of -1.

Yes, that is a minus one. Getting busy in life is good, especially if it means that your business is growing. By having various processes set up properly, you can let them run with little maintenance. Make a mistake along the way though and you will spend more time trying to fix it, like I have done with my reciprocal links list.

If you want to allow non-related links on your site, then put them into a separate folder or category. Example: I copied LinkMan into a separate folder, changed the settings to reflect the new location and named it “Games”. That is because I received so many requests for gaming links that it was becoming a problem to keep them cleaned out. This way they have a list of their own.

If your website only focuses on one topic, then you will only allow links from that industry and remove the rest. That will keep your list focused and clean.

Software to Help You Generate Links

There is a program called HyperVRE that helps you create web pages search engines love. The VRE stands for Virtual Real Estate, which is basically what websites are.

Some of the benefits include:

· Generate THOUSANDS of fresh, unique content-rich web pages from highly-targeted keyword lists.

· Add extremely targeted auto-refreshing content to your website by using rotating keyword definitions and put your niche keywords on steroids. Fill each of your web pages with content the search engines will love.

· Keep your web pages fresh with unique content by placing several rotating RSS feeds to ensure that all pages are unique and highly related to the topic.

Learn more about HyperVRE and how it can help you get more incoming links to your site.

This article is a sample from my book, How to Get Free or Low-Cost Website Traffic.

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Jim Hutchinson
Author of How to Get Free or Low-Cost Website Traffic

Recommended Plugins For Your WordPress Blog

Jim Hutchinson — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:00:59 +0000

When running your blog, you spend most of your time posting articles to generate traffic. That is the most important part. Another important part is making sure the blog is aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

Having a site that looks good makes reading the content easier and keeps the visitors there longer. To test various designs, I like to periodically change the theme. Then I check the logs to see if people tend to stay on the site longer and if they can navigate to the other pages easier.

Another thing I like to do is keep watch for plugins that make the visitors interact. That can be things like sending the page to a friend, or adding it to their favorite social bookmarking site. Even putting audio in the articles allows the visitors to listen while they read or look around.

The audio files are known as podcasts and can be downloaded to iPods or other MP3 players. With iPods though, they can sign up for the news feed, much like the other visitors do, so they can get notifications of new articles when they are published.

Recently while on NetProfitsToday.com, one of my favorite discussion forums, the topic of WordPress plugins came up. The list that grew really captured my attention. I knew that there are hundreds, maybe thousands or plugins, but did not know which ones were worthwhile, until I saw the list that others are using.

Whether you have a blog or not, I invite you to look at the list. I added it to my marketing site and looked up the links to each of the plugins so you can get them for your own blog.

To see a list of some recommended WordPress plugins, visit
Affiliate Referral Sources Blogging Secrets

Jim Hutchinson
Affiliate Referral Sources
A Division of Website Managers, LLC
Now in Our 10th Year of Website Hosting
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Copyright © 2008 Website Managers, LLC. You may reprint this article providing that this copyright notice and resource links all remain intact.

Using Vumpost to Automate Your Discussion Forum

Jim Hutchinson — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:35:36 +0000

You really CAN set up and new, pre-populated discussion forum within an hour!

In case you are new to this site and did not know, I like testing new software, especially programs that help make our business lives easier. One of the packages I am testing now is called Vumpost. Maybe you have heard of it, maybe not.

Vumpost is a program that allows you to pre-populate a discussion forum with content from Yahoo! Answers. Think of it as a jump-start to your discussion forum. Here are some things I like and dislike about the software.

What I like About Vumpost:

Launching a new forum on practically any topic, can be created and populated with hundreds of posts within an hour.
The discussions are automatically put into the categorizes you set up and define in the software settings.
Unlimited categories can be created on the same forum, or you can launch unlimited forums on separate sites and all of them can be populated using this software.
Even though the people who started the discussion are not members of your forum and may not see the responses, you can still continue those discussions with participation from other members.
Topic-based discussion forums, especially those with many discussions, are great for SEO!
New discussions can be added every week and even automated if your web host allows cron tasks. That way it is completely hands-off and automatically adds all the new discussions from the previous week!

What I Do Not Like About Vumpost:

The people who started the discussions are not members of your forum.
Those people may never see your responses (see above for alternative).
If you make a mistake importing the discussions and do it again, you essentially double up on the ones you put in the first time. This can be avoided by researching your keywords BEFORE updating your import settings. I learned that the hard way.
Even though there are responses to each topic, the number of views is initially zero. That means someone would have responded without viewing it? Weird, but how many people truly base their decision on reading and participating by how many viewed it? I go by the content and how many responded.
You will have all those discussions and initially only YOU as a member.

Overall, the software works great! You can see the results on the forum I created for the test. It automatically ads new discussions every week on autopilot. I just set it up once and watch it grow. Feel free to register and participate. Go to http://forum.affref.com

When you are ready to launch your own forum, check out Vumpost to see how it can help your discussion forum get active fast.

Until next time, I hope to see you at the TOP of the search engines!

Jim Hutchinson
Affiliate Referral Sources
A Division of Website Managers, LLC
Now in Our 10th Year of Website Hosting
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Jim Hutchinson is the Project Manager for Website Managers. He has studied Internet Marketing from some of the most influential leaders. Many of those resources are available on Affiliate Referral Sources.
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Copyright © 2008 Website Managers, LLC. You may reprint this article providing that this copyright notice and resource links all remain intact.