Sometimes we can out think the room when it comes to backlinking. But in the end, it has the same requirements as most all other tasks that we online marketers do … it behooves us to identify those tasks that give us more bang for our buck. 

High leverage tasks is a better term for them. The more of these we can identify and then execute on a daily basis, then the more we will get accomplished – period.

With all that said, here is an excerpt about some linking dos and don'ts …

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Link building entails thinking wisely and implementing the right strategies. There are certainly a lot of “dos” and “don’ts” in the business of blog link building. Here are some that you should remember:

• Do write guest blogs that promote your blog link and submit them to sites that are relevant to your website. But don’t submit blogs that are littered with a lot of typos and grammatical errors. You’re out to promote your blog, and submitting a poorly written article will reflect on your blog and the reputation it’s trying to build online.

• Build the content of your blog, making sure that the content is easily read and absorbed so that it will generate a lot of interest among various groups. This is an effective way of building loyalty and also generating interest among different audiences. But don’t generate a lot of content and links in a single day then fail to do it for the next 30 days. Consistency is an overlooked factor when link building. It is something that should be done with fair regularity.

As you can see, blog link building takes a lot of work that could eat up a lot of time. If you’re the type of person who has to juggle so many things in his life, it’s understandable that you may not have the time to implement a blog link building strategy. Fortunately, there are online services that can help with your link building goals….More at Blog Link Building Dos and Don’ts

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The very best way to understand how to get the most out of your blog is to regularly read great blogs to tell you how. You will amaze yourself if you make yourself do this for just a few weeks.

What I do is use Feed Demon and subscribe to the bloggers who are considered to be experts and gurus in the niches in which I am intersted. Feed Demon has a great way to organize the blogs to which you are subscribed. You can set up folders for each of your niches and than you can “star” the posts that you would like to retain for future reference.

The “starred” articles are kept in a seperate folder, while the other articles that you have “read” go away and makes room for more content. I highly recommend that you set up a feed reader and keep track of your niche.

To get you started, here is a great post that I discovered from my feed reader that lists some fantastic SEO blog …. 

Top 10 SEO Blogs for Bloggers

1. Higher Visibility – This blog always seems to explain SEO information in a way that is concise and easy to understand. In other words, it is a PR 6 blog for a reason.

2. Search Engine Optimization Journal – Managed by long-time SEO expert Nick Stamoulis, this blog is always looking to educate.

3. Search Engine Journal – This blog offers a wealth of information and breaks SEO down into different categories to help keep so much information organized. Also a PR 6 site.

4. SEOMoz – This is by far one of the most authoritative sites in the SEO world. The articles shared here are always incredibly detailed with step by step instructions and screenshots that help make sure you’re understand absolutely any aspect of SEO.

5. Search Engine Land – This is where I go to get all of my updates about any changes that Google is making. They talk with Google directly and always have the most up-to-date information the minute it happens.

6. Search Engine Watch – This PR 7 site offers top quality information featured on an easy to navigation website. Need I say more?

7. Search Engine Roundtable – This blog also offers breaking news in the SEO world, and you’ll often find this at the top of SERPs. Although only a PR 3, the content is top quality.

8. SEO Book – This site is also great for tutorials and screenshots in order to help educate. Aaron Wall is one of the top SEO experts in the field and manages this blog.

It is certainly not necess…More at Top 8 SEO Blogs You Should be Reading

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Become More Productive

Distractions rob us each day of our productivity. And it really shouldn’t be that way. After all, when we work at home, we don’t have the water cooler conversations that suck up our time. We don’t have those colleague that like to come and park themselves in our cubicles. We don’t have the brushfires of others, the last minute meetings, or anything like that when we work at home.

Dealing With Distractions

So what’s the problem then? Believe it or not, our playground is one of the busiest and flashiest places to play. The internet is forever changing and it will dominate all of our time if we don’t take control of our time.

When I first started working for myself, I got sucked up in the internet and suddenly found myself less productive than when I was a part time online marketer. The reason was that my time was more valuable then and I lived with a greater sense of urgency. My focus was much sharper.

Discover Your Distractions

This is the frame of mind that we must adopt when we go about our business. We must work on our focus. The best way to go about it is to identify the things that make us unfocused. For that, we have to inventory our surroundings. Let me share with you some things that were problems for me:

1. My TV set – I used to keep the TV on while I worked. The problem was that I quit working   when I became interested a particular program.
2. My email – Everytime I heard the email sound off, I had to check it – just couldn’t resist.
3. My cats – My kitties like to jump on my desk and sleep under my monitor. Sleeping is fine, but when they are constantly getting up and coming back, I would lose my focus.
4. My phone – Families members like to call whenever they figure you now have the time to talk to them.

I took actions to eliminate these four things and my production went up about 400%! Do you have issues with any of these? Perhaps you have some other things that have been distractions for you.

As hard as we try to reduce SEO down to a science, there is still quite a bit of it that is actually an art. Some people seem to be have an intuition about what search engines like, while it comes harder for a lot of us. 

Even though a guru may hand over his secret ingredients, that is no guarantee that you will have the same success. Why? Because he or she simply his a different vision and interpretation of the data.

Let's look at how one of those experts go about finding keywords:

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The Initial Research

Our downhill mountain bike enthusiast has started a website. Time to begin the keyword research process.

The logical first step is to head to Google's AdWords Tool and enter “downhill mountain bike” and see what comes up. Don't forget to switch your match-type from Broad to Exact (or include Exact if you want to see both). If you don't know the difference be sure to read Google's support page on match types so you get a better understanding of what data you're looking at.

For most query types, check off the box “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”. While the non-filtered results can sometimes give you insight into alternative targets, often it produces in a dataset filled with generic terms that results in a significant drop in useful possibilities. For example, a search for “downhill mountain bikes” mixes in “bikes”, “bicycles”, “bmx bikes”, etc. This will make it difficult to get the full scope of related phrases. After a quick glance for anything you may have missed, limit the search around your known terms.

It's extremely important to make sure you're thinking of all the possibilities. For instance, “downhill mountain bikes” may be referred to as “dh mountain bikes” or “down hill mountain bikes”. Be sure to include these in the queries to pull data from. Similarly, you should know the terminology and abbreviations of your industry and be sure to include them in your queries.

Once this is completed you'll download the list of phrases for future use and repeat the process in logical groupings. In this example, you would enter the various type of equipment (brakes, gears, armor, shocks, dual suspension bikes, etc.) and place those in one group, then build a list of all the brands you’ll be selling and add that to another list. Time spent on keyword research is never wasted and you may want to build up additional lists based on blogs, forums, articles and press areas, etc. depending on what you will be adding to your site.

Sorting Through The Keywords

Starting with so many separate lists will help us in the weeding process. The first step in this process is to go through and remove the phrases that don't apply. These will include phrases that are generally irrelevant and those that include keywords you want to filter out (“free” is generally at the top of my list in this category).

Once these tasks are completed, it's time to go through the product and brand phrases and look at them with an eye for ROI. At this stage we're not working to determine which phrases to target but rather to establish a value per phrase.

Rather than calling a 1-900 psychic line, it's time to pull out the calculator and figure out what the profit is per sale. More important than search volume for this stage is really getting an understanding about the profit per sale and if possible (this may be tricky) trying to understand which items may lead to the sale of other items and what the total value of that sale would be. For example, the sale of a tire may well lead to the sale of tubes or rims, especially if you're running a sale, free shipping for orders over a set dollar value, etc.

Of course, it's likely you won't know for sure what products will lead to multi-item sales unless you have previous experience in the industry, so you may need to go with instinct. If you don't have any of that (or even if you do) you'll want to visit the sites of top competitors, especially those heavily invested in AdWords (and hopefully doing A/B testing) to determine which items they've found tie well together by going through their buying process and seeing which items they recommend in their various sections or as add-ons.

Once you've determined to the best of your ability the profit per item for the brand and product-based phrases, it's time to review your generic phrases. Going through the list and looking for phrases that include the terms “buy”, “online”, and other buy-phrases is the first step. Models, colors and other specifics can also be solid indicators in most instances of someone past casual information gathering and closer to the conversion funnel.

Essentially, we're looking to build groupings within our list of generic phrases versus conversion-oriented phrases.

Prioritizing Your Phrases

Now you know (give-or-take) what you'll make per sale and you know your search volume. While you don't know your site conversion rate (and that will likely differ by phrase type) what's important at this stage isn't getting an exact value for a phrase but rather, relative values. You'll never know in advance exactly how much a phrase will make you; however you will have a way to rank your similar phrases and know which stands to make you more.

To reference the downhill mountain biking example, we'll know whether the phrase “Marzocchi 44 Rlo” or “Marzocchi 44 TST2” will likely be more profitable. The Rlo has a higher search volume but the tst2 has a higher retail value.

Knowing the profit per item and not just the retail price would provide conclusive numbers, though affiliates will be working in percentages similar to the example below. We’ll have to assume a uniform 20 percent markup on both the products to illustrate the method for determining the relative value of one phrase over another. This would give us the following:

Marzocchi 44 Rlo
Retail – $305
Presumed Markup – $61
Estimated US Search Volume – 210

Marzocchi 44 TST2
Retail – $389
Presumed Markup – $77.80
Estimated US Search Volume – 170

If we assume a 1 percent conversion rate on all queries the Marzocchi 44 Rlo would produce a profit of $128.10 and the Marzocchi 44 TST2 a profit of $132.26. The specific conversion rate doesn't matter here – what's important is that we know which product will produce a higher profit considering search volumes and profit per unit. This will allow us to determine the priority of each phrase. When you’re working out which phrases to build links to and which pages to prioritize when optimizing the content, this is the data you’re looking for.

Looking At Competition

So what we now have before us are spreadsheets with the keywords, their search volume, the profit per unit sold and a method of establishing the relative profitability of similar phrases. The last step in the process is to look at the competition levels of each of the phrases to help us prioritize the time frames we'll be dealing with as discussed above.

In the Marzocchi 44 Rlo vs the Marzocchi 44 TST2 example, we're dealing with products of essentially the same competition level – this won't always be the case, so we need a way to prioritize the phrases to attain rankings for the lower hanging fruit first, thus securing some quick revenue but always building to the highest competition generic phrases, products, and brands….More at How to Find Profitable Keywords For Your Website

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While we are not discarding what the gurus say, what we are pointing out pertains to our expactations. We simply have to realize that it may take some time to reach a guru level even though we may have the recipe …. happy commissions to all!!