Getting links into your site, quality inbound links, can be a difficult task these days.

Good link exchanges are getting harder to come by with webmasters becoming increasingly fussy about who they link to and concerns about paid links invoking search engine wrath.

Coaxing a site to provide you with link love can take more than money or just having great content. Be prepared to invest some serious time into your link building strategy.

How much would you pay (if you could afford it) to get a link from a related, high-ranking authority site? Some people pay hundreds of dollars a month.

A strategy that some savvy site owners are using successfully to gain inbound links is totally legitimate, won't cause search engine rankings to tank, doesn't cost oodles of cash and gets them onto sites that may never have considered linking previously.

The strategy is pretty simple - content reproduction with a slight twist.

Allowing people to republish some of my articles was one of the ways that Taming The Beast.net achieved the success it has. My articles appear on literally thousands of sites, all (well, most) linking back to TTB. There are a few disadvantages in allowing article reproduction, but it still remains a good way to build up inbound links to this day.

But there is a better way to approach this if you have some time to invest - offer target sites original content.

While smaller sites and article archives are happy to publish content that appears elsewhere; the larger and better known sites in any genre crave original content - article exclusives.

A few weeks back, I was approached by a site owner who was offering me a couple of totally original articles for another site of mine. I was promised the articles would be very relevant, useful and will not appear anywhere else - I would just need to keep the included links back to their site.

I must admit I was a little suspicious of the offer; after all, anything that seems too good to be true usually is. I had a very pleasant surprise when I received the articles though.

The two articles sent to me were around 500 words each, very well written and totally relevant to the theme of my site. I ran through a series of checks to ensure that the articles weren't carbon copies or were even close to anything else published in terms of phrasing. It turned out they *were* original and informational rather than a sales pitch for the other site's wares. The back links were well placed, subtle and linked back to a site that was well presented and related.

Getting these articles was a huge plus for me as it saved me a couple of hours work during what's been a very busy time.

This strategy is a win-win-win-win situation

• The other site gets a link back to their site in perpetuity
• I receive quality, original content; saving me time in developing articles
• My visitors get a truly useful article to read
• Search engines also have original content to chew on
  

Sure, there's an investment of time on the other person's part in prepping the article or paying someone to write it; but it all goes back to the question I asked at the beginning of this article - How much would you pay (if you could afford it) to get a permanent link from a related authority site?

If you're hungering after links from specific sites in your industry; give this strategy a whirl. Just remember not to crank out garbage articles, but something truly useful and unique. You don't have to reinvent the wheel - use current articles you have but totally rewrite them, perhaps adding some additional points or simplifying a lengthy article you have already published.

If you don't have the time or skills to write articles, you can always try outsourcing the work by posting a project on freelance marketplaces like Elance - but do take some precautions when outsourcing projects to ensure you don't wind up with junk or articles that have basically been stolen from other sites. Also be sure to specify that any articles created that you pay for you have exclusive rights to.


Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast
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