Why Counting Links Is Not So Easy

Knowing what a link is… that’s SEO 101 right? Think again! It’s one of the most fundamental parts of SEO, but when we really asked ourselves the question, we found there were many different ways of counting links. We use both Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO and decided to see if we can get a common census between the two tools. (Full disclosure: In case you didn’t know, one of the authors of this post is the Marketing director at Majestic.)
Firstly, let’s get all the confusion out the way about the different terms that are used to describe this one key word. "Backlinks", "inbound links" and "in-links" and "links" are different words but they have the same meaning. Namely, they are incoming links to a webpage or the entire website.

Open Site Explorer tends to have used the word “links” – but this can be ambiguous as it might also apply to outbound links from a page. (It doesn’t, in OSE’s case, but user perception is reality.) By contrast, Majestic SEO tends to use the phrase "backlinks", but again the user might reasonably ask whether a backlink is still a backlink after it has been deleted (since Majestic keeps the row of data, but just flags it as a delete link) or if a link from within the site should be included (as Majestic drops these).

Both SEOmoz and Majestic SEO realize that terminology is important and both tools have agreed to work towards a common language moving forward where we can. Certainly – when you use both tools, you will invariably get different answers as to “how many links” there are to a site or page. There are loads of reasons – but even if there weren’t, getting a methodology just to count them is pretty hard. So let’s look at an example (bring on the infographic. Full size here)…

 
Problem 1: Handling  the two (blue) links from Page A to Page B:
Have you ever seen a “Link count” between page A and Page B that is more than one? I haven’t. So how does one account for two links between page A and Page B with different anchor texts? They are obviously not the SAME link, but saying they are TWO links would be simply inviting trouble. Even the lowliest of hackers can create 1000 links on a free blog page all linking to a target page and call them 1000 different links in this case.  We are pretty confident that Google only take the first link and anchor text into consideration at this time – if that’s any help to you.
Problem 2: Does an Internal link count as a link?

Look at Page A. It has three inbound links and three outbound links. So is that three links or six? OK – 80% of you will say “3” even though technically the 20% would be right. Let’s take it a step further… what if Page A links to itself? Oh GOD! Here I think we have a difference between OSE and Majestic.
Majestic currently drops any links from internal pages (sites within the same domain), so that last example would not apply… but it is not true to say internal link don’t have link value. It is just a lot of extra data that Majestic doesn’t store as there are tools available for free that let you analyse internal links. OSE, by contrast, did seem to be able to keep a track of internal links last time I checked.
Problem 3: 301 redirects
You will notice that there is a third way a user can get from Page A to Page B with one click – via a 301. So are there two links from Page A to Page B or three? If you say “three” then you are also saying by the same logic that there is a link from page I to page B, which passes through the same redirected 301 page. Now that’s a problem. Is there a link from the 301 page to Page B? Or do would you say that the 301 page should be transparent?
Well I can tell you that Majestic (and I believe also OSE) counts the link from the 301 page as one link. Both sites mark it as a redirect link, but neither one will add in the links from pages H and I in their link counts. Technically – Google does though! At least sometimes. That’s why so many people buy up expired domains and 301 redirect them to other pages. They have a chance of getting link juice as a result. In recent years we have seen a bit of a downgrade in the effectiveness of 301s –but they remain a vital part of the web infrastructure. OSE shows you that the link is a 301, which should give you a good clue. In MJSE the link is flagged as a redirect, but you would need to pick up your “clue” from their ACRank on that link and if you wanted to investigate further, you would need to actually analyse the url that returns a 301.
Problem 4: Other Redirects
If either OSE or MJSE were to try and “act like a search engine” in making your decision that 301s should be effectively invisible, the problems simply multiply. Spam links would appear to increase, for a start, but what do you do with 302 redirects? In theory, Google does NOT treat these as invisible – although some .NET sites use 302 redirects in their menu structures, so goodness knows how Google handles that bad piece of programming. What happens on a multiple redirect? A 301 onto a 302 onto a URL which 301s onto the landing page and – itself – has 100 inbound links? No – it all gets a headache – so a link from a 302 or metaredirect page simply HAS to be a single link, even if there are hundreds of links going into the redirection URL. So how do the different systems actually keep tally?
Majestic SEO says there are 4 links to page B. One from page A (oops) and one from each of the three orange redirect URLs.A Search engine obeying the official line on handling redirects would probably count 5 – but they would be very different links. One from Page A, one from each of pages H and I, one from the MetaRedirect page and one from the 302 redirect page.
How many does Open Site Explorer count? I don’t want to speak for OSE but hopefully they will be able to say.
Note from SEOmoz - At this time, Open Site Explorer would count 2 links from the diagram above, one from Page A and one from the 301 redirect. Although you may see both H and I in an Open Site Explorer link report, redirects do not share or include their totals with the targets of the redirect. We continue to evolve our measurement and reporting as our knowledge search engines continues to expand.

In Summary
Counting backlinks is not a straightforward logic. Whatever logic you choose, Google sometimes counts 301s and sometimes doesn’t. It may be that Google takes the Juice but not the context of a redirect. So if you are building a technology like OSE or MJSE we need to either give you data OR give you opinions.
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Testing the First Link Priority Rule

This post summarizes the results of a recent internal test conducted to understand how a website’s navigation menu affects the ‘First Link Priority’ rule. A method for avoiding the consequences of this rule was also tested with positive results. While these tests were in no way exhaustive, they do add to the body of evidence available on the subject.
Optimized anchor text has long been an important aspect of search engine optimization because it helps the search engines determine the relevance of the target URL. And while a good SEO link-building campaign can help you achieve better optimized anchor text, a natural backlink portfolio will often be less than ideal.
For this reason, internal linking is crucial. It allows you to tell search engines what pages you want to rank for a certain term. In order to make your internal linking effective, there is one very important yet often overlooked rule you should be aware of called the “first link priority” rule.
The “first link priority” rule is Google’s way of making sure a webmaster doesn’t add hundreds of anchor text links into the content of their website. Basically, when the search engine spider crawls a page on your website and comes across two links pointing to the same page, it will only consider the anchor text of the first link and disregard the second. While this rule has been well documented by many SEOs, there seems to be some confusion on whether or not this rule applies to the navigation menu of a website.
On the vast majority of websites, the navigation menu is located above the majority of content when viewing the source code. As a result, the spiders end up crawling your navigation menu first. This creates a problem because most navigation menus do not use fully-optimized anchor text. For example, if I sell bunk beds, I might have two tabs in my navigation menu, one labeled “wood” and the other labeled “metal”. Of course those are not the keywords I am optimizing for, but “wooden bunk beds” and “metal bunk beds” don’t always look good in a navigation menu.
As a result, many professional SEOs have assumed that Google will still count an internal link’s anchor text within the content of a page. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

I created a test a few months ago on www.christiangreiner.com, before I redesigned the website. I made a page using 15 randomly generated letters with no search results (christiangreiner.com/zjjiurzcfccylco/). I then linked to this page twice, using other randomly generated letters. One link (pbnrnqdmzbeloxd) was in the navigation menu, with another (cxelwjgqaajlost) in the content of the homepage.

In the search results shown below Google ONLY considered the anchor text from the menu in ranking the page named zjjiurzcfccylco. Results were the same in Bing and Yahoo.

Results of this test and others that have been performed show that webmasters should re-examine the internal links of their website. If you have a link within the content to a page that is also linked to in the menu of your website, then the anchor text used in the content is most likely not being considered by Google because of the first link priority rule. However, all is not lost because there are a few ways you can still get your desired anchor text.
There are a quite a few technical ways to avoid the first link priority rule, some of which are demonstrated in a post by Giuseppe Pastore from Italy. However, I wouldn’t recommend all of these since some could be seen as misleading by the search engines. Instead, the following are three “best-practice” ways to avoid the consequences of the first link priority rule on your website.
1. Place the menu below the content in the source code of your website
If you have a static website this could be a great option. By using DIVs and absolute positioning it is possible to place a side navigation menu below the content in the source code. When applicable, this is a great option. Google considers any anchor text within the content first, and only when there is none does Google go on to count the links in the navigation menu.
However, before you get too excited you should know that this is difficult to do with a dynamic website, or any website using a CMS. It requires a smart developer, since one little tweak could ruin your absolute positioning and throw your website into a tailspin.
2. Internal link to deep pages only
Most of the time it is best to simply link internally to the deeper pages of your website, instead of duplicating links to pages already linked to in the navigation.
This is probably the most common solution and you see it used a lot by major news outlets. For example, I have never seen a New York Times article with an internal link to the “Sports” page within the content of article. Instead, they link to other articles with optimized anchor text. The result is a deep-linking strategy that is beneficial in getting deep pages read and indexed.
3. Use a hashtag for multiple internal links
The final option is a little trick that involves using a hashtag within your internal links. A hashtag is used within a link to bring users to a specific part of a page and is very common on websites like Wikipedia. Because only part of a page may be relevant to a user clicking on the link, Google treats a hashtag link like a link to a separate page, and therefore will consider the anchor text of multiple links.
In fact, the hashtag work-around works even when the link doesn’t bring you to a specific part of the page. For example, after the first link in the content (cxelwjgqaajlost, which was ignored by Google), I created another link with a hashtag in it (http://www.christiangreiner.com/zjjiurzcfccylco/#1) and gave it another random 15-character anchor text (mtqqjatxxwjfkod). Sure enough, as seen below, Google (but not Bing or Yahoo) considered the anchor text used when ranking the page it links to.

Even though it worked in my test, I wouldn’t consider this method to be a “best practice,” since it is essentially adding links which do not benefit users for the sake of manipulating search rankings.
However, if you do have an H1 tag that contains your keyword, and use an internal link with the same anchor text to bring users directly to that H1 tag on the page, this could create a good user experience and solve the first link priority problem at the same time.
This was not the first test to learn more about the first link priority rule, nor should it be the last. Instead, it is simply meant to help us better understand how Google crawls a website and what it considers.
It is also important to note that having internal links within the content of your website (even when the menu already links to the same page) can still be beneficial as long as it creates a positive user experience. The point of this post is not to discourage internal linking, but to discourage internal links that will hold no value for a visitor or the search engines.

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A New Perspective On Link Building

Dictionary.com defines a link as "anything serving to connect one part or thing with another; a bond or tie." Interestingly, the given definition for a relationship is "a connection, association, or involvement." From a semantic point of view, these two words seem to be synonyms. Yet from an SEO point of view, all too often they are mortal enemies.
Let's be honest, link building is not the most glamorous task out there. We all know it has to be done. We all know search engine algorithms heavily weight link metrics. But no one ever looks forward to sitting down and building links.
I believe this paradigm is self-defeating. If you don't want to do something but still do it because you have to, how can you expect to be successful? In sports you hear phrases like "the other team just wanted it more" or "they didn't show up to play" or something similar. When athletes are just going through the motions it is pretty obvious. What would make link building any different?
I think it is time to offer a new perspective on link building. Let's start thinking of it as relationship building instead. Please bear in mind, I'm not talking about low level linking tactics like social bookmarks, directory submissions or article publication. No real relationship is involved in acquiring these links.
However, for those who like to leave blog comments, request link exchanges or email webmasters, it's time to get your head in the game.
Building A Relationship Online
I'm not talking about eHarmony here. I'm talking about the relationships we can build with webmasters, which in turn naturally play out in their websites and ours. Let me start with a personal example.
I started a college football blog a few years ago. After about a year of the routine link building tactics, I decided it was time to start building relationships. For those of you familiar with the BCS, I am aggressively opposed to it. I did, however, know of a blog or two that favored it.
I decided to reach out to one of these webmasters. I suggested that he first post an argument in favor of the BCS. I would then respond on my blog and reference his original argument. The debate ended up going back and forth over a few months and several blog posts.
Naturally, I followed his blog and he followed mine. I linked to his blog and he linked to mine. My readers visited his blog and his readers visited mine. All the good things you are supposed to get from a successful SEO campaign naturally came to both of us through that relationship.
What would have happened if I was just another link in his blogroll? What would have happened if he was just another link in my comments? Perhaps our rankings would have improved slightly, but we both would have missed out on the extra visitors and subscriptions.
A Case Study: Danny Sullivan
If you have been in the SEO industry for more than a day you probably know who Danny Sullivan is. Suppose you have a new blog about search engine marketing and really want a link from Search Engine Land. Is the best way to do this to simply scan the blog for an hour and then email the webmaster, asking for a link exchange?
Probably not. You probably want to build a relationship with Danny, which would in turn do more for your blog than that one link anyway. So how could you go about doing this?
First, find as much information as you can about Danny without being a creepy stalker. A quick Google search could tell you he runs Search Engine Land, has a personal blog at Daggle.com, has a Twitter and Facebook account, uploads photos to Flickr, answers questions on Quora, shares stories on Digg, posts videos on YouTube and even has a Wikipedia entry.
This can take all of 10 minutes and in that superficial research you can learn a lot about Danny as well as see other connections he has in the industry which could benefit you as well.
After doing the research, you should start engaging Danny in various ways. Some obvious methods would be to comment on his blog posts at Search Engine Land, interact on Twitter or reply to his answers on Quora. After a few weeks, Danny may start to recognize your name when he sees it.
The next thing I would try would probably be pitching a topic for SMX. If you write to Danny, who by now has a general idea of who you are, and come up with a great pitch for a great lecture at SMX, there's a good chance you could present in front of hundreds of people in your industry.
Which do you suppose is more valuable, a link from Search Engine Land or a 15 minute introduction and presentation in front of other industry experts? Not to mention at that point you will have interacted directly with Danny as a result of being an SMX speaker. An aspiring SEO blogger would do well to have one of the most influential people in the industry as a friend on Facebook and follower on Twitter, don't you think?
Finding Relationship Opportunities
Most of the time our existing relationships are what lead us to new relationships. You may not know Danny Sullivan or Rand Fishkin, but do you know someone who works at Search Engine Land or SEOMoz? The best relationship opportunities can be found in our existing relationships. Networking can be a very powerful tool in building new relationships.
One of the best books I've read in a long time is called The City Of Influence. I highly recommend it for those looking for more information on the value of relationships and how to network in order to build new relationships.
Another easy way to build a new relationship is by looking for guest blogging opportunities. For example, I just did a Google search for 'finance + guest + blog' and found several websites that publish guest posts as well as tips for being a guest blogger. If you were in the finance industry, these could be great relationships.
Bloggers seem to be the most open to making new connections, so another technique is to simply Google your keyword + blog. Look for blogs in your industry and find people you can reach out to. Another method would be to search Twitter for your keywords and see who you can connect with.
Speaking from personal experience, I get emails all the time from people looking for links. I ignore them. Every once in a while I get an inquiry from my personal blog, or a direct message in Twitter, or an email proposal that doesn't involve links at all. I pay attention to these and other webmasters do too.
Conclusion
Rand Fishkin has a brilliant slideshow that explains the history and future of Google rankings. Evidence is pretty strong that social media is starting to have a big impact on organic rankings. In other words, relationships, not links, are poised to become the top ranking factor. Search engines openly say they calculate a users authority and trust. A tweet, like, citation or mention from an authority user is going to go a long way in the future of SEO.
So remember, links matter now and you need to have them to be successful. Don't stop looking for link opportunities. But I would stress that the link building of the future is going to be relationship building. People are going to influence rankings more than links do.
So let's stop focusing on the link building and start focusing on the relationship building. I believe we'll all be better off for it.
P.S. Don't miss Rand's great post Head Smacking Tip #20: Don't Ask Sites for Links. Find People and Connect that he wrote after this post was initially written.
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Optimize the Most Underutilized Page of Your Blog

Whilst it’s easy to get excited about crafting your latest blog post it’s far less likely you’ll be kept awake at night thinking about your blog’s Contact page. Indeed many bloggers don’t even bother to add a Contact page to their blog at all—but this can be a big mistake. As you’re about to discover, when contact pages are done right, they can become one of the most important parts of your entire blog…
Image copyright kpwerker, licensed under Creative Commons
A key blogging concept that sets it apart from running a standard static website is the “community” element. Blogs are built for discussion and networking and any blog worth its salt will have a group of like-minded subscribers reading and contributing on a regular basis.
In the same vein, your Contact page is just one more way to interact with your blog visitors. Here are just a few of the many types of email you might get as a result of having a contact page—just take a look at all these benefits.
Spelling mistakes. Grammatical errors. Broken links. Strange page alignments. Despite your best efforts sooner or later a few issues are likely to creep into your blog, either because you failed to proofread your writing before publishing, or because of changes to old posts that you haven’t noticed (such as the removal of photos you’ve linked to, affiliate programs closing down, or linked websites changing their site structure).
Sure, it can be both a little frustrating and embarrassing when someone contacts you to say that something isn’t quite right on your site but would you rather resolve the issue or leave the problem to run for the foreseeable future?
Making it easy to contact you allows your visitors to report any problems they are having with your site. That enables you to not only quickly resolve these, but to really take care of your readers by responding to thank them for the heads-up, apologizing for the situation, and telling them what you’ve done to resolve their problem.
Anyone releasing new products—from publishers to manufacturers—likes to get feedback on new products. It not only helps them make their product the very best it can be, but can also help to make their latest release more visible to potential consumers.
A highly-visible blog written by someone who clearly knows what are talking about can be an ideal avenue for this. It’s not uncommon for the blogger to be contacted in person and offered free products to look at that closely relate to the subject of their blog.
Without a Contact page, you make it very difficult for anyone to offer these to you. You miss out on potentially interesting and unique content, and freebies too!
The most profitable affiliate campaign I have ever run was as a result of being approached through the Contact form on one of my blogs. The gentleman who contacted me was one of the founders of a well-known online company who had since sold it and was setting up a new venture. He’d tweaked his sales process to within an inch of its life and was looking for a few beta testers.
That one affiliate program replaced my full-time income the day I added the links to my site.
And it was all because I ran a visible blog and was easy to contact. Without my Contact form, I’d never have been invited to join this “private” affiliate program and would be literally tens of thousands of dollars worse off.
Ever wonder what your blog visitors really want to read about? Ever spend hours working on a post only for it to get little or no response from your subscribers?
Actually getting out there and surrounding yourself with your readers is one of the very best ways to create a uniquely tailored blog that’s perfectly in line with the interests and expectations of your audience.
And one ideal way to understand your visitors better is quite simply to pay attention to the questions you get asked. Look for common themes that you’re asked about on a regular basis and construct blog posts that specifically target these.
A friend of mine with a small travel blog recently got contacted by an online advertising company which offered her a monthly advertising deal that, by itself, is equivalent to around 50% of the salary from her job. And all she has to do is paste a few adverts into her blog—a job that will take a few hours at most.
A 50% pay rise just for being easy to contact? Yes, contact pages really can bring in some amazing opportunities.
The media constantly needs “experts”—for interviewing, fact-checking, raising awareness, consultancy and so on—and a visible and easily-contactable blogger makes a perfect target for these media professionals.
All these benefits from having a contact page on your blog that’s easy to find and encourages feedback? Hopefully you’re starting to see why you need to overhaul your Contact page! But what should you do to make the most of all these opportunities?
The first step with publishing a Contact page is to make it easy to find. Ensure that anyone who wants to contact you can quickly and easily find your Contact page.
A great service for helping you understand how easy your website is to use is UserTesting, where real visitors who have never been to your website are set assignments (such as “Find my Contact page”). They carry out these challenges on video while describing their thoughts so you can exactly how real-life visitors view your site, and how easy it is to navigate.
A well-designed Contact page doesn’t just provide information on how to get in touch with you—it actively encourages anyone reading your page to drop you a line. Let it be known that you love to hear from your readers, that you’re a real person and that you genuinely value their feedback.
What should your visitors expect when they contact you? Try to improve the whole experience for your readers by giving advice on how long it normally takes you to respond to different types of queries, what type of contact you encourage (and what you simply don’t have the time to respond to), and so on.
Even consider giving tips on how you like to be contacted. For example do you prefer email, phone, Twitter, or Facebook? Do you prefer detailed messages, or short, to-the-point contacts? Are there any essential elements that your visitors need to ensure they include in their message to you?
Too many contact pages simply provide an email address on which you can be contacted. However, if you’re a blogger you’re probably involved in social media in a variety of ways, so your Contact page is another great place to list these profiles, thus offering more opportunities for interaction and growing your social network.
There are two problems with simply providing an email address on your Contact page. The first is that there is a risk your email address will be harvested by spammers who will then bombard you with junk email. The other is quite simply that you make it more difficult for people to contact you—and as a result you will reduce the number of messages you receive.
While it seems like a tiny thing having a Contact form that readers can fill in and send straight from your Contact page will make life significantly easier for your visitors and so encourage them to contact you.
Does your blog have a contact page? Has it helped you connect with your readers, the media, and others? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Find out how Richard Adams generates over 232,000 free visitors to his blogs per year at WordPress Traffic Explosion or visit his lifestyle design blog for tips on building an online business around your passions.

This guest post is by Richard Adams of WordPress Traffic Explosion.
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Increase Website Traffic Through Profitable Alliances

Pinky swear?

Call it what you want: alliance, partnership, JV – all roads lead to Rome.
The topic of the day is to find ways to increase your website traffic through alliances with other bloggers that benefit all parties involved.
This works no matter what stage your blog is in, how much perceived authority you, as a blogger, have, how big your readership is – the only thing that matters is VALUE.
You don’t think you have much value to offer to other bloggers?
Well, what about your readers? Do you provide value to them? There you go.
We all have something we do better than the other blogger, know more about something than the next guy – we all have something to offer that someone else might want or need.
And if you still think you have nothing, then, quite honestly you’d better close up the shop and go home now.
So, working together with other bloggers to achieve the greater good…
Why would you want to do that to begin with?
1.   Gain access to a new audience
Ideally, you want to partner with someone who has some fresh ears to hear what you have to say.
For instance, if you take a look at the comment section of a potential partner and you see all the same people commenting on their blog as on yours, this might not be the most productive “traffic borrowing” partnership.
2.   Promoting each other
Whether it be social networks, each other blogs, lists, promoting your partners and being promoted in return is a huge benefit not to be overlooked.
3.   Promoting products
Word of mouth advertising has always been the best endorsement you can get for any product.
Partnerships can be a powerful way to spread the word about your new product.
Profit sharing, as in affiliate marketing, or giving your partners’ audience a special discount works even better.
4.   Creating social proof
Being connected with influential bloggers will cement your reputation as the one to pay attention to.
Now that we know that the potential benefits of a partnership are huge, it’s time to learn what exactly we can offer to each other to create a win-win for everyone involved.
1.   Links / Mentions
One of the easiest forms of collaboration, it happens to be one of the most effective ones as well.
It increases website traffic by exposing your links to respective audiences and creates quality in-content link building.
Not to blow my own trumpet, but you can see the examples of me promoting other bloggers and you, my readers, all the time and quite honestly, I love doing it.
I’ve benefited greatly from it through creating more traffic from the mentioned blogs, as well as more comments – at the very least from the bloggers themselves , from being mentioned on their blogs in return, from referral business even, like consulting clients, blog audits, etc.
2.   Promoting in a post
Every once in a while, I like to highlight specific bloggers and the interesting projects they are currently working on like I recently did with Alex Whalley’s 30-day Unique Article Wizard Challenge in this post:
I didn’t do it to get Alex to write about me – truly, but what it did was created an even stronger professional bond as well as built up a personal friendship, not to mention that Alex does mention me a whole lot in his fabulous scribbles on his popular blog.
3.   Guest posting
Yes, I can hold this note for a long time.
Imagine you’d like to network with a blogger who seems to be simply unapproachable because of his/her strong reputation in the blogging community. The kind of blogger you really would love to get to know better, in other words.
You can’t and shouldn’t just send them an email, however nice it might be, introducing yourself and letting them know you are after a piece of their attention.
Of course, not.
But submit an awesome blog post, start commenting on their blog, and sooner than later they know who you are and you are on an email basis with them. Sweet spot to be at.
4.   Introducing each other
That happens all the time.
You know someone I want to know? Requesting an introduction is in order, assuming, of course, that I already networked with you, linked to you, and am on a first name basis with you.
Twitter is great for that, by the way.
Just recently Gail Gardner from Growmap.com thought that I should definitely be introduced to Donna Anderson from WhiteHatWriting.com, and within minutes of that idea the following tweets were sent out:

Now, thanks to Gail, Donna and I have become each other’s fans – who knows where that relationship will take us in the future!
5.   Swap ads
Simple enough, yet with a twist.
Find a blog with an untapped audience!
Don’t just go to a blogger you are already sharing the readership with. Find someone whose content doesn’t compete, but rather compliments yours.
Then approach them with the idea to swap ads and “exchange” traffic.
6.   Offer your freebie as a bonus
Know someone with a great product and think your freebie will make a great bonus to it?
Everyone loves a good bonus and as long as it’s not in competition with the product – naturally, this should be an easy deal to make.
7.   Co-registration
Get some bloggers with great newsletters together and start promoting each other on a thank you page your new subscribers will see right after they sign up to your list.
“…I think you’d really love to check out these newsletters I subscribe to and know to provide tremendous value:…”
8.   Product co-creation
Yes, everyone wanting to make any serious money online needs their own product at some point.
Having hard time with that idea? Have no clue how to even approach it?
Partner with someone who is in the same boat – two heads are better than one.
Better yet, find someone who already has an idea or is in some stages of development of a product, but needs your expertise to make it complete.
Think outside the box on this one.
Great example of that:
My good friends, Mavis Nong of AttractionMarketingOnline.com and Phill Turner of PhillTurner.com, who happened to meet on my blog, have recently co-created a great product called “Underground Blogging Secrets“.
Did I mention they met on my blog?
They obviously kept their eyes open for opportunities to expand their businesses and when such presented itself to form an alliance and build each other up through co-creation of the “Underground Blogging Secrets“, both Mavis and Phill were ready.

Needless to say, I am very proud of both of them and happily demand a management fee for introduction.
Seriously though – the product is great and I highly recommend you check out “Underground Blogging Secrets” today.
9.   Special discounts
Have a product already?
Offer a special discount to the readers of a particular blog.
Exclusivity is still a hot commodity and will guarantee to bring you red-hot traffic ready to buy.
10.   Run a contest.
This one is definitely better done with a partner or two – less work, better results.
The really hard part is attracting some strong sponsors; connections are the key here. However, if you’ve done the initial steps listed above and already positioned yourself as an authority figure in your niche, that shouldn’t be a problem.
The best part about blogging contests is having the contestants promote YOUR blog to THEIR followers and readership.
As you can see, the benefits of alliances and partnerships speak for themselves.
No blog is an island and your networking abilities are simply crucial to your ultimate success as a blogger.
These 10 ways should give you plenty of food for thought.
Just remember to think outside the box and be smart about how you approach the “unapproachables”.
What did I miss? Comment to show me that you’re alive!


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