One of the more popular groups of bloggers today in terms of sheer number of blogs and readers is the “Mom Bloggers” or “Mommy Bloggers” category. I’m sure many of you have at least heard of Dooce which is probably the most well known in the genre (she gets over 3 million pageviews a month!). But there are literally tens of thousands of other smaller sites with hundreds of thousands of readers and you can use this to your advantage.

While it’s hard to generalize about such a large group, I’ve found that some of the more popular topics that Mom Bloggers write about is kids and parenting, family life, coupons and deals and contests. Again generalizing here but I’ve found Mommy Bloggers to be VERY receptive to relevant comments on their site and direct emails. Of course like any other site you can leave comments for links. But let’s delve a little deeper.
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I frequently get requests from other sites in my niche to link back to them. The majority of them I will deny because their sites are crap and their request is lame. Yet when I email other webmasters requesting links, I have a very high success rate. Here’s how I do it.

Use the good dishes

Most importantly- you need your best content where other webmasters can see it and that’s the first page of your site. EVERY article on your first page has to be top notch. Most site owners are not going to spend all day poking around your site- they’ll go to the first page and maybe click on a post or two from there. If you need to change dates around or otherwise manipulate your site so older better content is on the front page- do it. Ideally you want original content and not rehashed versions of content on other sites but whatever is the best content you can offer that’s what you want.

Put your good stuff on page one, ask for some links and then you can go back to the same lame generic content you had before. But while you’re in the link request process, keep the good stuff up. That incredible post you’ve been saving until your site gets more popular because you want more people to see it- put it up NOW. If you have a new site, build up some content first before asking for links- it’s much easier for a more established site to get links.

I scratch your back, you scratch mine

Next you want add your target sites to your blogroll or link page. Remember you can always delete these links later if the other site chooses not to link back to you. It builds a much more convincing case for a webmaster to link to you when you’ve already linked to their site. Then click on the link. This is to make sure it works and also so that your site appears as a referring site in your target webmaster’s statistics program (obviously this will go unnoticed for massively popular site but for smaller websites site owners will DEFINITELY take notice of your site in their stats even if it’s just you clicking).

Webmasters are vain

Now go use your cellphone (not via wifi though) to click on it too. If you can change your IP address easily, or have access to the web at work, school, or elsewhere, or have some willing friends, go ahead and click on your link there too, spreading out your clicking throughout the day. Now it looks like 2, 3, 4, or more people are going to his site from your link. These numbers may be small but remember if your target site is getting 500 visitors per day and you’ve managed to make it look like 5 different people are coming from your site, that’s 1% which should get you noticed. Webmasters always check their stats, often obsessively because they’re all super vain. Use their vanity to get on their radar.

This time it’s personal

Now that you’ve set everything up on your end, it’s time to send an email off to the owners of your target sites. (I’ll cover how to find sites that will link back to you in a later post, btw.) The important thing in the email is to make it personal. Find the owner’s name from the contact page on the site or elsewhere and USE IT. An email sent to me addressed “Dear JMoney” will get read more closely than one that says “Dear ExposedSEO”. DO NOT use a mail merge and send the same generic letter to every webmaster. MAKE IT PERSONAL. Tell them why you like their site in a few GENERAL words. Make sure you really go their site and get a real feel for what it is.

Your recent post… insert link here …was good

Don’t talk about or link to a recent post on the target site- this makes it clear that you don’t know the site at all and you’ve simply picked a recent post to make it look like you do (I get at least one of these form letters a week and it’s always clear that they have not spent more than 5 seconds on my site: there must be some SEO “guru” out there telling everyone to do this).

Here’s an example- “I really like your post on ExposedSeo.com on How to Get Other Sites to Link to Your Site, it taught me a lot about linking strategies with other sites”. That’s HORRIBLE. BAD BAD BAD. Thanks for summarizing content I wrote that you didn’t even read completely. No link for you. A better email would say something like “I’ve been reading your site for a while and you always have great SEO tips that I wouldn’t have thought of myself and have been able to use for some of my sites”. MUCH BETTER. It sounds like you’ve read more than just one post.

BFFs

The point is that even if you are a shady webmaster just trying to get links from this other site, you don’t want to make it seem like you’re a shady webmaster trying to get links. You want to come off friendly and complimentary to the other site owner. You want to look like a long time fan of the site, even if you’re not. You want to be his new best friend, blog buddies forever, skipping off together into the big blog rainbow sunset. Make sure you mention that you’ve already linked to his awesome site and don’t forget to give the link to your site (he’s not psychic, he can’t link to you if he doesn’t know what your site is).

Keeping records is not just for DJs

And of course if you don’t get an answer back or a link back within a week or so, delete the link on your site. The other important point is to keep track of which sites you’ve asked, what email address you sent it to and what their response was. A simple 3 column spreadsheet or just a text document works fine. The reason is that you want to keep this list of all webmasters in your niche for later use, whether it’s to ask for a link again in a year, or simply to network.

When developing backlinks for a long term project you are better off either sticking to whitehat techniques or creating a buffer circle in case you get slapped by one of the search engines. (“One of the search engines” sounds somewhat inappropriate. How many of them still play a significant part in your SEO efforts? Yahoo and Google? Possibly Live stumbling along and getting out of breath every few steps. Anyhow…) Lets have a look at the awesome diagram I have created bellow:

If you want to take a safe approach you should not just bombard your main domain directly. Create a buffer zone using various resources freely available to you. Create a free blog or a squidoo lens and point it to your main domain. Now you can unleash your blackhat campaign on that buffer zone without having to worry about your main domain. You will still get to keep most of the link juice, however if something goes wrong it will be that free blog taking a fall for you and not your precious website. There are tons of various pages and blogs web 2.0 offers so spread out, make your circles wider and replace any fallen pages with new ones.

Hey guys! How you been? I have not made a post for a while but I am back and I should be making regular blog posts again.

This one is going to be slightly different. I am going to post an idea and we can do a bit of brainstorming together to hopefully come up with an easy backlink development method.

Has anyone had much success developing backlinks using RSS feeds? If you are not familiar with this method, it basically works when your RSS feeds appear on various RSS syndication/directory websites, other webmasters pick them up and use them on their own websites. The common approach would be to simply submit your blog feeds for example to various RSS directories and forget. This would be like a drop in the ocean and quite frankly would generate hardly any backlinks. This is why most people don’t even bother. I must say I was one of them until I stumbled upon this little video: Instant backlinks.

The idea is simply to use rssmix to generate unlimited unique feeds by mixing your feed with others. However the video just gives you an idea and leaves the rest up to you. How would you apply it? If I had a bunch of websites about… lets say dog training I would bookmark all of them using one of the bookmarking sites such as delicious. I would then go and hunt for some dog training related quality article feeds. 20 of them or so… Use various combinations of these feeds to generate 30 or so unique feeds and then submit them using An RSS submitter or even manually to a bunch of RSS syndication/directory websites. In fact I will do just that in a few minutes.

If you have other ideas or questions simply drop a comment.