Free Link Building 101: The key to zero cost web site promotion

By: Paul Easton

Having an effective link building strategy creates new paths of traffic to your site. The major search engines take this into account, when listing your site.

At the same time many site owners lack the understanding of what they are trying to achieve. This is especially when it comes to results.

Link building is all about the long-term goal of action producing traffic. Unlike Google Adwords, which is instant and you pay for that instant result, link building is about the small trickle of visitors every day from many hundreds of sites.

Let's run the numbers:

100 different sites sending you 2 visitors per day – 200 unique visitors a day 10% of them joining your list- 20 email opt-in visitors per day

At the end of the month – 600 on your list- not a bad start, for some "sweat equity" also known as work.

Next month you are listed in another 100 sites – end of the month another subscribers per month- total list 1200

Hit month three- same as the last two- so now a list of 1800 which is around about when Google updates its ranking algorithm, and you start to get natural search engine traffic- So you are starting to gain momentum.

Then you look closer into your web hosting statistics and find the majority of your visitors are come from posts you did in specific forums – Now you can focus your area of work to where you are getting results from.

Also you try a new more direct design for your website, and add a free gift. Now you have found a way to convert more visitors to take an action. If you need to know where your traffic is coming from, in the easiest way, with a free tool check out the invisible counter from statcounter.com

Some small business owners become frustrated when they don't see results, and then comes doubt if its working and then they go off to try another method of promotion. As long as you understand the process and the way the system works, its being a long race and not a sprint for traffic then you will have the results you expect.

Once you know where the traffic is coming from, you can focus on two things, increasing the traffic from these sites with more active posts and increasing the conversion to action at your site. These are the key metrics for knowing what is going on in your business.