All You Need Is Links

By Simonne on Mar 29, 2008 under Link building

Do you remember that song of The Beatles, “All You Need Is Love”?

If we were to re-write a version for the internet, it would sound like this: All you need is links… links is all you need!

Let me tell you this story: before going into internet marketing, I used to have a brick and mortar business. By the time I started it, I thought it’s going to be cool, but pretty soon after it turned profitable I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that kind of business. So, one day I stepped out, with enough money in my account as to secure a decent living for about two years.

Thinking at the future, I started to search for niches, to start something else. Doesn’t it sound very well like finding online niches and building websites to target them?

The Gold Is In The Niche

The best niche I found were video monitoring services for private kinder gardens. There were about 200-300 such kinder gardens in my city, and only few of them had such services in place. Rapidly, I put together a questionnaire for the parents, to see if they would be willing to pay some extra $20 to the monthly fee, in order to get internet access to the video cameras which were broadcasting live from the kinder garden rooms. I went from door to door, to all those kinder gardens, explaining what I want to do. Almost all owners were extremely positive to the idea, since they didn’t need to contribute with money.

In the same time, I bought a web domain and made a website promoting my services. I had absolutely no idea about php, or mysql, or Wordpress, or other fancy stuff I’ve learned meanwhile. I just bought a HTML book, I learned how to make tables, and I produced about 4-5 pages for my site. It was ugly like hell, but this is not the point of the story. It did its job very well.

Then I thought that I need to draw people to my site. The only way of attracting traffic that came to my mind, was to submit my site to all web directories I could find. And I found a lot. I didn’t know at that time that I was doing SEO for my site. It was just logical that the more places my site is in, the more chances are that people find me. Thanks to that site, I was featured in the local evening news of a very well known TV station.

Unfortunately, most parents didn’t agree to pay the fee, so in the end, the whole idea was a failure.

Three Years Later

Despite the fact that I had already shifted to other business ideas, the site remained online for a whole year. Then I took it off for about one year, and very recently I gave the domain to a friend of mine who is running a cooking recipes and travel tips blog. Looking through her stats, we noticed that the website still ranks second in Google for “gradinite” (which is the Romanian word for kinder gardens).

Isn’t that funny? A website which doesn’t publish one single Romanian word to rank second for a Romanian word which has nothing to do with the current site topics?

That’s all possible because of the links I gathered to that site, which all contain the keyword in the anchor text.

How many links are you building each day for your blogs? Do you remember our earlier article How To Speed Up Link Building Without Spamming? I have the feeling that most of you don’t believe in links. Am I right?

Do you want to know how much time Diana and I are spending on getting links to our sites? Too much time. Maybe 80% of all time dedicated to our internet ventures. And we are not the only ones. If you don’t read Blogger Unleashed, I highly recommend you do, because Vic knows very well what he’s talking about, and he has a lot of experience with making money online. And guess what? Vic is also spending most of his time gathering links for his websites. And he also uses tools to boost his productivity.

You have to understand that reading “make money online” blogs is not going to put any money into your account. Neither will the fake traffic from Entrecard. The real, most valuable traffic, are those people who find your site from search engines. They have a need, and you can fulfill it (with an affiliate link or with advertising ).

What do you think? Are inbound links important for you, and why?

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