Alright: spam alert. This tactic can seriously cross the boundary between creating original content that adds something to the web & content that is only there to make your other content rank.
That said, building links is part of any web publishing business. And looking at the backlinks to Katinka Hesselink the other day, I was stunned at the percentage I had directly created myself. And Katinka Hesselink Net gets some serious traffic. Of course the other links are probably just as important, if not more so. But if you have to start somewhere…
The reason I am writing this blogpost is that AJ has finally ventured out of squidoo to branch out to other online web properties like hubpages and article sites. This is cause for celebration. Everyone who does that, and links back to squidoo where relevant, is likely to make more on squidoo, or hubpages, than those who limit themselves to just squidoo. Or just Hubpages. Or just that one article site they started on years ago.
She’s doing all this with the idea of a link wheel helping her on. Here’s the simple link wheel:
Honestly I don’t quite get why she’s not putting the squidoo lens at the hub of the wheel. My principles for this sort of thing is simple:
- Create original content on the site that is most successful for you
- Create very different content in the same niche, on a site that’s not as successful for you. Link back from there to the first.
- Create something in the same niche on blogger, wordpress, vox, etc. and link to the first and link to the second, or the third, or the fourth. (am I still making sense?)
- Vary the order of the wheel per project.
- Link to your content where you can from niche sites that have their own backlinks
But another way of summing this up is:
- Make sure you don’t publish your stuff at only one place online.
- Make sure you own your best content.
- Interlink all your content.
- Link more to the stuff that makes you money.
- Make sure that everything has at least one backlink.
- Don’t create duplicate content.
- Don’t link out as much from stuff that makes you most.
Your best content should be on places where you are likely to be rewarded for it with either links or money (or both).
You should not put content on sites that are going to steal it or republish it. You should own your own stuff. Mahalo is one site where it’s very possible an editor may step in to change what you’ve done. They lost me that way. There are other examples too.
To close I want to quote Alex who apparently got AJ to that point of branching out:
People start scrambling for $25 here or $15 there. Sure, this can add up to a few hundred dollars a month, if you want to have the time to do that, but you do yourself or others no good in the process.
…
I will take the $25 a month direct payout and celebrate the hundreds I’ve made indirectly from the publishing sites.
What he’s saying is that the sum is more than the parts. Just be sure the content is real all over.
How I do the link wheel
The main thing to remember is that you want your money making stuff to rank. So that’s where the links have to go. But that doesn’t mean they can’t link out… Here’s what I do (roughly):
Don’t take such drawings too literally. The trick is to make sure everything backlinks that doesn’t rank on its own.
The wheel sites can be anything that is on topic.
Don’t forget to make a new niche blog for any new niche you enter. And don’t list them at your public Blogger account.
Money making sites A, B and C can be anything. From a special squidoo account devoted to a niche, to a hub, to a niche blog you’ve put up on blogger (with affiliate links), to a niche blog you’ve put up that’s self hosted on it’s own domain name. Note that this is still a wheel: the money making sites are not linking out to the articles you put up on sites that do NOT make you anything, like blogspot and wordpress.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Original and compelling content truly is the key, as you stated so well. There is also the aspect of the article sites already enjoying an inherent PR that can be shared.
Blogs make excellent hubs because the owner can focus all ads and content as narrow as they wish. There can be as many or as little distractions as the owner wants.
Through passing authority around the rim and to the blog, very little dilution occurs as the blog gains credibility.
This being said, I think Lenses and HubPages would perform well as hubs, but blogs always have the potential to out perform by a wide margin. Mainly because it is easier to infuse blogs with substantial amounts of fresh content. Squidoo updates generally go to the same lens and the lens gets bulky, where blog posts get rotated into the archive and get indexed every time a sitemap is submitted.
On almost every blogging platform, when a new post is made, Google is there instantly crawling the post. With Squidoo, there is a period of days at times.
Thanks for the mention, and may all you endeavors find success.
This just gets more and more complicated the deeper in I wade, hehe. Thanks, this sounds like a really interesting strategy.
Katinka, you wonder why I have not made the Squidoo lens the center of the hub? In this instance, the experiment is all about “Blogging for profit” so the decision was made to set up a micro-niche blog and apply the Link Wheel to that.
However, I will be applying the Link Wheel principles to my higher traffic lenses and making them the hub of their own Link Wheels.
It will be interest to review everything in 6 months time to see the results of this new thinking on my part but in the meantime thank you for featuring the experiment here and for joining in the discussion both here and at Crabbys Beach
I am learning. I am learning! Wow! All of this is so helpful. I am learning with AJ, too! Surely with all this super information from all of you, the light will come on and I will “get it!”
Thank you!
Alex: yes, that’s my main reason for making hubs: the tap into some domain authority.
AJ: I would personally never make the experiment more important than the bottom line. But to each their own.
BTW – Akismet seems to have decided that crabbysbeach blogs are spam. Your comments (Joan’s too) were all caught in the spamfilter.
If you have to choose from hubpages/squidoo and your own websites to create LW own sites are better. Just look at any squidoo page – gazzilion links next to your own (internal navigation and links from comments) and all of them “steel” link juice from your links. Stick to websites you can create yourself and don’t include too many unimportant links (navigation etc).
I don’t see why anybody WOULD have to choose. The advantage of having your own sites is clear, however there are advantages of using hubpages or squidoo (or both) as well. The main one is, that not only are you linking OUT to all kinds of stuff on those sites, but they also provide links IN to your hub or lens. Since these are both trusted sites, you’re providing your sites with trusted backlinks.
It does take knowing how to take the best advantage of the link potential on each. Taking good care of using the right tags is one of the basics in this respect. The main thing is not to use what I call ‘orphan tags’ – though those cause less problems on hubpages than on squidoo.
The main reason I was surprised at AJ choosing Crabbysbeach as the hub of her wheel was that it really is NOT her site. It’s a site she blogs on. One that’s not optimally monetized.
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