Dennis Edell commented on one of my posts to let me know he was curious about my linkbuilding strategies and I promised to write a post about it, so here it is.

Before I start sharing, there are a few things I really need to confess:

• First of all, I am a pretty lazy person and prefer to do as little work as possible.

• Second, I have a big sense of perfectionism in my personality, so I tend to overthink things.

• Third, I have a very short span of concentration, too many ideas I want to put to work and lose interest rather quickly.

Now, in order to become more successful in my online business, I completely realize that these three character flaws desperately need to be corrected and I have spent way too much time trying to find solutions for these flaws, reading all sorts of advice, even self help programs are no strangers to me.

Having cleared that up, I found that the only way to actually be able to set up a linkbuilding and promotion strategy is to go step-by-step… teeny tiny steps that is.

If I would go “big and huge”, spending hours and hours at a time along a set strategy of many many links a day, the task at hand would seem way too big and I’d probably don’t even start.

So, something that is really important to me is build on consistency, make things a daily habit and breaking patterns instead of shying away from big efforts, becoming overwhelmed and thinking that it won’t work in the first place and all other excuses I make to myself in order to avoid taking action.

So here is what I am doing at the moment:

I have made a list of all the websites that need promotion and highlighted different things I want to do for each of them, whether it be article marketing, directory submission, social book marking, commenting strategies etc.

I made a pretty little worksheet so I can hold myself accountable each day and put a timer on my desk so I can work in short spurts, making it easier for me to focus. After all, I tell myself that I only need, say 15 minutes of submitting to directories on one site, 15 minutes of social bookmarking on another and after completion I tick off on the list.

As you can see, it is really about taking baby steps at this point in time, crossing off every little task per site per day,

However, I have noticed that this seems to work for me at this point in time because of a few things:
1. Each task completed is one step in the right direction
2. I don’t feel overwhelmed anymore
3. I am noticing productivity level going up

I have set a list of minimum daily link building goals per site, very attainable goals which really only take around 2 hours to complete, again for building up daily consistency and try doing that first thing in the morning, breaking it down that would lead to about 50 new links per site per week, roughly, through directory submission, social bookmarking, commenting etc.

Apart from that I write a lot of articles daily, and submit part of them to article directories. 2-5 articles weekly per site, through article marketer, depending on whether a site is new or has been around for a longer time, which gives me another 50-100 links per article submitted.

Hope that gives you a basic idea of my linkbuilding strategies,

care to share yours?

Any comments are of course more than welcome

and *cough cough* needed!

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Isn’t that just one of the problems most Internet marketers are struggling with on a daily base? So at times we need to take decisions we aren’t all that happy about but feel they are necessary in the “bigger picture”, like for example me not posting here as often as I should or better said, would like to.

There are of course also times that we just have to step back and see the bigger picture more clearly, and I have found a few months ago that having a break really ups my spirit and energy levels again, ready for more action.

Last week I took another break and went to visit my family and take part in the annual family reunion, had a complete blast seeing all of them again, and even though Saturday wasn’t the highlight of the minibreak I had hoped for (the Dutch team lost in the quarter finals of the European championship) it was still a well needed and productive break.

So now I am back to business, once again I realize just how thankful I am to have found Internet marketing on my path. Before leaving, I had set up a distribution of articles on set dates so even though I wasn’t “holding the fort” myself, my work did continue.

One thing I have learned finally is not to sweat the small stuff and have patience.

Before I could get really discouraged if a site didn’t start making money the minute it was set up but now I am really focusing on the long run. Building up a site, adding content after doing my research, and getting it to an acceptable level.

Once at the point of having a site completed to a certain standard it goes into my schedule of promotion and link building and I go on to the next site to get it to the point where I can start promoting it as well.

I wrote a few weeks ago about More Niche and so far I can only say I am still impressed with the program. I am actually following all the steps and even though I haven’t had a sale coming in from the sites I build for that program, I am starting to become a lot more productive in matter of my overall work level and focus.

Following the right steps is actually showing me an increase in organic traffic and I am confident sales will start to get in sooner or later, so I am not too bothered about that part right now because I am confident about the outcome.

A really cool thing though is that I won a 40% commission lock in for life on one of the products, instead of the 30% this product gives normally, by winning in their competition in the category of best copy/layout.

A little cheer for me there!

That was a really nice surprise to see, that the site I entered for this competition got this feedback and I have to say that I am really pleased with that result. Funny thing is that when looking at my stats for that winning site, it has an average visited number of pages per visitor of 4.8, average time spent is nearing 9 minutes, so hopefully sales will start coming in once promotional efforts are really starting to hit in.

I’ll keep you guys posted!

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