Building eCommerce

By Shane Hester

If you do business online, then you undoubtedly know the power that bloggers have. They can influence sales with just a few keystrokes, sometimes starting a global trend almost effortlessly.

If you’ve ever wondered how to use that power to your business’ advantage, you’re not alone. Businesses around the world use blogging in some way to increase their exposure and their sales. Many businesses have their own blogs, while others simply read blogs as a way of conducting market research.

One of the most controversial uses of blogs in business is buying blog reviews. The concept is simple enough: good reviews on other people’s blogs means positive increases in your business. To gain some credibility and a loyal following, some businesses pay for bloggers to write glowing reviews about them.

Paying for blog reviews is not only about building brand recognition and exposure. It’s also about gaining links and dominating the search engine results for your particular keywords.

Is buying blog reviews ethical? It depends on who you ask and how you go about it. If you are purchasing links to your site outright, you will be flagged and penalized by the search engines. This is a prohibited practice that can have extremely negative implications for you. However, if you are experiencing challenges in building brand awareness or in getting honest opinions from consumers, buying blog reviews may give you the break that you need.

Think of blog reviews as a type of market research. By asking a blogger to use your website or product and review it honestly, you can gain valuable insight for a much lower cost than that of conducting an actual market research study.

If you decide to buy blog reviews, it pays to know how to go about it discreetly. Although you may have the best of intentions for buying blog reviews, your customers (or potential customers) may be turned off by the knowledge that you have paid for reviews.

There are several blog review services out there that cater to businesses looking to buy blog reviews. They can get you in touch with bloggers who are willing to write reviews. However, this should be approached with some caution. The reviews resulting from these transactions will most likely sport a disclaimer at the bottom saying that the blogger was paid for their services.

Another option is to approach bloggers directly. Find a blog in a niche that complements your own, and ask the author for their honest opinion of your site or service. Often, bloggers are more than happy to review your product if you send them a sample or demo.

However you choose to buy blog reviews, encourage the blogger to write naturally. Don’t provide them with a script or with instructions that don’t allow much personal interpretation. If the paid review looks and feels like a paid review, the chances are that it won’t have the effect you had hoped for. Aim for an organic feel and let the blogger express their honest opinion about your site or product.

While it remains a controversial and oft-maligned practice, buying blog reviews can genuinely give your business a boost when it is most needed. It’s not easy to break through the noise and build your brand online. Buying a few reviews can grow your brand awareness to the point that you start getting unsolicited reviews. That is the ultimate payoff for your hard work.

About The Author

Promote your website with quality blog reviews and link building programs from WebFirstCreations and start getting the rankings you need.

By Bill Miller

Everywhere you look today, there’s some SEO Guru trying to tell you what to do and what not to do when building links. It’s no secret that SEO experts agree on very little. A recent survey at SEOMoz proved that point.

If the top SEO experts around the World can not come to an agreement about what should or should not be done when building links, then what is the every day Joe supposed to do?

Rand surveyed the Top 37 SEO experts in the World. Basically the Survey is a series of questions asked to each expert. This group of experts could not come up with an agreement rating more than 1 on many of the questions!

So now that we know the experts can’t agree, I might as well tell you the mistakes I’ve made plus the ones I see done by many Webmasters.

Failing to procure reciprocal links. I’ve seen so called SEO Guru’s say that reciprocal linking is dead and they will hurt your site. This just isn’t so. The important thing to remember is to make sure they links your trade are from quality sites. It doesn’t matter if they’re PR0, just make sure they’re not from a spam/adult/pharmacy/hate type site. Reciprocal links can be on a resource page if you run a website or a Blogroll for you bloggers. Just remember to trade!

Failing to acquire low PR links. For some reason, many Webmasters do not want PR0 sites linking to them. This is link building suicide! One day, those PR0 sites could be the next PR5 or better. Frankly, I don’t care who links to my sites. I can’t control it and if they’re passing any amount of authority, which even PR0 pass some, I’ll take it. It also looks natural when you have many more low authority sites pointing to your site than all high PR sites.

Failing to link out. Once again, we’re talking about making your site look natural to the Search Engines, especially Google. Authority sites link out to other authority sites. Google expects to see this. I can’t tell you how many times Ive had a site stuck in the SERPS only to get a little boost when I linked to a higher authority site. So link out to authority sites!

Failure to check your reciprocal link partners websites. Once you exchange links with someone, you need to follow up on a routine basis and make sure the link back to your site is still there. Some sites go down, accounts are closed, domains let expired and purchased by someone else, Webmasters changing website topics and some Webmasters simply taking your link down after you exchange links. I’ve seen people put the “nofollow” attribute on the links after they’ve made a trade. I’ve seen it all happen, that’s why I monitor my link partners and you should also.

Failing to use Anchor text in your link. If someone gives you the opportunity to use Anchor text in the link back to your site, use it! In my opinion, anchor text in a backlink is the second biggest off page ranking factor for seo. Only the relevancy and authority of the page where the backlink originates is more important in my experience.

Failing to cover up your paid link footprints. Look, from here to the end of time, people will sell links. And from here to the end of time, Google will be trying to find paid links. And from here to the end of time, you’ll see blogs, websites and blog networks (think Backlink Solutions) get de indexed for selling links. If you’re going to buy or sell links, you’d better be hiding your footprint or Big Daddy G is going to find you one dark, cold and stormy night. There are several ways of hiding your footprint, I covered one way in my link laundering article a few weeks ago.

Failing to build links. I see people on the forums all the time asking how they should go about link building or how to get started link building. Many say they don’t know how and so they don’t even try. People! I hate link building as much as the next person, but it’s not Rocket Science. You may be able to rank high in a low competitive keyword niche with on-page SEO, but for a competitive niche where’s there’s money to be made, you’re going to need some relevant backlinks!

TIP: One of the most effective link building strategies you can perform is to find out who’s linking to your competition and get links from them. You simply go to Google and type in link:yourcompetitorssite,com. You’ll then get a list of sites that are linking to your competitors site. Browse that site to see if there is a place to put a link to your own site at. If not, simply Contact the person running the site and ask kindly for a link. Many times they will not respond, but some will. Now, out of those sites, do the same thing. See who’s linking to them and get links from those sites!

This is probably the easiest way to get relevant backlinks but it’s a technique very few Bloggers and Webmasters use!

About The Author

The website AffiliateWatcher.Com brings you these traffic tips. He reviews the best affiliate programs and other money making ventures that helps beginners get started in Affiliate Marketing. See his expose on quick ways to make money online at his blog.