Backlinks play a very important role in your search rankings. Every do-follow link acts as a positive vote for your website. The more backlinks you have more is your website’s reputability.

This backlink craze leads to some spammy activities like comment spam, fake profiles, forum spam etc. Many people pay to get backlinks. But most of the websites participating in such activities are penalized by Google. It is very hard to recover from such penalties.

Spamming is not everything to get backlinks. There are many ways to get natural backlinks without spamming. Such backlinks are called Natural Backlinks.

What are Natural Backlinks?

Natural Backlinks are the links not generated by you. These links are naturally or organically generated. Whenever others find your contents useful, they link to your site.
Perfect example – Wikipedia. Almost 80% blogs have at least one link to Wikipedia. Wikipedia never asks users to link to them nor it gives links to anyone. They are the users who link to Wikipedia.

How to get Natural Backlinks without Spamming?

1. High-Quality content

The higher is the quality of your content, the more often it is loved by users. I am not talking about Language alone. Suppose, you are running a blog and providing content copied from somewhere else, it will destroy your users’ experience. But if you provide in-depth analysis of a topic, with related examples, references and good readability, users will get attracted towards your site. This will increase the possibility of people linking to your site.

Example – Wikipedia. Almost every article on Wikipedia is well written and well presented. Articles are not just written, but they cover the topic in detail. Most of the articles provide 100% information related to the topic or term.

2. User-Generated content

User-generated and editable content often fetches lots of attraction. This includes user reviews, opinions and comments. Even Guest Blogging comes in this category. Many times forums provide more information than a blog. Because those who have knowledge or experience, respond to the discussions. Many times useful discussions are shared on other sites. Such sites are harder to manage and face problem of spam however.

For example – JustHost reviews. If you find the review on a blog, you often find the list of all the features, which you already know. But if you find the discussion about JustHost on a forum, you find real experiences and opinions of users.

3. Distribute Open Source content

Distributing Open Source content is the best way to get natural backlinks. Open source means software or script with its source code made available to users. It is licensed with an open source license (OSL). The copyright holder provides all the rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.
If you distribute your own work with OSL, there is a high possibility of users linking you back. This increases your Natural Backlinks. Developers also take interest in it. Your work becomes a great community.

For example – Self-hosted WordPress. Millions of WordPress users mention their site is proudly powered by WordPress. WordPress doesn’t put forced links in the footer. But yet users themselves link to it.

4. Free contents

If you can’t create your own open source work, it is still OK. You can distribute other contents like Free Software, Themes, Plugins, Frameworks etc. Try to provide more and more free useful stuff. Many times Give-aways fetch lots of user attraction.

5. Reward your users

If you reward your users, users will love you more. Rewarding users does not mean giving revenue to them. Sections on your site like ‘Top Referrers’, ‘Top Developers’, ‘Top Contributors’, ‘Top Commenters’ etc. fetch user attraction.

6. Advertising

Advertising makes your site get noticed. If you provide a great service, users will link to your website and you will get backlinks.

7. Affiliate program

Affiliate program helps a lot for any eCommerce site. Note that, the page ranks flows through affiliate links. Provided, the link is do-follow. Affiliates not only link to your site but increase the traffic of your site and make your website noticed.

8. Maintain a Blog

There is no excuse for any reputed site not to have a blog. The blog keeps your users updated. Posting offers on blog is a great way to get backlinks. You should be careful about the blog URL. Try to run the blog on a directory instead of sub-domain. Link to YourSite.com/blog will be counted as the link to your site. Whereas, blog.YourSite.com is a different site.

This was my short-list of ways to get backlinks naturally, without spamming. Let me know if you have something to suggest.

In the modern-day business landscape, online marketing has become an integral part of every business. The advent of the internet and the emergence of online platforms has changed the way businesses work. Earlier, being present on the online platform was an option, but now it has become a necessity for every business. According to a study, more than 70% of the customers first search for the business on the internet before buying any product or service.

But many small and medium-sized businesses wonder how they can leverage the power of online marketing for increasing website traffic and boosting the growth of their business. The online marketing landscape keeps on changing, and that’s why sometimes it becomes quite challenging to keep a tab on what’s trending. There is no denial in the fact that there are different ways to build a strong presence on the online platform but using all the tips that you come across in not a practical solution. This is why, in this blog post, we will go through the six most effective online marketing strategies to grow your business.

Build a responsive, up-to-date website

A website is the most visible part of your online presence as it acts as your virtual shop. It doesn’t matter how much effort you put in social media strategy, content creation, search engine optimization, if you will not have a good website, then you will never be able to perform well on the online platform. Your website should be responsive, and it should act as a seamless guide to your product and services for the visitors. If a website does not lead the visitors to where he wants to go, then the bounce rate of your website will increase. You should also keep on updating your site with new plug-ins and use the trending SEO practices.

Include social media platform

In the current era, social media has become a complete world in itself. With more than 2.7 billion people using social media sites every month, you can’t ignore this powerful and gigantic virtual world while making an online marketing strategy. You should know that social media is one of the easiest and cost-effective modes of marketing, and that’s why even small and medium-sized businesses are using it. From creating sponsored ads on Facebook to adding useful hashtags on Twitter, you can use social media sites in various ways.

Bring in Email marketing

Emails will continue to remain one of the most popular communication channels, and therefore, you should never opt out an email while planning online marketing strategies. You need the right mailing list and an excellent email marketing tool. Email marketing has more ROI, and the response rate is also higher in it. This is why most of the businesses still use email marketing. The content of the email will even matter a lot. Make sure to include short and crisp lines in your email.

Invest in mobile optimization

The influx of mobile has now forced giant search engines to turn the internet into a mobile-friendly platform. This is why Google came up with Mobile-first indexing in which websites that were not optimized for mobile usage were penalized. Nowadays, optimizing your site for mobile has a very good effect on your overall ranking. You should use the same approach while designing an app as well.

Provide a seamless payment procedure

Do you know that there is a large group of people who cancel their purchase just because of the complicated, limited or time taking payment procedures? This is why it has become essential for every online business to build a seamless and easy to understand payment procedure. You will never wish your customers to cancel the purchase just because of lousy payment procedures. You should also include as many payment options as you can on your website.

Invest in images

The images that you use on your website, social media pages and blogs play a significant role in the overall impression of your brand. So, instead of using free images which are very common, you should invest in quality images. Buying or making the right image for your website or any other purpose won’t cost you much, but it will have an excellent effect on your online presence.

Online marketing strategy is all about keeping tabs on the latest trend and using the right tool at the right places. Without a good online marketing strategy, all your effort of building a robust online presence will go astray. From search engine optimization to using social media platforms, there are many things that you should include in your online marketing strategy.

As you’re probably aware, as an Affiliate Marketer there are literally 1000’s of niches and sub-niches you can work in. But it’s important to choose a niche which has plenty of buyers, hungry for products and information. Because obviously, if there are no buyers, you aren’t going to make any money.

The simplest way to become a successful affiliate is to find a good offer, then find a TARGETED audience for that offer. Keep repeating that and you’ll be making money hand over fist. It makes so much sense.

So let’s say you’re promoting in the ‘make money’ niche (good move by the way, as it’s very lucrative), you can send ‘general’ traffic to your site, on the off chance they might want to make money online, but wouldn’t your site be far more successful and make many more sales, if you only send ‘targeted’ visitors to your site?

In case you’re unaware of that phrase, ‘targeted’ simply means you already know they are interested in your niche.

So in this example, wouldn’t it be much more sensible to find a crowd who you KNOW are interested in making money online and promote your site to them?

Of course, it would.

Someone being sent from a non-specific webpage/forum/blog etc arriving on your site, is very unlikely to buy what you’re offering. But someone who is clicking through to your site, from a ‘make money’ based forum or blog for instance, well . . . if they are visiting other sites in your niche, it’s much more likely they’ll be interested in your offers, right?

So be very careful where you source your traffic from.

Yes, you’ll see the banners and ads for 10,000 visitors for just $15 and of course, it sounds attractive. “Mmm… 10,000 visitors?! I MUST make sales with that amount of people.”

Wrong.

It’s normally a waste of money and more importantly, time. Concentrate your efforts on finding, helping and educating people who are targeted to your offers, by hanging out online where they hang out.

Also remember that if you build your traffic by joining relevant communities, blogs, forums etc and posting useful info with a link to your website, those posts etc that you make, will be there for years into the future. They’ll continue to get clicks. Buying ‘trash’ traffic however, will be one chance and that’s it, gone.

Back to Facebook for a moment. You can send traffic from Facebook to your website, but you need to either use PPC (Pay Per Click), as Facebook has its own program and you can really target your ads, or you can build a Facebook Fanpage. And it’s free.

It takes around 20 minutes to do, around 5 to 10 minutes per day to update it and you’ll have your very own source of visitors who you KNOW are interested in what you are offering.

Use your Facebook Fanpage to target them, educate them, entertain them and give them lots of useful info and then when they click through from the Fanpage to your website, they will certainly be far more receptive to what you have to offer.

You can do the same with Squidoo lenses, Blogger blogs, Pinterest, Tumblr etc, as they are all free to set up, are massively popular, get tons of traffic and you can direct the traffic to your own website.

To recap

just remember that it’s important to target your visitors to ensure more of them buy. The more targeted, the more sales. It’s worth spending a little time to build your traffic the correct way, as it will pay off by bringing you more sales, along with more visitors who will come back and buy more of your offers.