4 principles of Guerilla Link Building

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You know when people start to make real money? When they realize the phrase “it takes money to make money” is pure horsecrap. When you wake up to the fact that most great fortunes weren’t built from advertising your product, but rather from maximizing your profits. You don’t need to get a ton of links, and you don’t need to pay a fortune to get them. Just make sure you concentrate on getting permanent links, because that’s the only way your link building job will ever get easier.

1) Buy some permanent one-way links to your website. You cannot ignore this part of your job, no matter how much you might like to. I’m not talking about buying a lot of links, rather I’m referring to about a dozen one-way and permanent links from web pages that are already cached in Google. Make sure you double check and the company is using no funny re-directs. An obvious example of a high quality directory listing with no cloaking or re-directing is Sootle. I hate to “toot my own horn”, but I’m working every day to make this web directory popular, and that means your Sootle listings are always worth something.

2) Make link seekers come to you. This one is obvious, but missed by most. If you go out looking for links, you’re in a weak position. If people come to you with their link request, you’re in a position of strength. Despite having amassed several hundred thousand incoming links in the last few years, I’ve spent no time looking for them. People come to me and I decide whether to reject their offer or not. Why negotiate from a position of weakness? But this also means your website has to offer something to the public, or no one will care about getting in.

3) Look around you: backlinks are everywhere. If you don’t know what Digg or del.icio.us is, you’re behind the curve. Don’t overlook Web 2.0 as an easy source of backlinks. Take a look at most popular services, if they have publicly accessible and spiderable profiles, join them. Then, for maximum power: daisy chain all your profiles together!

4) Do not waste time spamming or harassing others. The people you want to get links from 1) know what you’re doing and 2) have long memories. You’ll end up being blacklisted and maybe even physically beaten if you’re just too damn pushy. For sure your name and domain name will be trashed and you’ll always be a second rate marketer. Take the high ground so you can build long term success.

A Guerilla Link Builder is always aware of the fluidity of her surrounding world. Look and see what’s making your competitors rank, and always see if you can replicate them and exceed them. Don’t let your competitors get links that you can’t get. You have to at least match them to remove their advantage.

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