I follow a lot of great affiliate marketing and link building blogs on the web and come to admire a lot of smart people out there. One of my favorites is Colin LaHay’s “Mixed Market Arts” because his blog is one of the few that has actually taught and old dog new tricks. His Link Building Cookbook is the best laid out blog post on the subject of getting links in 2008. His blog is a perfect example of someone who I regularly check to see where his top back links are coming from, and what new ones he’s acquired. A quick glance shows that his pet project RSS Hugger is providing his site with some great link juice. If you haven’t signed up for RSS Hugger I suggest you do so for free here.
I believe in doing this for every campaign because you can not only get the same links your competitors have, but you can also determine what they’re doing thats been successful within that niche. This is all assuming within the top 3 ranking sites in the niche you’re after.
Lets say for example you’re marketing a site targeting “Las Vegas Car Rentals”. I’m going to post the results I get from my browser here in Vancouver Canada, so they will be a little different when you search…this is fine though because I can still get my point across.
Dream Car Rentals has built a good amount of back links over time and as you all will be able to tell, would take some time to overcome. From the first 20 back links I snooped out on Dream Car Rentals I could obtain links from %40 of them because they were a few obvious social bookmarking sites and car rental directories. I can also see a few links they’ve paid for within the mix.
Another aspect to look at is how the top bloggers are using link bait to get an ungodly amount of one-way links to their site. Hate him or love him, Shoemoney.com is a great domain to examine in detail because there are few people who can attract links like him. I’ve learned a lot from gaming both Shoemoney.com and SEOMOZ.org in regards to link baiting.
