Business Plan For Any Webmaster!

Are you using a link wheel to raise your traffic and boost your seo efforts?

If you are not, you should be, the link wheel concept seems to be one of the most solid techniques out there to start getting some relevant and very targeted traffic to any website.  There are no expenses involved in building your own powerful link wheel, this is another reason seo experts love this method.  It seems that this is one of the most talked about techniques in the seo world recently.

Yes, link wheels are a great way to get some free traffic an they can be implemented in a few hours time.  You need to understand what a link wheel is first, then you can start using the power of a link wheel on your site or to drive traffic to an affiliate product.  The concept is simple but setting up an effective link wheel may take a little more effort.

Are Link Wheels The Best Free Traffic and SEO Method?

Here on Webmaster Business Plan we discuss many different methods to generate traffic to your website and most of the time we try to keep all the information on the free side.   The link wheel concept is no different, you can put together an seo friendly, traffic getting link wheel in no time at all and it will cost you nothing but a little effort.  We don’t like to use terms like “best” anything, but this sure is one powerful force to be reckoned with as far as search engine optimization and traffic generation.  So, for now this is at least our favorite methods to get some serious traffic, maybe not the best but damn close!

So What Is The Basic Concept Of A Link Wheel?

The basic concept of a link wheel is nothing more than creating multiple Web 2.0 properties on the Internet that inner link to each other and also link out to your main website or “money site” and in effect make a wheel of sites that link together.  There are complete products that are nothing more than explaining this process with a couple pictures.  We believe you can find better things to spend you money on, so we are going to explain it all here and give you a chance to compete with the big boys in any niche by grabbing some serious traffic with the power of your own link wheel.

If you can imaging you main site in the middle of a circle or wheel and sites like blogger, squidoo, hubpages and wetpaint surrounding your site this is how it starts.  Now each of the sites surrounding yours will link in to your site and then link to the next free blog or web 2.0 site.  So blogger would link to your main page and would also link out to your squidoo lens.  Squidoo would link to your site and then link out to your hub on hubpages and so on.

Why Are Link Wheels Effective?

Well, there are a couple reasons for this.  The main reason that these become very effective as far as google and other search engines are concerned is that the sites that you are going to setup for external linking are considered authority sites.  You know, sites with high page rank and ones that are used as part of the search engines “social indexing”.  Yes, these authority sites pack a real punch when it comes to search engine optimization and when you link multiple authority sites to each other and they are all linking out to your site, guess what, the search engines let little old you, share a little of that authority!

Keywords And Link Wheels

Understand that just because you have setup a few blogs really fast, you are not out of the woods yet.  The keywords you focus on are just as important here as they are anywhere else.  If you focus on some low competition keywords you will be sure to get ranked fast, but you can shoot a little higher on the competitive keyword target, because after all you do want some keyword phrases that will bring you some good traffic.

Once you have decided on your keyword phrase, you will wan to get your keywords in your blog addresses, lens urls and so on.  Also you will want to make sure that you are using variations of your keyword phrase in all of your link’s anchor text.  You may want to use a few long tail keyword phrases and then focus in on your main keyword set.  This is a good way to keep the links mixed up and still give the focus to the correct term as you are developing your link wheel.

How Many Web 2.0 Sites Do I Need In My Link Wheel?

Ultimately this really is up to you.  You can build a very small, simple link wheel with three to four external blogs, but you may want to continue to grow your link wheel through time.  The more external web 2.0 sites you include in your link wheel will help re-inforce the link strength to your main site, but also can drive some healthy direct traffic to your sites as well. The power of the link wheel is 2 fold, keeping people in a loop of your own information until they end up on your main site and hopefully buy.  Secondly, you are building an authority presence on the search engines, so you will benefit in raised google rankings for your keyword phrase.  So, there is no reason to limit yourself to four sites in your link wheel, when you could have as many as you like.

A More Effective Link Wheel

If you really want to get the most out of your link wheel, you may have to make some more mini link wheels on the outside.  This means nothing more that adding social bookmarking to each of your Web 2.0 sites or blogs you are using as your main feeder sites on the link wheel. Since you can only add one link to a social bookmarking post, you really cannot expand the theory of the link wheel using these sites.  However, you can reinforce the strength of each of your new inbound link properties by giving each of them some exposure on these hugely popular and high page ranked sites like digg, stumbleupon, mixx, reddit and others.

So What Does A Link Wheel Look Like?

Well everybody has a different take on what an effective link wheel should look like.  I have found many different ideas on the net, most of these are free on flicker, but I have saved these so long ago, I do not have the accurate credits to give here, so I do apologize for that.

Here are some of the best visual examples of link wheels out there.  You can take any of them and put them to use in your online business instantly or you can study them all and choose one you want to follow.

Complex Link Wheel Diagram

Link Wheel Chart

Link Wheel Diagram

Link Wheel Explained

Link Wheel Type 3

Well that’s pretty much it for link wheel’s, let me know if you have any questions or comments in the comment section below and happy link wheeling to you!

Nick Simpson

There are so many social networks out there today, it seems to be a “job” just to stop by and check your inbox and friend invites.  I know the feeling, I am part of many social networks myself.  The problem for many webmasters and internet marketers is that this is still a very effective method of getting the word our about news and your business.  This can make for a very hectic and unfocused work environment.  Trust me, you don’t want to get caught in a loop of updating your statuses at all these social sites, when you could be spending your time writing solid content for your site, building relevant back links and hopefully dealing with all the sales coming in. The internet is by itself a very distracting place and there is no reason to allow it to make you loose your focus.  Keep reading and learn how to spend less time on social sites and more time working with your business, where your focus should be.

The power of your social marketing campaign will come down to 2 simple factors:

1. Quality Of Information
2. Expansion Of Syndication (across many networks)

If you are getting any results from working with one social network there are many more places you can get the same results, it just comes down to a matter of time.  If you are not taking the time to add value to your presence on social networks, you will not be getting the results you are looking for either.  That is what makes these the 2 golden rules of social marketing to me.

If you are sending out a bunch of junk and you are only sending it to 5 or 6 people, my guess is that you are not selling much and probably not driving a lot of traffic to your websites either. This is fine if you are only using social sites for fun and to keep in touch with your family and friends.  However, if you are trying to use the power of social sites to get your information out to the world, you may need some extra syndication power to give you more bang for your buck as far as time spent on your social marketing efforts.

I have a couple of suggestions to get your social marketing campaign rocking really fast.  I have listed the top resources below.

Professional Social Marketing Tools

There are a few paid tools out there to help you get your information out to all your social sites and to twitter effectively and the biggest one on the market today by far is, Socialoomh.com pronounced “Social Oomf” and it does a great job, allowing users to que up tweets and messages to be sent out in the future to many social networks.  This allows you to manage and maintain many accounts on many social networks with ease.  The fees here are well worth it.  This site has a great back end to make sure you can keep your messages personal and get your messages out when you want them to appear from a company you can trust.

Free Social Marketing Tools

There may be a few different free tools on the market, but I can tell you that you will not find one that is easier to use, more powerful and more flexible than Ping.FM This service is seriously a killer when it comes to distribution of your information across multiple social networks with one click.  I have used this service for some time and I have nothing but good things to say about their marketing power.  Oh and did I say, this is FREE!

I know the title was a little misleading to this one, but to be honest I am not going to waste your time or mine to list other free services that just don’t compare to the power of the Ping.FM service.  So if you want to take your social marketing power and syndication to the next level, get over there now and don’t forget to post a thank you down below.

Nick Simpson