To Link or Not to Link? That is the Question when Building Your Online Presence & Attracting the Right Kind of Traffic

Through my days of punch tape and cards, bulletin boards, floppy drives to the cloud, I began my internet education. With that educational experience, also came experimentation. I have always lived my life as one that is destined to help others which led me to wonder…to link or not to link? However, I humbly admit, that it was more through my failures than my successes that my most valuable lessons were learned.

Links are the social life of your online presence. Through my various experiences, experimentation's, and exploration of life and its multifaceted dimensions I discovered the importance of building an online presence sometime around 1997. It wouldn’t be for several more years before I would actually begin my social entrepreneurial adventure, however I wish I had met the man that I would like to introduce you today, before I started.

My path crossed with Jim and his family, late 2001. Through the years Jim and I have worked together on several church related events, however, we never seemed to be able to connect relationally. Not sure exactly why, I just chalked it up to the fact that “Once a Marine, always a Marine” mentality of Jim’s and my “Carefree Spirit” somehow clashed.

However, this “clash” of personalities didn’t prevent either of us from being able to see the value each brought to the table. Honestly, I wish that I had met someone like this man years ago. Maybe I wouldn’t have made the mistakes that I made when first setting up my online businesses.

At first glance, when I heard that Jim had published a book, curiosity I must say captivated me. When I arrived at his book on amazon, much to my SHOCK I found that this book was only 11 pages long, and now he wanted $9.99 for this. To be completely honest, the first time I saw his book for sale it was selling for $24.99 and that was where my shocker really came from. However, when he brought the price down to $9.99 that in my opinion was a fairer price, although not what I would have sold it for having only 11 pages to the entire thing. Nevertheless, I purchased a copy, just to see what he had to say, since I had already been down this path with my own businesses and books.

Upon completing the 15 minutes or so that it took to read this book, the thought occurred to me. If I had read a book like this prior to starting some of the online businesses that I started years ago, it would have SAVED ME over 80 hours’ worth of work in the beginning! See, now that price of $9.99 doesn’t seem quite so bad.

Now that the choking over the cost has subsided, let’s look at the other benefits this short but Powerful Tool has to offer.

• Teaches the small business owner the importance of Keywords especially in your titles etc…

I have to interject here, that if I had known this ONE TIP, it would have saved me countless hours of frustration. My first website that I ever attempted was a site called “I sell Your Gifts dot com”. You know what I ended up with? I am just going to leave that you your imagination what kind of traffic I ended up with to my site. I got a lot of traffic, just not the kind of interest that I was wanting and definitely not convertible into customers for what I was selling.

Two additional Benefits of How to advertise on the internet for free:

• Guides the small business owner through the maze of free sites to advertise your company on.
• Instructs the business owner on the importance of back links.

The Author provides the reader with a large amount of information on which sites to start with, and the steps that most of them will require. Jim Tumlinson makes it clear to any business owner who is a DIY type person, that they will need to “Keep up Their Game”, to stay within the top rankings, and demonstrates a simple and time saving method for doing just that. Jim has designed his business, Jump Start Advertising to take on the responsibility of maintaining his client’s online presence as he describes for his readers.

Final take on How to advertise on the internet for free:

While I believe the price of this book is still a bit much, it is WELL worth the price if you are a DIY type business owner who wants to know everything from the ground up. However if you already have experience in e-commerce and building an online presence, then you will be more than bit disappointed. Jim’s How to advertise on the Internet for Free, is purely for the small business owner that has discovered the need for an online presence to maintain the longevity their business.

As I said earlier that links or backlinks as they are called, are the social life of your online presence, allow me to elaborate on this a bit. Now consider this; who do you want to be “hooked” or linked with in your business or personal life, either one applies here? This is what the spyder bots are all looking for.

Once you get past the new verbiage of online e-commerce, you will soon learn how you must begin to look at the life of your business as you do your own life. How and why the link is coming into your business/life? Does it add or subtract value to your business or personal life?

Unfortunately, this is a sad fact for new business owners; however it isn’t as hopeless as it sounds. Although I must give a word of caution when signing up with all the free advertising sites, some due diligence must be done.

Be sure that you are signing up for sites that have a good reputation on the internet for what they are offering to hook/link you up with. The graphic shown explains this quite clearly.

Remember that even though the hare was speedy, he was beat out by slow and steady wins the race factor. In the world of the internet, a combination of both are what will get you to the top search engine rankings and your overall PR.

While submitting your website to all the free advertising links you can find, will saturate the online market with your information. The quality of those links should be investigated through the various tools that Google supplies for free. The higher the website ranks that is sending a back link to your site will help increase your overall page ranking as well.

The opposite can also happen. The lower PR the site back linking to your site has, subtracts from your good links, thus causing you to lose traction with the spyder bots and creditability with the search engines. Once this happens, it is very difficult to regain creditability; however it can be done with A LOT of hard work and long hours!

The first thing that most every new online business owners does, is to go out and gather up 10 or 12 different website names with GoDaddy, Wordpress, Blogger etc…. They might choose one to be their main site with the others as simple satellite sites to build back links to their main website. However when they do this, they do the #1 mistake in link building. They provide EXACTLY the same information and content on every one of their sites and the spyder bots are WISE TO THIS TRICK!

Consider for a moment, relate this to your different groups of friends. Your work colleagues may not know that you are learning ballroom dancing, however, your buddies that you watch the football game sure do. This is exactly what the Google and all the other search engines are look at.

If all your different groups of friends truly knew who you were, they each would bring a different perspective and tell different stories about you. Providing the same content on every site out their simple tells the spyders, that your site is considered invaluable because no one has anything really new to say about you.

This is why all the changes to the search engines that have been going on recently are driving website content providers to the Top Ranked Growth industries in 2014 and well into 2020 according to internet content forecasters.