This is the question of the day: what is your internet marketing plan? Wow, am I trying to rank for the keyword Internet Marketing? Well not really, actually I didn’t know if I was going to ask what is your seo plan, link building plan, traffic plan? So I just guessed that I should give a global approach to this post.
Okay, so as you may or may not know, I’m more into SEO when it comes to building sites that I want to monetize. The goal, even if you want to pay for it, is to get visitors see your page, offer, content, message. In other words: getting TRAFFIC.
Of course, the ultimate goal is to make money, and depending on what you are more comfortable with, you may have decided to make product reviews sites, CPA offer landing pages, optin box to build your list in several niches, or sell your product. But today there’s even more than your own pages hosted on your own sites, there is social media that comes in the game. And it plays a huge role. Not only for traffic because you can reach tons of people very quickly, but also for SEO, branding, interaction and more. PEOPLE.
So what came to my mind was this: what is your internet marketing plan – with people in mind -in its BIGGEST picture? What should this master plan involve?
Because I build affiliate sites that take the SEO route, my internet marketing plan is more powered by link building and free ways to drive traffic. But you will see that it can be adjusted to any plan, the first goal being to get traffic before you monetize it. So I’m not going to talk about creating content or outsourcing, this is not about that, and you should know when you have to do those.
So here is my Master Plan, or at least some of it since I don’t know if I thought about everything.
I’m far from doing this for all my sites, but I’m considering doing more of that stuff. Especially when you want to build long term businesses, to sell your own products, or even sell later your business or site.
I tried to be smart for once, I hope you will agree. My approach was this: what links look natural, from one type of site to another type of site. In the past you would you need a wide variety of links and all should point to your money site. Well that is still true, but it is strange that no other sites are linking to those too, right? So you should ask yourself, “what can I do to have people know about MY link, MY video, MY Facebook page, My money site”. Here we’re talking about PEOPLE to notice your content and links, but of course search engines will do too. But we want to do this for people, our TRAFFIC.
Many people would do this wrong and link stuff together to get link juice (which indeed matters) but that would not look natural. Here’s an example. Say you have found a high PR blog post that you comment on and it gets approved. Would you write a press release about your comment, and link to the high PR blog post? No, it’s not that newsworthy. You may want to ping the url of the post but not create a campaign for someone else.
However, what can be natural is something like this. You create a site, it’s brand new. So you write a Press Release to announce it.
You make a video presentation of your offer or website. The video will mention your link, both in the video and description. You create a facebook page for your business or offer. You can again create a press release to tell everyone they can now interact easily with you on Facebook. On your facebook page, you will share your videos, embed your optin form.
You then create web 2.0 pages (squidoo, hubpages), on which you can also embed videos, and the rss feed from your site. You also write articles to submit to article directories and turn articles into pdf or powerpoint to submit to document sharing sites. They all have links to your site and. You will then bookmark those.
If you subscribe to a high PR blog network, you can submit posts that will be drip fed over time and giving you constant baklinks to your site or web 2.0 properties.
Forum signatures or thread links can point towards virtually anything when it’s relevant.
So basically, you shoud find an angle to tell others what there’s been going around your business. For example if you have a video that is very relevant to a blog post, then you can mention the YouTube url inside the comment instead of using it in the website field.
Now, social bookmarking can almost be used for everything. But obviously, bookmarking a forum profile isn’t natural. Why would you bookmark a profile on a forum you are never active. Sure, you’re building a backlink to your backlink, it helps search engines. That doesn’t mean it should never be done, if you can find an angle. But in the approach of “building links that people would find natural”, it seems strange.
RSS feeds can be created for all your links, you may want to create separate feeds for different link sources. And then submit those to RSS aggregators.
Now here is some details about all the elements from the diagram.
Money Site – this is the site or page that you want to get traffic too. For any purpose, either getting a commission or getting an email on a form, or a like on your facebok page. Where the action takes place.
High PR Blog Network – This is the strongest links you can get to your money site. Use it to get links over time to it. These are strong enough to get ranked and some people only rely to them. But you will still want to add other links to keep things natural. Actually, we don’t care if those blogs recieve traffic, we just use them to get strong links and SERP boost. You normaly don’t have to create backlinks to the blogs in these networks as the owners generally do this to ensure your posts and links are indexed.
Web 2.0 properties – Web 2.0 sites were hot in the past, you’ve all heard about linkwheel. these are still powerful but needs to receive link juice too. There was a time when you could just create a linkwheel around a keyword and rank quickly. I never thought natural to have a squidoo page linking to a hubpage that had the same content, or at least content that means the same thing, cause it was spun. The better way to do it was either to keep the wheel NOT interconnected, thus having to link to them from other sources. Or having a differentunique article on each, then interlinking those would be fine. They have lost their power, still they are great to create a new layer of links on link pyramids for example.
Web 2.0 means user generated content. So it includes more than Squidoo or such, document sharing sites and video sites are in the web 2.0 category.
Doc sharing sites – Just like web 2.0 they were golden. There was a time that you can rank within 24 hours or less of publishing your document. Still a good way to get links.
Videos – YouTube is the biggest video site, it is also the biggest search engine. There are more search queries happening on YouTube than Google. YouTube is owned by Google and is still ranking on it and other search engines. Video can drive tons of traffic to your site or other pages that you want to promote. There’s more than YouTube though and you want to use these also to embed them in posts, web 2.0 content pages, social networks…
Blog comments – the ones that are not spammy. An easy way to get backlinks to your money site, video, fanpage. depending on what you want to promote you will have to decide if you put your link in the website field, or in the comment field. Sometimes you can just add it as a signature, but ou always want to be constructive in your comments. No “great post!” and then your backlink as a signature will be very effective. I like to quote a part of the article and comment on it and ask questions too.
.edu and .gov – Mostly blogs and blog comments too. These give some strong link juice, but again you have to play fair if ou want to get a chance to get approved. These can also be forums or other platforms that allow you to create content, where you will place your links. On moderated platforms I would only link to a main money site, not sure that .edu blog owners would approve a comment linking to a Squidoo page, though you never know. The key is to be constructive and targeted to the topic.
Press Release – To use when you have something news worthy. You just published your review or announced a bonus on your affiliate site, write one. Created your facebook fan page, go for it. A squeeze page where you give away a special report, again a press release is a great way to get links and rank better. Actually news sites rank well on search engines, and will receive traffic, so you want to be sure to have a message that encourages readers to visit your page.
Social Networks – Much necessary now to interact with others, but also to create social proof for your website. A popular website should certainly have a facebook fanpage or have people talk about it on social networks like twitter. So you need to get there.
Article Directories – I still believe article marketing works, I still see people sharing their experience by using them and making money. Just like web 2.0 sites they are nice to create a new layer of links, that you will then bookmark, or mention on a social network “written a new article…”, so people know about it and Search Engines too. Also, there are many article submission softwares, the best on the market being Article Marketing Robot. It can submit to thousands of directories, there are 1200 directories by default, but you can add much more on your own, there are many lists on forums. Once you get these many links, getting them indexed will give you a nice boost.
Forums – There are three type of links you can get from forums: signatures, profile links, thread links. Signatures are those links you can see at the bottom of each of your post. Profile links are those you create for your profile, you generally enter your home page url or anything else you want. Thread links are those you put inside a post, it is part of the discussion. These last ones may be the most important, because they bring direct traffic if they are relevant to the discussion. Forum profiles are more just additional backlinks, and nowadays are often deleted if you are not active. Signatures may also drive great traffic. If you are helpful on a forum and people see your links, they ma want to click on it. You want to make it catchy, and “sell a benefit” inside. You can link to virtually any place from forums, depending on the 3 link types.
Social Bookmarks – As I said earlier, bookmarks can be used for almost everything, though there are certainly places that would not seem natural to bookmark. Also to keep things natural you want to bookmark others stuff, hey maybe someone else’s blog post where you have a comment, but not necessarily. You can bookmark completely random things, and various places: a forum thread that you find interesting and where you encourage others to give their opinion because you already gave yours (with a link of course), a web 2.0 page, a video, deep posts from your site,social media pages… Social bookmarks are great to build links to your links, and can be also just made for YOU to remember what you like. So it doesn’t have to be made for others. But you want to keep a natural look to your account, so mix things up. And if you want a page of yours to make it to the first page of Digg naturally, submit killer content.
RSS – your site has an rss feed, your web 2.0 pages have rss feed, your article directories accounts have too, your video site profiles too. They can all be submitted to RSS aggregators and give more power to your links. Also, you can create an RSS feed from a list of backlinks, and then submit this one too. It helps getting your backlinks indexed. So ALL backlinks you have everywhere, can be contained in one or preferrably multiple XML feeds.
Web Directories – These are maybe the least important links. You will only use those for your own sites. The reason why you want to get those, is not for the SEO power they bring. But all things equal with you competitors, they could make a difference. And, as it looks natural to have a popular important site mentioned on social networks,I guess it is also natural to be listed on important web directories.
Conclusion
You can almost link everything together, as long as you can find an angle to do so, and that your link is relevant, from site to site. When a type of site have various ways to drop a link you will have to decide which one is the most appropriate but that shouldn’t be a proble at all if you do things naturally. Always ask the question to yourself, what resource would I like to be presented here with, if I needed. What do I want to see from others? that’s putting yourself in others shoes and building a serious and natural link web that will attract traffic.
More traffic sources can be added to those, we haven’t talk about banner ads, or pay per click advertising, but these would certainly be used to drive traffic directly to the money site.
I hope it was helpful for you. You can download the diagram (by the way, it was created ith the Draw module from Google Docs), just right click and save 
Also, if you have yours, just share it!
