But I only mentioned this because of how you can check for reciprocal links.

Here are a few more ideas why checking your website’s outbound links here and there can be very useful:

1.    Check for spammy outbound links
You might think that you have full control of the links from your website but that’s not always the case.

Here’s how a spammy link from your website can happen:
-    If you use C2 or any other Web 2.0 system to allow visitors to share content, they might try and hide their link.

I found a link on my site where the webmaster created a link from a »full stop« which was the anchor »text«.

I didn’t see that link on my site when looking at the comments. I found it by running a linkfromdomain command from Bing for my website.

I would have also found it in my comments moderation panel but with lots of comments coming in I didn’t check them all the time. Now I probably will.

-    You might link to a good site but in time that domain may have changed hands, got in the hands of spammers and now you link to a spammy site.

2.    Check company and authority websites whether they link out to other »normal« sites.

For example a massive authority site like Hoover.com has only 8 outgoing links:

Asking them for a link to your site would be a waste of time…

But if a big company or an authority website DOES link to regular (hobby, personal sites), then getting a link from them is possible and extremely beneficial to your rankings.

These two and a few other cool tips have been explained in more detail on SEOmoz page about linkfromdomain tool used for linkbuilding.

Don’t forget to check the comments there as there are even more tips.

Here are two quick outsourcing tips to help you minimize the amount of poor quality articles and get much higher quality content written.

1. When using freelancer.com, create a project big enough so that you can select “Very small project” where bids are between $250 and $750.

When you do that, you’ll receive bids from writers with the highest ratings which in most cases produce best articles.

If you always post a project in the “Simple project”, where the bids are between $30 and $250, you’ll find mostly lower rated freelancer bid for your projects.

Good writers don’t need to bother with small projects so they will most likely never bid for your projects.

2. When you ask the writers to write your articles tell them to include the links to websites from which they gathered the info.

This will:

• allow you to check whether your outsourced content is it’s really a lot different  from someone else’s information already on the Web
• it will keep them honest – it’s going to be very hard for them to take shortcuts in rewriting the content if they know you’ll be comparing both articles.

If you have any other quick outsourcing tips, please share them below!

But you can also overdo it.

The problem with decisions at the beginning is that you have NO experience. All your potential decisions are based on a theory and you KNOW that you really DON’T KNOW what works and what doesn’t.

So you don’t really trust any of your decisions.

You may decide for a niche #1 and a day later find another interesting one. You start some keyword research and see that it has potential too.

A day later you come up with another niche – and it looks good. But you still haven’t decided yet.

You are unsure and you want to be sure before you start, right?

You don’t want to mess up and make mistakes and waste time.

Well, in my opinion this is almost impossible. Think about it; you want to be sure and yet you have zero experience.

And experience is nothing else than making lots of mistakes and finding what works by not making the same mistakes again. Only then you know.

I was recently contacted by an SBI-er who asked my help in choosing a niche and he sent me 3 different ideas in 3 days – while my response for the first and his second choice was that those were good niches.

Here’s my reply after he asked for my thoughts on the third niche:

“Every niche is ok to start with. I would suggest you stop analyzing and looking for the perfect niche and just get started.

Only THEN you’ll be able to make close to a perfect choice. Still not perfect though but you’ll have a pretty good idea of what a good niche is.”

In summary – do not generalize the message of this post: it’s not that you should start your site without good research. The key is in the level, the amount of time spent doing research.

You can do too much of it and not being aware that whatever niche you come up with you’ll feel unsure about it. You will not feel sure about a niche ever – when you’re starting your first site.

If your research shows you good numbers and one or two experienced internet marketers give you a green light, it’s time to stop thinking and start doing and getting experience.

Continuous action which will definitely include mistakes and the right choices will make you an expert. And expert knowledge enables you to create high traffic and high income websites.

If you agree with the above statement, then notice the word LIKE.

Someone must like your site to link to it. Of course, they can simply like the content – it can simply be just very useful like the Wikipedia type of content where there’s mostly massive amounts of text on the page and very few (or none) other elements (pictures, graphics, videos, forms, etc.).

These types of sites do get organic links but they must really have an authority status and be well known to get them.

Most other sites get links from fellow webmasters and bloggers because they like the content AND they like the looks of the site.

Most webmasters are concerned with what their visitors will think about them if they send them through a link to a boring site. (Either boring content or boring looking.)

That’s why most webmasters prefer to link out to NICE looking sites. I think you now realize what the point of this post is:

The better looking the site is, the higher the chances for organic links!

Note: I haven’t done a scientific study to prove this with exact measurements so this claim is based on my personal experience and from reading many case studies and stories mostly from the SBI forums.

That’s where you see webmasters either struggle getting links or others wondering what’s the story with these links since “I’ve never built many links and yet I have 5000 daily visitors.”

I am sure that there are always elements of luck in there and if those webmasters built 100 sites they definitely would not have had exactly the same experience with their traffic.

But there is a pattern.

And if you observe carefully you’ll see that most webmasters who did not work very hard on getting links and still got them (meaning that most of them were organic) have very good looking TEMPLATES and CONTENT pages.

I believe that a site that attracts organic links MUST fit both criteria – although the template is probably less important than the look of the content.

Just to state the obvious – the content MUST of course be useful and not some regurgitated and rewritten stuff from the Web.

But to gain organic links in time, that content must be wrapped in a nice package. The template and the colorful and interesting elements of the page make that page looking very nice.

I want to share some examples of very nice looking sites (in my opinion) that have either already proven that they got many organic links (webmasters sharing their story) or that they are on a very good way to gain organic links in time.

Gardening Quick N Easy

This gardening site’s first cool impression is its 3D header where the wheelbarrow sort of sticks out the header. You can also see nice design of the left and right column (not usual straight line), great looking pictures in the content area and great looking photos in the right column.

The footer graphic again impresses with the 3D effect.

What this site on gardening tips tells me is that someone has put a lot of effort into the design of the site and is therefore SERIOUS about their online business.

It is the owner of the website that convinces me in a few seconds that this site is something special and since it impresses me it will definitely impress my visitors of my site if I decide to link to it and recommend it.

And many webmasters will like to share their discovery of this website with their visitors. Bingo – another organic link.

Of course, keep in mind that before organic links happen, someone must discover you therefore you need to rank somewhere in the top 10 for some key keywords related to this niche.

So the first part of link building through article submissions, directory submissions and some link exchanges will have to be done.

The Chic Fashionista

The header of this fashion advice website is again customized in a way not often seen. The links to the Blog, RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter are embedded into the graphic.

The first impression (first few seconds of seeing the site above the fold) is that this site has a lot to offer and is somewhat special. It’s customized and different from a regular cookie-cutter 3 column template.

You’re even more impressed once you scroll down a little bit: every link to specific page has a corresponding graphic design. There are 42 total links to inner pages of this site with a related graphic.

That immediately suggests that someone has put a lot of effort into the site and therefore must know what she is talking about and is therefore an authority on the topic. Most other pages of the site are as colorful and interesting as the homepage.

Stocks For Beginners

The design of this stock market for beginners site is based on a call to action. The most wanted response (MWR) is for a visitor to subscribe to the newsletter.

The design is very clean and simple and yet it looks very professional.

This is not a Made for Adsense (MFA) site built in one afternoon – and the visitors instinctively know that. (Since they’ve seen many MFA sites in their past experiences with Stock Market and other types of sites)

Again, there is a lot of attention to detail that can been seen in matching colors, related images at the bottom of the homepage near the links to T2 pages and strategic placements of newsletter sign-up boxes and Google search boxes.

If you go deeper into the site for example to a page about stock market charting you’ll also notice that there are real time charts on the site and this is not just another MFA site.

While this webmaster’s plan is to generate some income from Adsense, the ads are not intrusive and “in-the-face” and this kind of site will also most likely get lots of organic links in time.

Note that ads and affiliate links appear deeper in the site and not immediately on the homepage above the fold as is the case in the Gardening Quick N Easy site and the Chic Fashionista site.

Spearfishing Tips

The header of the Spearfishing Tips and Techniques website again impresses with good colors and images and so does the general look and feel of the site.

This site is looking to earn more with Adsense but I would advise the webmasters to take down the ads and work for some time on links to really climb up the rankings and then decide whether Adsense is really worth it on this type of site.

Some of the pages of this site are shorter but a page like the bottom hunt spearfishing techniques is the type of rich content that will definitely attract organic links in time.

If most of this site was built this way then success is only a matter of time.

Top Spy Secrets

The Top Spy Secrets is to me one of the most cool looking sites. It’s definitely a type of template that you rarely see.

It’s also most likely very effective when it comes to Adsense CTR since it’s a 2-column template and the main content area is almost as narrow as the Adsense ad.

The visitor reading that page will HAVE to scan the ad if he wants to keep reading the content.

Again, note the attention to detail and all the small customizations like the red Top Secret sign, the design of the horizontal navigation and others.

Conclusion

If you see someone on the street (or many other settings like parties, business meetings, conferences, …) dressed really really well and smart, what is your first thought?

In most cases that is is someone important.

It is only their “look and feel” that makes the first impression and we tend to make some very profound conclusions based on this first impression.

We can also be fooled very easily by that. But that’s how the world works and that’s how the human mind works.

The goal of your template and your content is to make that first impression which can many times be much stronger than the impression the visitor gets when they actually read what you have to say.

And if your visitors who also own websites and blogs and use Facebook, Twitter and other social sites are impressed immediately by the look and feel of your TEMPLATE and the richness of your content, they will link to you much more likely.

And since links are THE KEY to high rankings, then having a good looking template and putting a lot of effort to make your content interesting and colorful is also the KEY to long-term success online.

Can you build a high traffic website with a plain looking template? Yes you can.

But unless you’re lucky with some great links (like getting listed on high PR pages in DMOZ and Yahoo Directory) it will take you much more time and effort to achieve that because not many other webmasters will link to you organically.

Take some time and look at the above four websites and study their pages. They all follow quite a simple 2 or 3 column format and yet they are interesting and unique.

They are not as complex as the CNN.com or Yahoo.com homepages and yet there’s no need to complicate things.

You can make a simple two column website look very clean, professional and that it conveys the status of authority through richness of the content.

You will definitely “convince” many webmasters who visit it to link to it and recommend it to their visitors.

And once the organic links start to happen, it’s time to start partying.

————————————————————————————–

Today I would like to share with you some things that can help speed up your results with your SBI site.

Currently, my travel site is getting 750 unique visitors per day and I work about one hour per week on it. This is based on my own experience and is not an exhaustive list.

1. Know your reason why – Knowing the true reason why you are building an SBI site in the first place will help you on so many levels.

You won’t be distracted by the latest business opportunity or program out there and therefore you will save yourself time that could be used in reaching your goal quicker.

Example: I started my travel site in 2007 as an experiment to show others on my newsletter list that you can go into a niche with no connections or experience and make $500 a month.  That was my reason why and I achieved it.

My reason why has since changed to a more important one and that is if things keep going as they are, I will have a wife soon.

My reason why now is I am working towards getting married soon and would like that site to provide me more of a cushion instead of just being a science experiment.

Having a STRONG reason why keeps me VERY focused and causes me not to waste time on other things which speeds up my success.

Note: See article about happiness and journey to $9k per month.

2. Use google docs – At first I didn’t treat my site that seriously. I knew I could make $500 a month from it and halfway did it.

Once I got serious (my reason why) I treated it like a real business. I opened up a free google docs account and created a spreadsheet containing important info about my site.

Keywords
urls of all my pages
rankings in google for keywords
ezinearticles.com submissions
Pictures added to page

Those are just a few of the things I keep up with.

I like Google docs because I can be anywhere in the world and access it. Plus, my outsourcers can have access as well via their sharing feature.

3. Take massive action – I monetize my site mostly with adsense. I know how much I make on average per click.

It comes down to a numbers game then. I start with how much I want to make.

Let’s say I wanted to make $100 a day. I take what I make on average per click and divide it into $100. That will give me how many clicks I need per day to reach my goal. Real simple.

I am on a 25 article per week campaign right now for the next 8 weeks so once I decided what I wanted to make on the site, I formulated a plan to get me there and put it in my google docs.

After 8 weeks, I will have a 513 page website!

Note: Things in life rarely go as expected so I planned for a margin of error in my campaign and you should too.  This way I am not disapointed.

How do I manage to take massive action? That leads me to my next thing you can do to speed up your results.

4. Outsource – Thanks to Tomaz back in 2007, I began hiring ghostwriters.  This is how I leverage myself and take massive action.

I view myself as the manager of my site and my job is to reach the goal of the site. If I can outsource it then I will.

I think about “buying low” and “selling high”. Think about it like investing in stocks. You buy low and sell high to make money.  If I can do that on my site, I outsource.

Here is what I ask myself before I spend any money on outsourcing/ghostiwriting.

“Can I make my money back in a reasonable amount of time?”

My time is usually 3-6 months. I can wait that long to break even or turn a profit.

This is a powerful tip I am about to share with you.

I use CheapGhostwriters.com for good ghostwriters and I have another writer I pay fulltime during my 8 week campaign.

On that site, you can get a 550 article done for $5.52. I am going to show you how to get two articles out of one so you are only paying $2.76 an article.

If you are needing articles done for article submissions then this will work great for you. EzineArticles.com allows 250 word articles.

When you post a project for a writer, ask them to write about two subjects in the same article. For example, I have them write about two travel spots.

I then have them write it so each section can stand on its own. I even tell them that I plan to submit each section to EA.com so they can understand my logic.

By using this little strategy, you can get 2 for 1 price. Let me tell you what happened to me.

I got 25 articles done that way which landed me 50 articles actually. I submitted them to EA and…true story…within 4 days of having the articles approved, my site jumped up by 194 unique visitors per day which increases my income by default.

In closing, I hope you find these tips helpful and I hope you apply them to your own website.

“thanks Tomaz, when you send out emails for link exchanges, is your subject line: regarding link exchange and what is your version of value exchanges email?”

I personally think that asking for such specific examples is just too much. Here’s my reply:

Don’t you think you could come up with something that would eventually work? Do you really feel satisfied and fulfilled by copying EVERYTHING?

I don’t have an exact email because I come up with something. I don’t have a copy / paste system neither for the email and neither for the subject line.

Sometimes I used “Hi from freedomideas.com” as a subject. I introduced myself and simply suggested a link exchange. Sometimes I used something else.

Try googling “link exchange email” and you’ll surely find some good suggestions.

But to build some confidence you NEED to do things YOURSELF. Otherwise you’ll ALWAYS feel that you don’t know stuff.

You know stuff when you come up with something and it works – maybe not the first time but eventually you learn and adapt.

Now you really know. You have results.

Results build confidence – especially results when you did something on your own. Copying stuff will NOT build confidence – you’ll always feel insecure. (regardless of how much money you earn!)

How do you want to feel in the future? Do you even realize that you have a choice about that?

You have a choice. Get ideas from some people who know stuff, then add your own ideas, modify stuff and come up with something creative and new.

Play with it, adapt and eventually it will work.

As Morpheus said to Neo: “There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”

If I tell you something, you might “know” something about it.

But you need to walk the path. You need to do stuff on your own and then you’ll become the One.

You’ll be able to create money out of thin air using just your brain, a laptop and an internet connection.

Here are the most common myths of why Google and other search engines might penalize your site:

1.Will Google penalize me if I link to non-related sites?

No, unless you link to porn or sites that spread malware and other crap. The Internet is a World Wide Web which means that websites interlink with each other in many different ways.

If you write about your topic you’ll link most of the times to sites that are related to your topic – since you want your visitors to learn more.

Of course it happens that you may want to link to a non-related site but you will in no way be penalized for that.

Example: imagine to how many non-related websites ezinearticles.com links to.

2.Will Google penalize my site if I write about different topics and not just about one?

No, it won’t. In my experience the only negative thing about writing about not tightly related topics is that Google may not figure out for which theme / topic you specialize.

I have a site that is built around 4 very tightly related themes but the majority of traffic comes only from keywords of one theme.

It’s the theme that I started first and it seems that Google decided that my site is about that theme and doesn’t rank well pages from other 3 themes.

It’s not really a penalization thing in my opinion, it’s just a lack of focus.

Example: Look at ezinearticles.com again. There are probably thousands of different themes on it and yet they all rank well if you choose the right keywords. The authority status of the site gives a big boost to rankings of any topic. So I don’t think there’s such thing as being penalized for writing about non-related topics. You just need lots of links.

3.Will Google penalize me if I add 10 pages per week (or 5 pages per day or …) – because that might be too many?

Not at all. There may be some algorithms at Google that check huge spikes of content that are not realistic and may represent spam.

But there is no way you can trigger those algorithms with manual adding of pages.

Example: Let’s stick with ezinearticles.com – they have over 5 million pages and exist since 1999. That means that they have built 5 million pages in around 3600 days or about 1380 pages per day.

Update: You can publish 100 pages per day and that’s nothing in Google’s eyes:

4.Will Google penalize my site because my pages are too long (like over 2000 words)?

No, it won’t. Google wants to find the best expert on the topic online and list it on top. The best expert on topic will most likely have the most things to say about a topic. He / she knows the most about it so he / she will write the most about it.

Example: wikipedia.com has extremely long pages, some over 9000 words long (try tennis) and they typically rank top 3 in Google for single word searches!

So your 2000 word pages don’t even scratch the surface.

5.Will Google penalize me for getting links from non-related sites?

The logic is the same as it was with #1 myth. While I don’t see into Google’s algorithm it seems very unlikely that they would put huge importance on the relevancy of the links.

Example: Note that many websites are not really on one topic. What are ezinearticles.com, BBC.com, CNN.com, techcrunch.com, engadget.com and others about?

They cover hugely broad topics and yet they receive massive traffic. They also get links from all sorts of different topics and are not penalized. On the contrary, they are rewarded with huge traffic.

If you’re worried that Google might penalize your site for something else not mentioned above, feel free to share your thoughts below and we’ll all together figure out whether there might be something to worry about or not.

And lastly you must realize that while your site is very important to you, it’s probably nothing to Google and its massive database of sites and pages.

What Google wants is to provide the best information online to the person who is looking for something on Google search engine.

The average person has no idea about links to non-related sites or some other stuff. They just want to read the info or buy something that they are looking for. And Google’s #1 priority is to give it to them even is that site has been doing something not perfectly aligned with the webmaster guidelines.

I still see many sites on top of Google who very obviously buy links and yet nothing has changed.

So whatever you’re doing manually (and not using some automation tools) will (in my opinion) NOT trigger any penalizations from Google.

What you should do is build a successful online business instead of trying to game the system. Build a large content website focused around one niche and get links to it from quality websites.

If you’ve built a quality site then getting quality links shouldn’t be such a big problem.

After that, the content may grow with user generated content (C2 anyone? ) and links may happen automatically because your site is on top of Google and / or you’ll get link exchange requests because a link from your site will have lots of value.

It was suggested before that I should put up a Donations button but I don’t feel it’s the right thing here.

I am happy to share what I know (or think I know ) and am really happy to see other people succeed online.

That’s why I never really treated this blog like a business model. It’s more like a journal of my Internet adventure and a channel for helping other people on this journey.

And that’s also why this blog never received lots of links and exposure.

So if you have benefited from the free information on this blog (there are over 150 posts right now), you can return the favor by linking to it.

Here’s what would really help this blog:

1. A link to the homepage: http://www.freedomideas.com/ with the link text “Home based business ideas” or “Home business ideas”

or

2. A link to the SBI review: http://www.freedomideas.com/site-build-it-review/ with the link text “Site Build It review” or something similar.

Of course, if any other blog post better fits your content, feel free to link how ever you wish.

If you decide to return the favor and link to FreedomIdeas.com, email me at tomaz (at) freedomideas.com and I’ll share with you one awesome product niche where products are barely starting to appear on the market but it will be just huge in the next two years.

I won’t pursue this niche and there are basically just 3 blogs writing something about this stuff but of course they know nothing about keyword research and correct internal linking so you’ll easily leave them behind.

There will be other people of course who will figure out this niche soon so the sooner you start the better.

There are very few products on the market at the moment so there won’t be much content to put on your site, but there will be literally hundreds of different models in the near future and that’s when you’ll be able to build specific product pages which also convert really well.

Thanks for reading the blog and sharing your comments and I wish you BIG NUMBERS in 2010!

While I personally recommend that you start doing everything yourself at the beginning (to better understand how this Internet thing works), you don’t have to stay stuck in this “mode”.

Instead of thinking “what you have to do”, you should start thinking “what needs to be done” – and what can you outsource.

Almost everything can be done by others; content writing, website design, link building (I don’t have good experiences though), blog commenting, doing research and much more.

If you want to run a successful business, you need to become the manager. You need to manage the whole operation and let the workers do the simple jobs.

I’ve written about outsourcing before so this post is not really about how to outsource, but it’s more about the mindset and how I suggest it changes after a while so that you can get more done in shorter amount of time.

I started to think like that when I started my second SBI site and slowly progressed from just outsourcing content to outsourcing all sorts of tasks – like website design, blog commenting, research about potential link partners and so on.

I’ve even outsourced publishing of articles on a couple of blogs where I created an Author account on a WordPress based blog so my writer now writes the articles and publishes them and I only take care of an occasional link exchange.

The only thing that you as a manager need to constantly monitor is the quality of work.

“Employees” will always look for shortcuts and look for paths of least resistance. You as a “boss” of your company need to check that the quality is not compromised.

There are crappy websites everywhere (example: jacklalannepowerjuicerinfo dot com) and you need to differentiate from them in terms of quality and that’s how you’ll dominate your niches.

I’ve also seen my articles from my »static« SBI sites being indexed very quickly – in a matter of minutes too.

But since most static websites focus mostly on keywords that get searched over and over again, blogs can focus on keywords that happen »now«.

Getting a blog post quickly up when something interesting happens is crucial to get lost of traffic. Realize that this traffic will typically NOT monetize well since people are just curios and are not in the buying mode.

But still, they might subscribe to your newsletter, the RSS feed or even bookmark your site for later.

I wanted to show you an example of how much traffic you can get if you quickly write a blog post when something happens.
Serena Williams just lost her semi-final match against Kim Clijsters and she lost it in a very controversial way.

Since I watched the match live on TV, I quickly wrote a blog post about Serena Williams’ foot fault and what my thoughts were.

The traffic immediately shot up and I literally had to sit behind my PC and approve comments every few minutes because they were just flowing in.

One more thing: when I noticed that I get lots of traffic for Serena Williams foot fault keyword, I then decided to quickly write this post so that I could get a text link to my blog with that exact keyword and hopefully push it up a few more places higher.

In such cases, timing is everything.

Update – 2 days later:

The traffic to my blog was incredible; over 18,000 visitors in one single day and the article was not on Digg.

It was almost all through Google as you can see from the keywords below:

Again, the key to such traffic was writing a post on an event that just occurred and of course using the right keywords. Some of it was luck and the rest happened with tons of comments flowing in.

Did this extra traffic result in more earnings? Yes, some of the people coming in also found my site for the first time and I made a few extra sales of my tennis ebooks and videos:

Anyway, very interesting to see all these stats and also good advice for those focusing more on blogging and not so much for creating big websites focused on keywords that get searched over and over again.