One of the biggest challenges in making money online and getting your sites ranked in the search engines is getting the right kind of links to your sites.

Links give us the ability to get Free natural organic traffic. With right type of natural traffic we can pretty much write our own paycheck every month.

But most times when starting off, your inclination might be just to start link building without a system or plan.

We all have done this at some point.

We surfed online, bought a course or spent some time on a forums talking to others and started the link building process

You probably have some good results already.

Or you may be struggling to get your sites ranked because you cannot figure out the right kind of links to get you to your goals

I have taken the liberty to document the type of links and give you some perspective.

You see perspective and experience is important. The last thing you probably want to do is waste your time and money on unproductive activities.

How much fun is that really?

The web marketing and SEO marketing has changed from the good old days of the wild, wild, west.

So if you have the right perspective I believe that this will give you a good head start and irrespective of what is going on with Google or the other search engines you can still figure out where to go if you are going off course

I have come up with my own classification of the different types of links you can use to promote Amazon affiliate marketing blogs or any products or services online.

I grouped all of them into different link buckets.

I specifically call them buckets because you can have different type of links in each bucket but every now and again your bucket could have leak, so you need to plug the holes.

Here they are:

1. Direct Links Bucket–

This is a link building strategy for someone who is new or looking to throw a ton of links to your site. Direct links involve placing incoming links to your site and these links have no content associated with them. So for example you may list your website on a local directory or open profiles on online forums with links back and no content. You may even use bookmarking as a strategy for direct links.

2. Content Based Link Bucket–

The key idea behind this link building strategy is to write content and distribute your content with your anchor text links embedded in them. Typically this will involve writing articles for high quality article directories and distribution of these articles, becoming a guest blogger or posting blog comments and reviews, and submitting press releases. There are many more content related links strategies you can apply in this area.

3. Social Media Link Bucket–

With the explosion of Facebook and Twitter you can easily place links, join the conversation and get some traffic to your site. There are hundreds of various social media sites and directories available. From my perspective this type of links are the least valuable from a link building strategy as most of them fall in the non-follow camp.

4. Sensory Link Bucket–

These fall into video, podcasting, creation of apps, where there is some sort of sensory or interactive approach where you would embed the links and point back to your sites.

5. Viral Link Building Bucket–

The type of strategy causes your audience to want to share your content, quiz, contests and other type of media because it is so good that it will go viral.

6. Paid Linking And Media Sharing Bucket–

Sometimes you could end up paying for your links. I would encourage you not to do that as it could permanently hurt you. However if done correctly some paid links in the right way can actually improve your rankings. Certain sites will accept your content if you pay to place content on those high traffic sites.

7. Feeder Site Bucket–

Super Affiliate Jeff Johnson first introduced me to this a few years ago. In this strategy you are building secondary or feeder sites to feed your main site links. You are in control over the links that get to your site.

So these are the high-level link buckets that you could use to pour links to your sites.

But as you can see, depending which bucket you use, there are some challenges with this.

1. Not all links are created equal. Getting links from content sites will definitely be better than paid links.

2. Some of the link strategies for example, social media links may not get you direct benefits over the short term and will not help your Google search engine rankings.

3. There is an art to getting links back from video directories. If you just go ahead and start distributing video to most video sharing sites you would find that in most cases you do not get credited for the links as most directories do not allow anchor text links or are no follow.

4. It takes time to figure out and test and then execute the right linking strategy.

So though there may be hundreds of different ways of getting links that fall into different link buckets what is the best way to get your sites ranked fast in the shortest time.

I follow a specific formula that works well for me for now.

My link getting plan is as follows:

Step 1 – My goal is to build links o get my pages indexed as fast as possible. This includes using wordpress plug-in and getting special types of links from bucket 1.

Step 2 – I usually start off by building 20 from Bucket 1 and 2. These are very special links that I have not shared before. Think of this as Phase one links, which is extremely high quality links

Step 2 – I then move on to phase 2 linking. Phase two linking is getting slightly lower quality links. I usually use a combination of bucket 2 and 4 for this in a specific way.

Phase 3 linking – After a time I ramp up the linking efforts focusing on diversity of links . This is using techniques from Bucket 3, 5 and 7 as necessary.

Then I rinse and repeat the process all over again.

In the next series of posts we will dive deeper into link building. For now leave me a comment below and let me know your specific linking strategy.

Affiliate marketing