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If you’re just getting started in affiliate marketing then you’ve surely heard that it’s very important to get links to your sites. Indeed, Google judges or “ranks” sites based not only on content but on the links pointing to your site.

Here’s how it works for most affiliates in the beginning and you also might relate to what I’m about to say. You hear or read somewhere that you need to get links to your site. Then, you somehow get the impression that you need to get as many links as possible.

Then, you find out that you can use social bookmarking sites to get links to your site. You get accounts at all the big social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon and Mixx. Maybe you even buy some software such as SENuke or BookmarkingDeomon.Com to automate the process for you.

The next thing you know it you have TONS of NEW links pointing to your site. You have a handful of these links showing up on Google in addition to the URL for your site.

But, there’s one problem. And this is a BIG problem. What Google wants to see is that the links to your site grow in a steady and natural fashion. In Goolge’s eyes a link to your site is a vote of approval, resulting in the improvement of your ranking.

But, if you’ve just launched a site and it suddenly has a hundred links pointing to it in the matter of hours (if you use linking software) or days (if you do it manually yourself) Google will say, “What the heck!”. It’ll see way too many links pointing to your site in too short of a time period and this is not good.

See, what’s extremely important to Google is TRUST. If the search engine sees that you software suddenly has too many links pointing to it it’ll lose trust immediately as building links too fast is considered a form of spamming.

However, if you build your links slowly over a long period of time you’ll build trust with Google and see a really good result in your rankings. Furthermore, you won’t waste your precious time building links – an extremely mundane activity I may add – and use your time wisely spending your working hours publishing content to the web.

This brings me to the best linking strategy which I learned from Brian G. Johnson’s affiliate marketing courses. When I launch a site I just get ONE inbound, or  backlink after the site’s completion. Personally, I use a service called Article Underground, which is recommended in Brian’s courses.

Article Underground is a PLR service that offers up to 400 article every month which you can publish to the web yourself. They also over 10o WordPress blogs on which you can write short posts that link to your site using the anchor text of your choice.

Again, I personally write only ONE post per site with two outbound links – one on my anchor text and the other on my domain name (URL) and that is it! I wait about 24-72 hours and my sites are usually indexed and ranking on Google. While Article Underground costs some money to join it has been worth every penny for me.

Back to the best strategy. After making that one post I walk away from linking for abut SIX months. That’s right – I do not engage in any linking practice for half a year. The main reason for this is because I want to build trust with Google. Then, after six months I return to Article Underground and make some more posts.

If you don’t want to spend any money then there is another way you can go about linking, based on Brian’s teachings. You can find blogs that use the CommentLuv and KeywordLuv plugins. These are WordPress sites on which you can leave post comments with links back to your own site.

Again, the same principal of building links slowly applies here. After finishing a site I’d recommend to make three to four posts on different blogs all linking back to your site with your anchor text. All you’re hoping for is one of the webmasters to approve your comment. Then, you’ve got what you need: A link through which Google can find your site.

When I first got started in affiliate marketing I got endless sites kicked off Google because I was too aggressive about my linking. My sites were immediately marketed as spam by the search engine and I ended up losing precious hours of my time with my sites getting banned.

This does not have to happen to you though. Go about your linking strategy in a very slow and prudent way to build the maximum amount of trust with Google in order to get the best possible rankings for your sites.

Further reading

Getting good quality links is important for all online marketers and webmasters. Here are some resources for further reading that may help you.

Filed under: Link Building

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