If there is one thing I have learned over the past year as an internet marketer it is that backlinks are the single most important aspect of search engine optimization.  Keyword selection and on-site SEO optimization are helpful, but nothing is more powerful than hundreds of links pointing to your website.  With that I mind, I focus nearly all of my efforts on building as many possible.  Again, I only invest my time and energy on this tedious process after my first phase of testing has shown results.

The good news about building links is that many of the tasks can be outsourced.  This is key for me because I only have a couple of hours a day to dedicate to affiliate marketing.  Sure you drop a few hundred dollars doing it this way, but the time it saves is well worth the price in my opinion.  Here is my checklist for each site:

- Build 1 Squidoo lense with a unique article linking to my site.
- Build 1 Weebly website “ “
- Build 1 Hub Page “  “
- Submit a PDF article to Scribd “  ”
- Submit an article to Gather under one of my themed profiles
- Create a MySpace page with 5 blog entries and 250 friends (link back to my site)
- Submit site to 500 directories using this guy
- Add 5 to 7 more articles to my main website
- Submit each new article to 50+ social bookmark sites (1 article per week)
- Hire a link builder from GAF to get 10 PR2, 5 PR3, and 2 PR4 links (about $150)

This entire checklist is completed over a period of about 45 days.  If things go well then I typically see a steady increase in both traffic and sales.  Ideally the project will earn at least $300 per month, which is more than enough to justify investing more work into climbing the SERP’s.

I hope this helps some of you who are struggling with how to generate traffic to your websites.  Of course you already know how much money I make online, so there is no sense pretending that these strategies have made me a millionaire. Nonetheless, I am excited about the future and this is the template that has worked for me.  If you need a more comprehensive plan for building a money-making website, then I recommend reading Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate.

Feel free to contact me with any questions.

We all know that mortgages and dating offers can mean big money for affiliate marketers, but these niches can be tough to compete in if you want to produce at a high level.  It is much easier to spend an hour doing some keyword research to find the subtle mini-niches that might allow you to rank highly in immediately.

Even if you do not have a website with enough authority to rank in any mildly competitive market, you can still use your research to enhance other methods like article marketing.  The key is to use every authority outlet you have access to…squidoo, myspace, hub pages, whatever.  Use these techniques to setup mini-sites for your offers and link them back to your own website.  This way you will inherit the traffic that comes with ranking well and you will also get a quality link back to your low authority site.

Bottom Line:  If you are a small player (like me), you are better off find the best mini-niches, as opposed to trying to swim the sharks.