Read my Guide to Article Directory Promotion to learn more about the benefits of article submission and more about Ezine Articles.

14 HAHD Published Posts

Article #100: eBay Quality Click Pricing Model: Good or Bad?

Article #99: Free Ways to Build More Backlinks

Article #98: Become a Blogging Good Samaritan

Article #97: How to Create a Checklist for Switching Themes

Article #96: What Did I do to Make Money today?

Article #95: The Importance of Pillar Articles

Article #94: HTC Hero Android Cell Phone Review

Article #93: Samsung BD P3600 Review

Article #92: No Web Site or Blog Should Be Without a Contact Form

Article #91: How to Build High Quality Backlinks by Guest Blogging

Article #90: 9 More Ways to get Juice from Blog Comments

Article #89: Change Change a Theme Change Search Engine Positions

Article #88: Can Bing Bring Your Web Site Back from the Dead?

Article #87: Does Google Hate Datafeedr Wordpress Affiliate Stores?

Article #86: How to Build Your Own Authority Page

Article #85: 15 Ways to Save Water and Conserver Energy

Article #84: Polybutylene Piping or Blue Poly Problems

Here are the articles I’ve written to date that have been published for the HAHD challenge:

Article #100: eBay Quality Click Pricing Model: Good or Bad?

Article #99: Free Ways to Build More Backlinks

If you’re interested in taking part – it’s still not too late! Read my Original post about the HAHD challenge. Another great reference is my Guide to Article Marketing. Get writing!

Article marketing can generate massive amounts of authority and backlinks for your web site or blog. You can get more exposure, more traffic, and this is something you can do for FREE! I have a story I often tell about the largest diet affiliate program on Clickbank. Out of $12 million dollars paid out in the last year to affiliates, 95% of the commissions were paid to less than a few dozen people (from thousands of affiliates). When surveyed, the main difference between the successful and those that didn’t earn much – it was article marketing. Nearly all of the handful of successful affiliate marketers had performed article marketing to build links. The shocker is they all submitted from 100-500 articles EACH for their target sites!

Have you ever submitted 100 articles? Odds are you never submitted more than a dozen or more (if that) for the same project. I’ve had my Ezine Articles account for about 2 years now, and I’ve only submitted 40 articles in all. I’ve received over 99,199 views for them to date, imagine my exposure if I would have submitted 140?

I’m going to do it, I’m committing to the 100 articles in 100 days. Follow the link above to signup – blog about it, tweet about it, comment below about it – and follow my blog as I’ll be writing about it every step of the way!

Read my Guide to Article Marketing if you’re ready to get started! It will teach you all about how article marketing works, and the best ways to write and submit content!

Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC): Pagerank 8 directory accepting free submissions. Many directory listings are Latin American – but many are just good resources.

Kelly Search: Pagerank 6 directory accepting free submissions. This is a great business to business directory. I like the fact that you can submit to different categories with different descriptions and URL’s if you want when you signup.

Canlinks: Pagerank 6 directory accepting free submissions. This directory is nice because once you submit the form your blog is automatically listed – you don’t have to wait for approval.

Free Links Directory: Pagerank 6 directory accepting free submissions, but only if you reciprocal link

Pegasus Directory: Pagerank 6 directoy accepting free submissions. Also accepts reciprocal and paid submissions.

Skoobe.biz: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free and paid listings.

Surf Safely: Pagerank 4 directory accepting free submissions, but you must have a PICS label and family safe.

Flookie: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, very easy to submit to.

Resource Help: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions for reciprocal link back.

Zoomdir: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, but if you do reciprocal link you’ll get listed in just days (vs. months with no link back).

Zico Sur: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, very easy submit.

Sufficed.com: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions with reciprocal link back.

A2Z Web Index: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions with reciprocal link.

Directory World: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions with reciprocal link back.

Also – as an honorable mention – I’d like to throw my own hat into the ring. You can submit any Wordpress powered blog or web site to my Wordpress Directory.

How to find Quality Directories?

If you are interested in finding more quality directories to submit your web site to, I can give you a few links that will keep you busy for hours – if not for days.

When we SEO has a list of 560 PR4+ directories to submit to. Some are paid, some are niche, some are free. My list of free directories above was generated from a few hours of going through this list.

If you’re wondering how I found such a list, you can always google for this kind of thing – but often times webmaster type forums are the greatest source of free information. Check out this forum post of directory lists and information that will keep you busy for days. In fact, the digital point forums has a forum specifically for directories.

If you like this article, you should check out my ever growing Link Building Cheat Sheet page!

If you need to get ranked in top search engine results, but find linkbuilding and building backlinks to hard or time consuming – consider getting a linkbuilding quote from me.

Twitter is important. If you don’t have a Twitter account you should get one for your blog, business, or brand. If you don’t think so – it’s because you still don’t understand how powerful it is, or what you can do with it.

Twitter is also fun, trendy, and “what all the cool kids are doing…”. Let me give you a few examples to show two years later what it has evolved into, and why it can no longer be ignored.

Backlinks, backlinks, and more backlinks

First of all, your twitter profile page links back to your web site. This is possibly the most important backlink you can get – and I’ll show you why. In backlinks, just a handful of high pagerank links can be worth more than thousands of low or no pagerank links. You might think that your twitter profile page has no significance – but then you’d be wrong. A twitter profile starts out as unranked in google, but let me show you a pattern I’ve uncovered lately…

jtpratt.com: pagerank 3
twitter.com/jtpratt: pagerank 3

wp-dir.com: pagerank 2
twitter.com/wpdir: pagerank 4

shoemoney.com: pagerank 6
twitter.com/shoemoney: pagerank 7

johnchow.com: pagerank 5
twitter.com/johnchow: pagerank 6

johncow.com: pagerank 4
twitter.com/johncow: pagerank 6

Do you see a pattern here? Your twitter profile can easily (over time) outrank your web site home page (becoming one of the most important backlinks you have). In addition – if you link to your posts and pages from this high pagerank page, this is an unbeatable source of promotional juice!

Connections and Networking

When you start out on Twitter you have no followers, and you’re following no one. Do you honestly think that by following 10,000 people means you’re going to be able to spam them with affiliate offers and make a wheelbarrow full of cash? Everyday life doesn’t
work like that, why would twitter be any exception?

Instead of following a bunch of zombie losers who’s only goal is to over-inflate their “followers” in search on money that will never come in – focus instead of people that you can learn from. Find and follow people that know more than you, and use twitter for what it was intended for: a conversation. Where else can you find and connect with experts this quickly and easily? My advice to you is to think of and use Twitter as a business tool – not a fad. Don’t use Twitter tools that give you useless facts and garbage charts. It doesn’t matter what someone’s follower to following ratio is. What matters to me is how many tweets they have and if they actually look like I can learn something from them. Would this be a good person to network with? If so, chances are they would be good for my business and brand, and their followers probably would be too.

Check out a Twitter app called Klout.com. It allows you to gauge in a very scientific way what kind of twitterer you are connecting with. Take for example the twitter request I got the other day from Chris Voss. I don’t know much about him other than he has a lot of followers and he’s on a lot of lists. Here’s what Klout has to say about him:

It says that Chris Voss is a “Persona”, someone that’s built a personal brand around twitter. He doesn’t just have a ton of followers, he engages with his audience. I think that Klout saying he’s a “Personal” is dead-on, he’s almost a Twitter celebrity – isn’t he? But what does that really mean, is he really a valuable person to follow? Let’s see what other stats Klout has gathered about Mr. Chris Voss:

The initial stats are suprising to me. His “Klout score” (1-100) is very high, but his “true reach” is zero. True reach is measured by the number of followers following less than 2,000 people. I guess Klout feels you can’t follow more than that number and really read their tweets anyway, and most people with that many followers are promotion whores and maybe not as important. I guess that’s a subjective stat – but interesting nonetheless. The @mentions and retweet scores are a compound of the Klout scores of the people that mention Chris Voss and retweet him. Klout has other stats available on that page:

These stats can help you understand how often someone engages with people, how often they are retweeted, how often they are mentioned, etc. I should point out, it says these stats for Chris Voss are from July 27, 2009 – updated ones would probably be much different. I think it’s very interesting to see that usually people that are “connectors” give lots of very useful information, but they don’t engage a lot with people on twitter. People that are very high “Personas” tweet CONSTANTLY, but usually very few of them get retweeted. Maybe it would be best to try and be somewhere between a Persona and a Connector. Check out the Klout stats for John Chow and Shoemoney – I think they’re very interesting (both are Personas).

Next let’s take a look at the Klout profile for Laughing Lizard:

Laughing Lizard (Mark Ghosh) of weblogtoolscollection.com is “Connector”, a constant source of information. His opinion is respected, and his judgement is trusted.

You can also compare Twitter users as well:

So far we’ve used Klout to investigate someones Twitter stats, but it has another use, and that’s it’s ability to find people to network with.

Just do a Klout “Topic Search” like I did above and find influencial Twitters to follow quickly and easily. You can also use a Twitter App like Tweep ML to find lists of Twitterers on topics related to your business or brand – and follow them all at once!

Conclusion

Just like everything else I’ve ever blogged about, you get out of Twitter what you put into it. You can easily use it to connect with potential customers and clients, build an audience, engage with people in your market, and more. Follow people that are worth following. Tweet information that’s worth tweeting. Use Twitter as a tool to improve your online marketing efforts, and treat all claims that “it’s the next cash cow” as if it was Carlton Sheets trying to sell you “twitter with no money down…”.

Also, I would like to thank Avinash Kaushik and his recent post of Social Media Analytics: Twitter for pointing out new tools for measuring true Twitter metrics.

If nothing more, you should make a point to comment on this page, because once it gets stumbled and bookmarked – the contest page will get it’s own pagerank in google and that one comment alone could be one of the best high authority links you get for free!

link juice from blog comments

The greatest thing about blogs is that they’re interactive. You write posts, and people can leave comments and carry on a conversation right there on the same page. Blogs are like part web site, part forum. Sometimes the post comments are more interesting than the post itself! The first goal is to get comments in the first place, and I wrote a post about that long ago “Rock Star Comments in Wordpress in 12 Steps. The more traffic you get the more comments you receive, and a lot of people ask me, “when will I start getting traffic on my blog?”. Well, my rule of thumb is usually most blogs go from obscurity to a steady flow of traffic at about the 6 month / 100 post mark. This is enough time to be through a google update or two, and with 100 posts indexed in the search engines, you’ve got 100 shots at getting found in online search. I believe every post you write is like a little deposit in the search engine bank.

So back to the original topic – “How do you get the most Juice from Blog Comments?”. Well, comments aren’t like a blog post – you don’t just approve them and leave them site there on your blog. Like your own posts, pages, and content – you can re-use comments in many convenient ways you may not have previously thought about.

• Use a Widget: This is probably the simplest thing you can do, add a “recent comments” widget to your sidebar. It shows your blog is active and people are leaving comments. Simple, yet effective.
• Create a page Listing Most Commented Pages: This is one you don’t see very often. Create a page on your web site and list the most commented and active page, like my Active Discussions page. This is pretty simple to do with the Active Discussions Plugin.
• Use Comments in a ‘Testimonials’ page: Everyone gets comments like “Thanks, exactly what I was looking for!”. If you have a product or service on your site turn your comments into Testimonials! Create a testimonials page and copy them there, then link back to the original comments (building internal links in your site at the same time!). How? Download the WP-Testimonials Plugin, that’s how!
• Reply to Comments: This is pretty much a no brainer – reply to your comments! Tell people thanks, answer their questions, and reply to their comments. Comments get indexed in search engines too you know, and the comments you add in reply to your comments the more content the search engines have to index from your site. Also – people like to know that you are reading their comments, and furthering the discussion(s) makes them want to come back. THIS is a GREAT way to build loyal readers!
• Reward Commenters: Use plugins like Comment Luv, Top Commentators, and DoFollow. Commenters will come back more often when they know their link juice “counts”. In addition, you get listed on sites that list blogs that have these plugins (building backlinks for you!). I get a lot of traffic from being listed on this list of commentluv blogs.
• Email Commenters: If you see someone commenting on your site relentlessly for weeks and months – connect with them! Send them a simple email and say “thanks – I see you’ve been commenting a lot, and I really appreciate it”. If you owned a brick and mortar store you’d be smart to treat your regular customers this way – why wouldn’t you do the same on your own blog?
• Challenge Commenters: Run a contest of some kind and challenge your commenters to become part in it!
• Recruit Affiliates: If you come out with a product or service, recruit the people already commenting on your web site to be part of your new affiliate army! They already know you and your content, and probably wouldn’t mind making a little extra cash as an affiliate of your products.
• Hire Guest Posters: This is a no brainer. I’ll never understand why more web sites don’t recruit guest posters. Authors build great back links back to their web site, and you get great traffic and content in return! In addition most authors always link the article they wrote for you (instant backlinks) – and what better way to find quality guest posters than from active commenters you already have on your blog? It’s like the flowers recruiting the honeybees and saying “hey, since you’re here anyway…”!

Like I said in one of those points, your blog is like your “storefront”. If you actually owned a store, and customers can and visited 24 hours a day you would do everything you could to market to those people and increase your sales. Most stores use direct and indirect ways of marketing to customers that are already there. TV screens at the checkout and throughout the store, ads plastered on the floor, ads in carts, coupons on the back of receipts, checkout coupons. All of these methods are trying to “engage” the customer in yet another way to influence his or her buying decisions.

Think of your blog comments as your checkout clerk. It’s the last thing the customer does before he leaves the store – he “checks out”. Why do you think most stores ask the clerk to do certain things while ringing up your goods? They say things like “did you find everything you needed?”, “would you like to apply for our credit card and get 10% off this purchase?”, “would you like to signup for our free catalog?”. In some stores the checkout clerk is the only actualy person a customer interacts with before leaving with their purchase. Comments are the checkout for your blog, are you getting everything you can from them at the one point they are engaged and connected with you?

Are you using squeezing every bit of juice out of your blog comments?

Wordpress World Map

I think it’s very cool to see how many Wordpress bloggers and business owners are close to your location! You can even see where Wordcamps are across the world. Log in and add your location! Are there lots of Wordpress users near where you live?