Affiliate Musketeer

I set myself a goal this month to build more backlinks to my affiliate site. I plan on using three very basic and accessible methods to achieve this. First, I’ll be looking for reciprocal link exchanges with other sites directly in my niche. Second, I’ll be making comments on blogs (even though they’re nofollow) directly related to my niche. Third, I’ll write a couple of Press Releases and try and distribute them as best I can. Today, I paid someone to write me a Press Release…

I paid $90 to a press release writer who I was hoping would be able to whip something up for me in no time. As it happens, he did manage this and I am fairly happy with the result. Now press releases are a funny beast. They can be written directly to your users, unlike traditional press releases whose content needs to target journalists and industry analysts to get picked up and published. Using the internet, we all have the power to communicate directly to our users and there’s always the off chance some blogger somewhere might re-publish, re-tweet or use a wordpress auto post plugin to automatically scan for posts related to ‘x’ and post them on his own blog without ever lifting a finger. This is all good because even the auto-posting blog setup specifically for adsense is worth the backlink it could provide you.

Anyway, so the point of this post is just to say that I paid a PR writer $90 today to write me a press release for my affiliate site and you can see how “Bar Stools UK Launched to Popular Response” from the main website. There were a couple of little white lies in the content of the release (particularly around volume of sales!) but you’ll notice a well constructed release overall with the all important backlink in the footer section.

I posted the release on PR Log (a free press release distribution site) because from my experience, releases posted here get tracked by Google News/Alerts and that’s all good for me.

The other thing to note here is that for press releases to really take off, you do actually need a good, newsworthy story and a few lucky strikes with some ‘in your niche’ bloggers or local journalists who will pick it up and run with it. My release will not achieve this but I am hoping it will get tracked and possible a few pingbacks on some blogs and be worth between 5-10 backlinks to me. I’ll write an update to this post later where I’ll discuss how many backlinks it did actually create for me…