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Backlinks, Backlinks, Backlinks. It’s what the internet is all about. Unless you have some off net promotion going on you need to have backlinks. Backlinks also help with increasing google PageRank, as it’s the way Google measures how popular you are.

But how do you get more backlinks?

One easy way to get backlinks is to be active on the following two kinds of blogs. Those that have nofollow disabled in their comments section and those that have a top commentators or top commentors list in their sidebar.

I’m not promoting spamming these blogs with nonsense comments. You should find blogs that interest you and have nofollow disabled, as well as those that have top commentors sections and provide useful comments to their blogs that help them and in return you get a link back to your site.

There’s tons of lists out there, here’s one for example, and just googling the term no nofollow brings up a lot of good resources.

The world of online content is all about the Google PageRank, at least it is for those of us without really well known websites or blogs. So how do you get a higher pagerank?

You get some strong backlinks from other sites.

But you need to know what backlinks are strong and what links aren’t, especially if you’re going to be doing recipricol link exchanges. The better the site that’s linking to you and the stronger the sites backlinks are the better that link will count towards your overall PageRank.

So, in order to utilize your time wisely as a blogger, especially a part-time blogger, you need to use an all-in-one service to check those backlinks. I found just that service in a free website at backlinkwatch.com. It checks all your links in all the search engines out there and then looks at those links as well.

You can easily see and compare possible link exchanges by using Back Link Watch and determining which exchanges will yield higher quality links.

I’ve written before about building your incoming links by utilizing various link building techniques but want to focus this article on 3-way link exchanges.

One of the biggest things to help increase your Google PageRank is to get quality one-way links coming into your site. That means that you don’t have any pages linking back to their site from yours.

At first it can be very difficult to get these one-way links. Most of the webmasters out there aren’t willing to link to you unless a. you link to them, or b. you have amazing content and other webmasters are linking to you. Then they’ll feel the need to jump on the bandwagon and link to you just so they aren’t the only ones.

However, there are ways you can get one way incoming links but still do links exchanges. You need to either have 2 blogs with similar content and solicit 3-way link exchanges, or find others with 2 blogs or sites of similar content and see if they would be interested in a 3-way link exchange.

What a three-way link exchange is, is a link exchange where person A has sites X and Y and person B has site Z. Person A can then link to site Z from site X, while person B will link from site Z to site Y. That way each site, X, Y, and Z, each have their own link coming into the sites.

Try to hit up the forums and see what type of link exchanges there are or start up another site with similar content and start linking away.

If you’re trying to build your blog pagerank and traffic quickly, then you know that saying you’re doing it quickly isn’t really true.

Building pagerank and traffic is tough and you need a lot of backlinks to help you get there. Soliciting, exchanging, all this can be fine, but it takes a lot of time. Being a part-time blogger you need to determine where your time is best spent, and what you can get others to spend their time on.

One of the newest things I’ve been reading about over at Digital Point Forums is the use of directory submissions. It seems like everyone out there has a directory they want you to submit to, some of them are payed, some of them are reciprical. There’s so many to choose from, you can waste a lot of time trying to find the right ones.

That’s where getting other people to do the submissions for you will help you out in the long run. If you look at the subforum for directory solicitation or link building, people will submit your link, manually to 100 directories for under $10. Maybe they run all these directories or maybe they have a great system for doing the submissions but either way this is cheap.

It would take me a long time to find let alone submit to this many directories. I’m going to work on getting Blogtown Press into these directories and I suggest you take a look at the possibility as well.

Google Page Rank is a numbering system that Google gives to your website based on a variety of different factors. It’s a fluid ranking, meaning that it can change from update to update, going up or down. It’s also a way that people judge your website, especially in the blogosphere.

Unless you’re well known in blog town, your Page Rank is the quickest way someone will be able to tell if what you’re saying is worth their reading.

From Google’s explanation page rank is

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important

Now that may seem a bit confusing at first look and you may be asking yourself how do I get a higher page rank. The best explanation is to get more links from better quality websites. The more often you get these links the higher your page rank will be.

It’s tough to entice a PR6 blog to link back to a PR0 blog, but when you get the link, you’ll be a happy camper and you’ll have that much more authority, as given by Google. The Google Page Rank system can make or break your blog and we’ll definitely be spending a little more time on it in the future. Especially ways you can quickly and easily increase your Google Page Rank.

With the recent launch of blogtown press, the network home of Blogging On Empty, I have begun to see “The Power of the Network.”

With the Link to a Coconut Contest helping gain traffic to individual blogs, I’ve been tracking visitors behind the scenes and noticing that the network helps! Having that nice little block of links in the bottom right of every blog in the network, I’ve noticed that one visitor will be linked into the network ultimately see the network box and click through to another blog, and do the same on the next.

This just continues to build awareness of other blogs in the network, building traffic, page impressions and repeat visitors with subscribers to their RSS feeds.

With each blog that I add to the network that’s another blog that I don’t have to link exchange with for the blogs already in the network and another link for each of those blogs as well. That will ultimately build pagerank in Google, which will increase my traffic hits, subscribers, so on and so forth. It’s great!

Being an individual blogger, getting 12 links into your blog would take a lot of emails and a lot of link exchanges with other blogs. These links are now automatic within my network and will continue to grow as my network grows, 12, 15, 20, 100 links! Just like that.

At first I wasn’t sure what the impact of having a network would mean. I’ve heard it’s great just to get linked exposure from a network. But if you can build a brand from the network, which I hope to do with blogtownpress and it’s many contests that are going to be coming up, you can have exposure on every blog and every site in the network that builds traffic to every other blog or site.

It’s an exciting process to be going through and I’ll for sure keep you all informed on what the contest has done for Blogtown Press and just what being part of a network does.

I can’t believe I blogged any other way.

I currently use wordpress on all my blogs, all 11 of them. But this blogging tool will work on all major blog software out there, read below to see which ones.
The Old Way:

To post I used go to the particular Blog’s WordPress Dashboard, click on write, and go about my business. If I post about a news story or some other great tidbit I found on a website I have to open it (usually in a separate tab) and click back and forth, copying and pasting things I can’t memorize how to spell and generally spending a lot of time keeping my readers updated on the most current related information.

Uploading images, formating text, copying web addresses. Time Time Time. I would waste a lot of time doing a lot of things that I knew had to be possible some other way.

I was then pointed to the greatest Browser a Blogger could ever use.

The New Way:

Now I blog from my browser. As I surf the Internet and see articles I think you, my readers may like, I right click to “blog this,” Type or quote a little bit from my new “stuck” window, hit publish, choose which of my eleven blogs and categories I want to publish to, add some tags and presto, I just published some fresh new content for my blog.

It’s that easy. Flock is amazing. It’s a browser based off of Mozilla but with all the add-ins you could possibly want to be a great and efficient blogger. It literally has everything. I’ll outline some of the best here that deal with efficient blogging but there are a lot more you can use.

Built in Feed Reader

Flock has a built in feedreader. That’s right, no need to login to an account, check your feeds, go to your wordpress, blogger, or typepad dashboard and blog about what you read. Just organize your feeds into folders, it’ll tell you whats new, then right click “blog this.”

To add feeds just click on the RSS icon or link on any blog or news source and it’ll bring up that sources feed. Another great thing is that any site with a valid feed shows up with an RSS icon in the address bar that you can also click and add to your feeds.

Don’t worry if you have a bloglines or other feedreader account you can import back and forth your feeds so you can have the feeds on the go as well.

Web Snippets – Better than Google Notebook

Google Notebook is an interesting addition to your web browser but isn’t all that integrated. It’s still cumbersome to navigate through your stuff and hard to add to blog posts where most people would need it.

With Flock’s Web Snippets all you need to do is drag and drop or right click and add and your in business. The web snippets are saved in a nice expandable/collapsible toolbar at the bottom of your screen. You can then drag and drop the pictures you save, the text, or video feeds into any web application or “blog this” post.

It’s that easy.

Blog This – Finally Efficiency

You can finally have truly efficient blogging. Flock’s “Blog This” function allows you to blog about anything you’re reading or looking at. That’s right you can even do pictures. You can shape and resize pictures (I resized the picture above right in the “blog this” window.)

You can highlight text or pictures, right click to blog this, and your text along with a titled link to what you’re viewing is right there in the window for you and ready to go.
The “blog this” window is sticky, meaning it’s anchored to the screen and you can scroll, highlight, navigate whatever you want to the main browser window and it’s tabs. You can copy paste, drag drop, whatever you want.

You don’t have to log in anymore, all you have to do is setup each of your blogs with their passwords and Flock does the rest. It’ll find your blog, it’s settings, and it’s categories. You truly never have to log in again if you don’t want to. Just click publish!

One other cool thing about the “blog this” feature is that it allows you to tag your posts with technorati tags. No plugins, no coding, just add your tags in their tag box and they show up at the bottom of the post. Tags are quickly becoming vital to a bloggers toolbox and this is a no-brainer way of tagging your posts.

Don’t worry about blogging software support, flock currently works with all the major blog softwares out there like Blogger, Typepad, WordPress, Moveable Type, Live Journal, MetaWeblog API, and Atom API based blogs.
Lack of Toolbar – No Problem

I can’t find a Google or MSN toolbar download support for it but that’s no problem. The built in search box lets you customize what base search engine to use and also lets you add other engines to the pop down search as you type option.

I would imagine you’ll see a toolbar soon as flock seems to be catching on. The one thing I miss is to check Google pagerank of the pages I visit but I’m sure I’ll get over it.
Finally

Flock has tons of other great photo features, favorites sharing, extensions, plugins whatever you want to call them, and it’s open source. Meaning the general public makes it better through extensions and updates. It’s also got a nice support forum and more that you’ll have to try out.
Flock is great and you have to give it a try for blogging and browsing. Just try it out and see what it can do for you. I know there are blogging tool additions for Firefox from groups like Performancing and other add ins that make IE and FF like Flock, but Flock has it all.

By the way this was blogged using Flock!

technorati tags:Flock, Blogging, Blog, Efficiency, Tools, Browser