In three days I have nearly quadrupled my inbound links (110 to 482 on Yahoo), and it all came from 30 minutes of easy work. More to the point, all of these links are linked to my homepage with the keyword phrase “Affiliate Marketing Tips.” Wanna know how I did it? I used a remarkably fresh new method by Michelle MacPhearson, called “30 Minute Backlinks.”

So now you’re wondering what kind of black-hat stuff I’ve managed to dig myself into right? SEO is grueling, hard work right? Nobody gets quick results with a puny amount of work, right? Well I can tell you the whole thing is completely legitimate. The basic idea is to take advantage of web directories that have high PR, yet are virtually unknown to the majority of webmasters! How can this be you ask? They are software directories!

Software directories… I can hear you laughing already. Like what is a software directory going to do for me? Well what if I told you that Michelle lays out no less than 5 different ways you can create your own customized, branded, software in less than 30 minutes? The beauty of this system is it doesn’t even really matter too much if nobody ever uses your software… though it would be nice of course. The trick here is that you’re getting your software placed in the directories with the keywords you choose as the linking term, coming back directly to your site. These are all one way links coming from good PR sites!

I’ve only used one of the five examples that Michelle discusses - so far I’ve made myself a toolbar for FireFox and Internet Explorer. You can check it out here if you want - it’s got some cool tools on it for affiliate marketers. The best part was, I didn’t need to know a single line of code to produce this toolbar. If you can spell your name and type in your internet address, you can be a programmer!! Well, not quite, but you get the point.

So basically she lays out five different ways to make a cool bit of software, targeted to your niche, which you can then upload to hundreds of sites around the internet - sites that want your listing- even crave your listings! You see these guys want to have the biggest, hugest link directories out there because that is their reason for existence.

The best part is, it is completely free and takes very little time to implement. (The video series itself costs a bit, but it is very reasonable). Anyways, I don’t want to make this too “salesy” - really I’m just kind of stoked that I managed to triple my backlinks with so little effort, and I wanted to share that tip with you. Check it out, and let me know how it works for you!

(UPDATE) As of today (April 9) this domain is up to 631 inbound on Yahoo. I’ve done nothing additional since this posting aside from leaving 3-5 comments on some other blogs.

(UPDATE) April 10 - Yahoo now shows 785 inbound. This is the gift that keeps on giving!

(UPDATE) April 19 - My backlink tool appears to be dead, I now have 0 inbound from each of the big 3! Can anyone recommend a better link checking tool? Argh.

In my newly found quest to promote this blog and generate traffic, I thought why not submit to a ton of site directories? I found a ridiculously long list of free web directories at lazyurl (they will know if I copy it!! and I submitted my site to a few. I’m curious - has anyone had any quantifiable success with free directory submissions? Anyways, the sheer monotony of doing that for about 20 seconds caused my attention to slip and I started surfing again.

I stumbled upon the following list of filters one can search Google with, and became immediately intrigued. These links search Google for blogs with a specific PageRank (PR), and apparently filter out all blogs that use nofollow links in their comments (better check them yourself though). That started me thinking. Chris Sandberg once told me that a great way to get traffic and rankings was to post on other people’s blogs; basically become involved in the community. In addition, links to your site from pages with a high PR count for more when Google is calculating your own PR.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no SEO Master; in fact I’m just starting out here. But I can put two and two together. So why not find a blog with a high PageRank, and post it to death? Just kidding, make sure your posts are meaningful.

So here’s that list of Google filters. Simply click on the PR you want, and search Google for a topic relevant to your blog, and voila, bang presto - you have a list of sites that have decent PR!

PR 6 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…66:2ziwmhsusja
PR5 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…66:gpfnyqgww54
PR4 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…66:fcvptc3lghk
PR3 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…166:ec1btv16hl
PR 0-2 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…ygwict5bzjo&hl

Now comes the next little problem: hardly any site out there is going to allow you to post a comment on their main page (most likely the highest PR page on the site). So if you posted on a sub page, you might not be getting any value at all, right?

Never fear, there’s a tool for that too!
I found this cool tool at SEOCompany.ca (which has many cool FREE tools) which will check internal site pages for PR. So if you combine the links above with this tool, you should be able to find high PR blog pages that you can post a comment on. Because most blogs use the title of the post in the URL, you can quickly look down the list and even pick a high PR page that is most relevant to your own blog.

Hope you find this useful.