Back Linking and Web Directories

Having been a bit disappointed with the performance of my blogs, in regards to traffic and AdSense revenue, I took a couple of days to stop and think about what I could do to change things. When I first started to write my blogs I decided that I would only spend money for the domain names and nothing else. I decided that I would not spend any money on promotion and rely only on promotion tools that were free. I had hoped that through AdSense and some affiliate advertising I could recoup the $30 total spend for the purchase of the domain names. With my first blog, Retired in Malaysia, I did not have too much trouble finding ways to promote it, as it was a travel blog. There were many other travel blogs and forums where I could leave comments, thus building back links.I also managed to have my blog included in several travel websites. My second blog, Senior Neurons, was a bit more difficult, being a liberal political blog. There were fewer forums on which to post, as many of them did not allow placement or mention of personal blogs. As far as the very well known political blogs allowing links, there wasn't a chance in hell. My third and newest blog, Steveso Thinks, is even more difficult to promote, as it is a personal opinion blog, with few forums to relate to.

For two days I researched personal opinion blogs and forums, which I could use to help promote my blog. It was very frustrating. Most of the personal opinion blogs I found were religious or family oriented blogs or blogs about people's daily lives. I really hope my blog was not as boring as some I had read! I think I found two blogs which had similar content to mine and I found one forum, where I could ocassionaly comment. After this frustration I decided that the only way to make money was to spend some of it and the only way to increase traffic was to try the paid route. I decided to spend a little bit of money to see if it made a difference. Next I researched blog promotion.

I concentrated my search on back links and web directories. I found hundreds of both and became more and more confused the more I read. It seemed that everyone who wrote a blog or article of either of these subjects was an expert, who just happened to have something to sell. Regarding the web directories, I found a few that seemed to be good, as far as I could see. Some of these were free and some charged a fee. After studying these for a while I settled upon The Red Tree Directory, a relatively new site with good reviews. This one cost me $18 for one submission. So I submitted Steveso Thinks. I spent most of my time these past two days looking for back linking sites. As anyone who has a website or blog knows, creating back links is very time consuming and tedious. I have already spent many, many hours trying to do this manually and for free. I decided I would pay some money and have someone do the work for me. I found all kinds of sites willing to do the work for me. Some of them were really quite expensive. charging hundreds of dollars a month. There were also a good number of sites that were nothing but scams, as far as I could see. I finally settled on Social ADR, a social media marketing service. It took me about 5 attempts to finally sign up for this service. They have a free service, where you manually do the linking yourself, but your links are not guaranteed. There are also other levels where the work is done for you, for a range of fees. I found the fees to be a bit more than what I was willing to pay, so I opted for the free service. Amazingly after I turned down special offer, after special offer, I was offered a service at a price I could handle. I signed up for this one and am still waiting for the payment of $11 to be approved. I must admit that I was completely exhausted after doing the research and deciding on the choices I finally made.

Now that I have done this I am still not sure if I made the right decision. Only time will tell. If it works and I see increased traffic and increased revenue, then it is money well spent. If it doesn't work I will just have to chalk it up to a learning experience.I will now just concentrate on writing and take a break from promotion. I am still barely a novice at writing blogs, but I am afraid I have become addicted.Even though there are days when I am very disappointed, there are also days when I see a spike in traffic and even when I make a few cents. Blogging is both fun and a challenge and something that now is a part of my life.

I have been using The Red Tree Directory and Social ADR for a couple of weeks now, so I decided to give my readers an update. As far as The Red Tree Directory is concerned, the $18 was a waste of money. To test it out I put my site Steveso Thinks on it for a trial run. My blog appears on the site, if you can find it. There is nothing you can do with the site at all. As far as I am concerned it is useless.

I have submitted my blogs and posts to Social ADR and have seen quite a good increase in blog traffic. The site is very user friendly and there are many options it offers to promote you site and build back links. I would strongly recommend Social ADR to anyone wishing to increase traffic and back links. The money I spent here was well spent.