Dirty Link Building, Part 2 of 3

But, I thought we were talking about linking? We are. But instead of blindly decided which anchor text to target, we are going to test to find out which anchor text will be the most profitable. Make sense now?

Here is the quick rundown of the process after you have run your PPC test campaign:

1. The best keyword phrases to target are those that convert well and are $4.00 or more per click on AdWords. The second group are those that are between $1.50 - $4.00. And the bottom ones are those that are $0.90 - $1.49. Keywords that convert well that are below $0.90 per click are those that you want to just pay for, while you work on the big ones ... remember, the big keywords tend to have a "trickle down" effect on the long tail keyword phrases. You want to start at the top and work your way down.

Note: Remember the term "long tail keyword phrases" does NOT refer to keyword phrases that have long character counts, instead, it refers to keyword phrases that rank low in traffic but high in conversion. The "Long Tail" is all about conversion, and you discover this through testing via PPC.

2. Analyze the top ten organic sites in Google.

3. Their back links should be reviewed and studied using Site Explorer in Yahoo (don't use the Google backlinks, the information is not accurate). You can do this analysis quickly with Brad Callen's SEO Elite.

4. Look for unknown directories, press release areas, forum postings, articles distribution areas, "hidden gems", etc.

5. Hit all the links that are quality that the top ten sites are linking to. Study them to see if you want to be listed there as well. You can even call the webmasters and tell them why it makes more sense to link to you instead of your competitor. Of course, if needed, you can offer to "sponsor" their site for a few months ... get the relationship rolling. Good things happen with good relationships.

Why do you target converting keywords that are high cost per click? Easy. Let's say that a keyword that you tested was $4.00 per click, and in your test, it converted well. Researching this, you realize that if you had the #1 listing, you could potentially get 5,000 visitors to your site a month. Wow, that's a lot. Looking at the figures in your Google AdWords account, simple math tells you that would be about a $20,000 spend per month, which is outside most budgets.

So, what do you do? Think "organic" instead.

If you had the #1 ranking organically for that keyword phrase, you probably wouldn't get 5,000 visitors, but you estimate you could get about half that ... and other spill over traffic from other phrases that you would rank well for, should fill in the gap. You feel confident you could still get 5,000 unique visitors per month.

The point of this test was to verify what your site's potential is converting targeted traffic into sales. You saw it succeed, now you just need that traffic consistently. You know all you need is top ranking, because paying $4.00 a click is eating so far into your margins that you can't make a realistic profit. But, if that traffic was free, that would be a different story.

So, if you kept conservative, and invested 1/10th the PPC monthly spend, or $2,000.00 per month on a paid link/directory campaign, along with other SEO and SEM methods taught here by Dan and Leslie, what do you think your results would be at the end of 90 days? I would estimate that you would be in the top ten, possibly top three, and your traffic and conversions would be solid.

Next week � How to tell that if your conversions will be solid?