Link Building with Carnivals

How much would you pay for a contextual, focused link to your content from several of the competitors in your niche?  If you use something like Text Link Ads, you might pay $25 a month.  Or you might pay $50 for a one time link.

What if I told you, you could get those links for free.  How? Carnivals.  Much like the real life thing, these Carnivals are nomadic.  Let me explain.

A Carnival is a post full of links to content that fits within the focus of the Carnival.  There are Carnivals that deal with Personal Finance, Debt Reduction, Electronics Reviews, and the list goes on.  These Carnivals are typically held weekly.  The Carnival, in most cases, is hosted by a different blog.  If you submit to a Carnival each week, you get a link from the host for that week.  Pretty easy. Want more links?  Be a host.  It’s common for the host to get a link back from each of the participants in the Carnival.  In some cases, that could mean 50 or more links.

While the links that you receive may not use the anchor text that you really want and will only link to individual posts, they are incoming links.  And they do count.  It’s just one more path in the network for the search engines to follow to your site and help you with your SE rankings.

Bonus Tip: Use Pingoat.com to ping the services with the site(s) that are linking to you.  Sometimes those sites don’t already do that and you can increase your link count ranks in sites like Technorati.

Bonus Bonus Tip: Use blogcarnival.com to look for Carnivals to participate in.