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A lot of my readers have been giving me excellent feedback stating that they love my link building strategies that I give away in the link building cookbook. Link building is important because nearly every blog wants additional search engine traffic, and building links is the best way to get it. I thought I would feed everyone’s link building appetite by releasing yet another tip that you won’t see anyone else telling you.

Introduction to Flickr

Flickr is a free image hosting site that is now owned by Yahoo. It stores thousands of images and serves millions of visitors every month. Flickr allows users to make comments on the pictures that are uploaded by other users.

What few people realize however, is that Flickr allows you to post links inside the comments that are auto-approved, followed by the search engines, and even pass pagerank/authority. Flickr also allows you to use some HTML to pick your favorite anchor text that you are looking to rank for in the search engines.

Why should I build links with Flickr?

Flickr is a massive site and is growing at a rapid rate. Flickr is already a Google Pagerank 9 site, which means it is looked highly upon by the search engines. There are over 73,000,000 pages cached by Google on the site already. In other words, there are over 50,000,000 opportunities to get your blog noticed!

How can I build links with Flickr?

There are a few ways to do this. I will provide you with a few different options because I know that a lot of my readers prefer the ethical link building, while others prefer the “evil methods” that receive the maximum results.

Extremely Unethical Method

Browse around everywhere spamming comments with your link in them. The comments provide little value and are simply “copy/pasted” material with your HTML link embedded in it. You do not care if the person who uploaded the image removes your comment because you are simply going for quantity over quality.

Unethical Method

You make a lot of comments on random pictures you take little interest in. The comments you make are masked to sound like you truly care about the person when you couldn’t seriously give a damn. An example would be “Nice picture, do you mind if I use it over at my blog that shows you how to make money blogging?”

This would get a few people who would delete it as spam. The remaining people would think you are serious and reply back thanking you and giving you permission (or not) to use their work. You would then never bother using their pictures on your blog, but are just keeping the link from the Flickr page.

Ethical Method

Nearly the same as above, but you would only comment on the pictures that you would actually use in a blog post. I know a lot of bloggers that have a picture at the top of every blog post, and the majority of them find those pictures off Flickr. You could meet a lot of photographers and have permission to build those links, although there would certainly be fewer of them. You would get full permission to use their pictures on your blog as well, avoiding any copyright problems.

Recommended Tip

If you are a frequent Digg user, you should have noticed that a lot of the images that get popular and hit the homepage are from Flickr. This is because Digg users know that Flickr is owned by Yahoo and is on some huge high bandwidth servers. You can use this to your example and find the Flickr images that were made popular on Digg. This will result in you getting a Flickr link (good in itself), combined with a lot of strong links that will make that Flickr page have a high pagerank. Depending on how fast you are at getting these comments posted, you may even see a huge spike of traffic flock over to your blog.

Proof of Concept

I recently saw a photo from Flickr hit the frontpage of Digg (1500+ diggs so far) and thought I would use this as my case study. The Digg article is called “Frontpage with 19 Diggs?” The link to the Flickr photo is here.

By doing a quick backlink search on Yahoo, we can see that the Flickr page is fully cached/indexed and is one of the strongest links to the Digg page, excluding Digg linking to itself. A screenshot is posted below:

The next time Google updates their pagerank system, I am sure this Flickr page will have a decent pagerank from that Digg frontpage alone. Since it hit the frontpage about 6 days ago, your links might even receive traffic for the next three weeks while the Digg post is still ranking in the “recently popular in the last 30 days” section.

As a reminder, there are many more Flickr photos that are popular on Digg, and I recommend that you do the research yourself instead of commenting on the proof of concept I listed above. The reason behind this is that there are over three hundred people who will also be wanting to post their link, so it will definitely stand out if we all build links on the same page. There are over 50 million potential links, I am positive we can all find enough for ourselves!

PS: Stop wasting your money on ebooks, subscribe to my RSS feed for (better than) ebook quality tips absolutely free.

Welcome to everyone who is visiting for the first time due to John Chow’s review. Feel free to look around and find a few inspiring blog posts! I will be going back on topic tomorrow but wanted to throw a few quick notices out for my readers:

1.) I had a typo in the “RSS by Email” link, so if you previously tried to receive your blog posts by email and received an error, it has been fixed.

2.) If you had not figured it out yet, this blog talks about blog marketing, different ways to make money blogging, search engine optimization, link building, and a little “mix” of other internet marketing tricks on increasing traffic. Feel free to browse the archives or you may check out a few of the recommended posts on the right.

3.) Thanks John for the review and JollyJo for the contest.

4.) The blog takes a few seconds to load because my host (Mediatemple) has been having some problems. I am getting extremely frustrated with them and might consider switching if things don’t start shaping up. Since they deal with the servers there is little I can do except wait for them to get their act together. For that, you have my condolences. On a brighter side, subscribing to my rss feed or getting your blog updates by email should get rid of the few seconds of delay!

I just want to wish all my new readers a warm welcome and hope we can all earn more money together.

A few years ago the giant forum we know today as Digitalpoint developed a mass link exchange program called the DP Co-op Advertising Network (aff). After signing up, you then add 3-5 links on every one of your pages, and this earns you more linking power (coop weight). The more weight you have, the more links to your site you receive from other members in the coop. You can choose up to 15 anchor texts and there are over 30,000,000 available links in the network today. Sites have been using it to rank #1 for “Debt” “credit cards” “bankruptcy” and “loans.” Such a simple method is allowing them to outrank massive authority sites like Wikipedia, but the main concern is how long will this gravy train last and when will Google do something about it?

Google staff already know about the network, but have not yet done anything to prevent people from quickly ranking for popular terms. I just want to clarify that I would NOT recommend this technique to anyone that is going to be doing a long term link building campaign for their blogs, but I would recommend it for “made for adsense” sites, and even blackhat/greyhat temporary high profit earning sites.

Now while the coop has existed for years, it has only recently been in the news again when it has had a few popular posts inquiring what Google is going to do about it. To see some negative posts about it, you can check out BlogStorm’s say as well as a another post about it.

I can tell you that I will not be running the DP Coop on my blog, but I will be using it for a few of my other websites.

Do any of you use the coop, or have any of you used it in the past?

To make more money blogging, continue reading the rest of the link building series in the Link Building Cookbook.

After launching my weekly blog contest, it is finally time to announce the first Weekly Winner.

The $25 paypal goes to the homebiz resource bukiki blog for their entry. Please contact me as soon as you read this and I will gladly send over your money as well as your bonus.

Bonus Prize:
A kind fellow named Ethan Christ has sponsored the bukiki blog with a $50 adwords voucher. Enjoy all the free advertising!

Ethan Christ blogs over at Slam Blogger, which is a unique controversial blog thats sole purpose is to make fun of other bloggers! He actually did a review of my blog which seems to be one of the two posts in his entire blog that are actually positive remarks instead of negative ones. Thanks Ethan!

If you would like to join a blog raffle with a chance to win $25 and tons of bonus prizes like todays $50 adwords voucher, feel free to read the original post on my weekly winner blog contest. As more and more weeks go by with more and more money being handed out, you will regret it later if you do not enter today!

If you would like to donate a prize and get a FREE plug, feel free to contact me.