Website traffic is the most important aspect of any online business. Without the stream of visitors, you have no business!
There are a number of ways to accelerate the amount of traffic your website can achieve, such as search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising.
But one sure-fire way to drive traffic to your website or blog is by creating a ‘Link Wheel’.
A Link Wheel is a system created to generate a network of links pointing back to your main website, which creates a higher page rank for your site as the search engines see your website as a popular site because you have a group of related and well-keyworded sites and popular social bookmarking sites pointing back directly to you.
This may all sound a little complex, so I have created some simple graphics to show you the 4 simple steps to creating a Link Wheel formula that will hopefully drive massive amounts of traffic to your website in no time.
To successfully create a Link Wheel as shown below does take some time and patience. It’s not a fast process, but as they say, there is no quick way to ultimate success, but hopefully, this will help you understand and speed up the process of creating your Link Wheel.
Step 1
Once you have your website up and running, search engine optimized, and submitted to the search engines, you need to create a series of 8 microsites.
These microsites work best if they have their own domain names that relate to the content of the master website.
For example, if your main website sells car parts for classic cars and your domain name is your business name, then purchase 8 domain names relating to this, such as classiccarparts.com, uniqueautoparts.com, classicpartsforcars.com…you get the idea!
You can buy the domain names fairly cheaply at Godaddy.com for around $11 a domain name.
You also need to now create the 8 microsites. The easiest way to do this is using WordPress, but if you are not a web guru and have no idea how to install WordPress there is a couple of solutions.
Solution 1. Since you need to host 8 websites, the easiest way to set up your blogs is to purchase a hosting account with Hostgator. Hostgator’s Cpanel allows you to simply click a button and the WordPress blog is created for you. No mucking around setting up databases, etc. It is done for you in less than a few minutes!
And as you need to set up 8 sites you obviously need them hosted. Rather than paying a hosting account for each site which could cost a thousand dollars or so, Hostgator allows you to purchase the one account for around $8 per month, which you can then split into 8 (or more) sites for no extra cost!
Solution 2. If you already have a hosted account you can go to Fiverr.com and have someone set up your WordPress account for $5 per site. You can sit back and relax and someone will do it all for you!
Make sure each microsite links back to the main website. This starts building your link structure, making it easy for the search engines to list you.
NOTE: Don’t add links FROM your main site to the microsites, only from the microsites TO the main site. This prevents the search engines from busting you for possibly spamming their search engines and earning you a blacklisting.
So once you have your main site and 8 microsites set up, each with their own domain, it should look something like this:
Step 2.
Now you need to add content to the sites in order for them to be also picked up on the search engines.
Create about 4 pages for each of the 8 sites, and make sure the content on each page is keyword specific relating to your main product, and the pages are named well.
For example, titles for the pages such as car-parts-for-classic-cars.html, If you are using WordPress make sure you turn on the Permalink setting. this turns the page numbers into search engine-friendly titles. See the setting example below and set your custom permalink on each WordPress site the same as this for best results:
Your Link Wheel should now look something like this below:
Each page doesn’t have to be a huge page of text and images. In fact, just a couple of decent paragraphs of well-written product-related content per page is all you need.
If you are not great at writing, don’t steal or copy content from other sites. The search engines could catch you for duplicate content and drop you from their searches. Again, go to Fiverr.com and you will find there are people willing to write the articles you require for $5 per article or search content writers online and you will find cheap packages available.
Now add in a few internal links from related keywords in a few of the pages, pointing them back to each of the other microsites. try not to get two microsites pointing to each other or again Google may pick you up for spamming and your cover is blown! Follow my graphic below, which shows you the correct way of linking each of your sites for best results.
Step 3.
You’re almost there!
Now comes the real dynamic part of the process. You want to get all your sites and pages listed on as many search engines and social bookmarking sites as you can.
The graphic below shows just a few of the most popular ones to link to. By linking to these will boost not only your page rank but will attract other members to follow you and link through to your website.
Because many of these sites have so many people already listed on them they have a good page rank already. When you get all your microsites listed on them as well, this boosts up the page rank and popularity of each site, and in turn, boosts your main website immediately.
Remember, the microsites aren’t designed to be selling anything, they are purely to generate traffic back to your main website through optimization and link building. Of course, you can always add a banner on each microsite to promote and drive traffic to your main site.
Sites such as StumbleUpon and Hubpages work as their own microsites and social bookmarking sites, so you need to create accounts on each one for your pages. This can take a lot of time.
But an easier way is to go to OnlyWire or LinksAlpha and create one account which will post your pages to all these sites and more. You still have to create the initial accounts for each site, but it is all done through LinksAlpha and Onlywire, saving a lot of time.
You have now created your Link Wheel!
Now sit back and watch the traffic start rolling into your website!
