How To Get Lots Of Links Without Even Trying

Read this silly story and learn how we used a box full of rats as a secret weapon to build a free link machine.

Getting links to our sites is one of the most important parts of building our traffic, sales and income.

Building these incoming links can also be among the most tedious and time consuming jobs a webmaster faces. Most webmasters find link hunting to be the kind of unsatisfying monotonous job one just has to plug away at, whether we like it or not. And we usually don't.

If a fairy princess granted every webmaster one wish, many savvy webmasters would wish (that is, get down on their knees and beg) that someone else would find their links for them. For free. Yea, that too!

The good news is that if we're clever or lucky enough, that wish can come true.

A Box Of Rats To The Rescue

Although usually I have to grovel for links just like everybody else, once in awhile I get lucky. Here's a little website story that illustrates how the free link machine works.

My wife and I have a hobby of raising orphaned baby squirrels, and then re-releasing them back to nature once they're all grown up.

One month we got carried away with enthusiasm and took our digital camera and video recorder, and made a website about our hobby, just for fun.

I never got around to promoting the site, because well, um, I do that sometimes. Uggh. So, as you would expect, our squirrel site had only a handful of visitors a day.

But really, I just didn't think too many people would be all that interested in a site about the nutty Florida couple with their box of rodents.

About a year later a friend wisely suggested I submit our squirrel site to Cute Overload, a well done collection of all kinds of cutesy photos.

Ok I said to myself, I guess it won't kill me to do 10 minutes of promotion. So I whipped off an email to CuteOverload.com, and then went back to work on something else, and forgot the whole thing.

Until the next time I looked at our traffic logs.

Wow! A thousand people a day are pounding the door down at our squirrel site!

It turns out that CuteOverload.com is a really popular site, and that a lot of people want to see videos of cute little baby squirrels.

But wait, keep reading, we aren't to the good part of the story yet.

The Free Link Machine

So we got a big boost in traffic from a mention on a popular site.

And the traffic began to gradually drop as the article about our site sank off the CuteOverload front page in to their archives. Ok, that's what we'd expect.

But then a neat thing happened.

Some of those thousands of people who learned of our site through CuteOverload had sites of their own. And they wrote stories about us on their blogs.

And some of their readers had sites too. And some of these readers linked to us from their sites.

And then the people who read those sites mentioned us in forums and other community sites.

Bit by bit, news of our site spread by word of mouth, and new links to Squirrels-For-You.com began popping up here and there around the Net.

People were linking to us just because they thought it was fun. We didn't have to find these people, or beg them to link to us, or do anything at all.

The process was happening on it's own.

Our free link machine!

Over the past year our traffic has leveled out at around 300 unique visitors a day, with higher spikes when a popular blog discovers us.

We're not setting any traffic records, nothing to brag about, but still, a real audience, for just 10 minutes of promotion.

And by the way, if you want to study a free link machine much more impressive than ours, take a closer look at Cute Overload. They know what they're doing, and their site is worth studying.

Building Your Own Free Link Machine

The reliable way to get this kind of free word of mouth advertising going is to build your reputation, and a large authority site, over a period of years. If people begin to recognize you as "the" authority on some subject, you'll have your free link machine.

Sometimes you can take an express lane to your free link machine by coming up with a unique clever idea for a site that catches the public's imagination.

Or, you can just get lucky like we did.

Very few of us will be able to launch this kind of viral marketing with every site we do. So it's still necessary to be prepared to get out there and work for links.

But it's also a good idea to keep our creativity, imagination, and luck, up and running at all times.

One good idea can launch your own free link machine.

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