January 15th, 2008 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

Sorry if people are getting bored with the link building posts but I tend to write about on here what I’m doing for myself. At the moment I’m spending a lot of time gaining new links, more links = more traffic = more money. I’ll try and mix things up a bit tomorrow.

Anyway, what if I told you there was a way of creating some simple content on your website that once established ran itself, not only that but you could submit that page to some very good authority websites and that it would provide link bait to other websites for years to come. Sounds great, it could be yours for a single low payment? You’d probably think I was trying to sell you some crappy e-hype product that actually delivers sweet FA? You’d be wrong.

OK, so what the hell am I talking about? A webcam. That’s it, nothing more complicated than a bog standard computer webcam. This is something I discovered by accident on my very first website and it’s something I’ve used over and over, it has never failed me yet. Buy yourself a webcam, point it out your window, get yourself some free webcam software to upload to your website and create a simple page with a bit of information about what it is pointing at and some of the things you might see. The thing is that by nature people are nosey, we like the idea that we are spying on people. I remember when I first set mine up I was still working for a company. Several of my colleagues had asked about my online activities and had nearly fallen asleep with my talk of visitors and adverts and writing software. The second I mentioned my webcam though they would brighten up. “Let’s have a look”. “Have you seen this, Paul has got a webcam?”. Quickly following by the URL being e-mailed around to hundreds of people.

There are also plenty of WebCam listing websites out there that are just crying out for new cams as well. It’s true that some will try and frame your page but for the most part it doesn’t matter because it’s still your ads that are showing, it’s still your links to other parts of your website that people will follow. Those that don’t frame can provide you with valuable one way links for very little effort. Unlike many directories these webcam directories can also provide you with real amounts of referral traffic, forget 1 or 2 a day, 50-60 visitors is not uncommon. When you get these sort of figures from a few different referral sources it doesn’t take long for your websites popularity to grow. You’ll also be surprised to learn how many webmasters are willing to link to a webcam. Perhaps my best example is my garden webcam, it does nothing but point at our garden bird table. Over the 3 years that it has been running literally hundreds of bird watching blogs and websites have linked to it. It’s link bait gold that costs me nothing more than a bag of wild bird seed a month.

I suppose my biggest webcam success came when the garden webcam ended up featuring as a webcam of the day on a national radio station in the UK. That 1 link alone resulted in over 1800 page views in 1 day (3 hours to be precise) and enough Adsense revenue to buy my camera twice over.

Even my office webcam which points at nothing more than a street has proved to be great link bait helping no end the linkability of a rather boring business website.

But what if you don’t have anything interesting out the window? How about getting creative, there are hundreds of webcam images out there that aren’t getting the exposure they deserve, why not “help” out (or get naked, that tends to work quite well too :) !

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