ryancaldwell

As you build up your blog, and your readership, consider building resource lists that are relevant to your topic. Here are some examples:

• The Best Magazines About X (e.g. The Best Video Game Magazines)
• The Best Books About X (e.g. The Best Books By Video Game Designers)
• Five Great Software Tools For Video Game Design
• The 10 Best Games On The Wii So Far
• 10 Essential Books For A Career In Video Game Design

These kinds of resource lists are not only easy to build, but they can also serve a dual function: 1) They provide useful information to your readers (information your readers are actually looking for) and 2) They can often be associated with affiliate product links, offering a steady stream of income.

Think about it: your readers are coming to you as an authority. They are looking for recommendations. Give them useful recommendations, and you’ve basically created the perfect storm for “purchase action”

Here’s a real world example. I own the site BusinessPundit.com which covers various topics in investing, small business, entrepreneurship, etc. Many of the readers of BusinessPundit are looking to further their business or business career. Many of the readers do this by reading books and magazines to get ideas.

So, it made perfect sense for us to create resources like the following:

The Best Business Magazines
10 Books on Investing Recommended by Warren Buffett

These resources offer useful information that matches the interests of our readers. Warren Buffett is a legend in the business and finance world. There was publicly available information about the specific books that he has recommended over the years. It occurred to me that our readers would like to know the books that have had an influence Warren Buffett. But at the same time, I knew that I could make a profit by linking to the Amazon product.

Taking It A Bit Further

It’s one thing to create a resource. It’s another thing to keep it in front of your readers’ eyes over a long period of time. You may think that you can rely completely on Google or other search engines to send traffic, but trust me: your biggest asset is your targeted readership.

Instead of relying 100% on search, I can think of two ways to keep the resource in front of your readers’ eyes over time.

1. Create a summary page of all your resources and feature a link to it in your sidebar or top navigation
2. Place sentence-ads at the top or bottom of your content

If you visit a single post at BusinessPundit, you can see that below each post we have a random, no-follow sentence-ad that is intended to draw attention to one of our resource pages.

I have found that this sort of single-line, call-to-action sentence-ad is one of the most effective means for drawing attention to older content.

Let me tell you a couple things about the position of your website in Google’s search engine results.

• If you build lots of good links to a page on your site, and you notice a short-term spike in your SERP positioning, followed by a major, medium-term dip, don’t fret. This is quite normal. Just wait while the new links build temporal equity*.
• Have you noticed an old page dropping a bit in the search results? There are a few things you can do to help counter-act this drop. First, work to decrease the “bounce” rate of visitors to the page while increasing the PageViews per visitor. Post a relevant and interesting YouTube video on the page so that people stick around and watch. Include clear “calls to action” for visitors to move to another page on your site: Examples: “See more Boston Terrier videos here” or “Check out our Mustang gallery.” Second, aim to add one strong, editorial link with relevant anchor text back to your page each month.

*Temporal equity is value that links to your website gain over time. Google often applies a buffering algorithm to young links. If you’ve acquired good links, just be patient… your reward is around the corner.