William Charlwood

41 minutes ago I wrote a post about GadgetSpots.

I checked Google 6 minutes later and saw I was on first page - so, in an infinite loopy kind of way - I wrote another post about ranking on the first page in 7 minutes (because it took me a minute to prepare a screen dump).

I posted that - and looked again a bit later on. Now I’m ranking 4th with my first post and 5th with my second post. This is my last post of today but I can’t help wondering what my rank will be tomorrow for GadgetSpots.

btw, in case you’re wondering why this is useful, just imagine a new product launch that everyone is going mad about. If you can rank on the first page of Google superfast, all you need to do is get yourself an affiliate link and write a post and away you go.

One of the factors in my favour is the fact the GadgetSpots are new and so there are not many web pages written about them - yet. But that is the usual situation for most new product launches.

The first rule of any successful website is that you need traffic to make money.

And the first rule of getting traffic is that search engine traffic, which is free, is the best sort.

Bearing that in mind, it obviously matters deeply where your site ranks on Google and Yahoo etc. and any techniques you can use to boost your ranking will help you boost your income over time.

One proven way of boosting your ranking has been to use reciprocal linking between sites on the basis that the more links in to your site, the better. In this approach you exchange links with another site. But let’s face it, it’s not hard for a search engine to spot this! If I link to your site, the engine simply has to visit your site, poke about a bit and if it finds a link back to me it makes a note in its database but doesn’t add any ranking points to me or you.

However, there’s a new system available now that generates 3-way links. These boost your rankings but do not suffer from the disadvantages of 2-way / reciprocal links. The system has been designed intelligently. For example, you can set up different variants of your link text so that not all links back to your site are the same which makes them appear more natural. The basic process is that you link to a site that links to another site that links to you. This takes some organising which is why there is a charge for the service so the key question is, does it work well enough to justify the price for your business?

The results so far look impressive. Read the case studies here: 3 Way Linking System

I got an email today from one of my subscribers today who suggested I take a look at Yuwie so I did. It’s a web 2.0 site in the sense that it relies on contributions from thousands of internet users to build up a social network. The difference between Yuwie and, say, MySpace etc. is that it shares its advertising revenue with its members on the basis of the more you use it, the more you make.

There’s a ton of things like that out there but I took a look at the Alexa ranking for Yuwie (Alexa gives you one opinion about the popularity of a site) and it seems to be very fast moving although it is very early days.

One of the more powerful aspects of Yuwie is that you make money when people you recommend to Yuwie sign up too - like a network marketing arrangement but crucially without the need to pay anything to join.

So where’s Yuwie going? I don’t know yet but we’ll probably know in a few weeks time. Worth a look at at this stage IMHO.