Making money through website linking

For most people, the basic objective of web hosting is to make money. Unfortunately intentions alone aren’t sufficient to bring in profits and many people end up making far less money than they wanted to. The secret of success in web hosting lies in pulling plenty of traffic that is of the right kind, and converting the vast majority of these into sales. That requires not only a good strategy to pull traffic in, but also good website design and support from the web hosting company to ensure that visitors to the site are able to find what they want, and close a deal easily. There are many ways in which you can increase traffic to your site. Strategic linking is one of them

How does strategic linking work?

Imagine that you wanted to start a brick and mortar business that sells a number of hardware and miscellaneous items used by masons, plumbers, electricians, carpenters and others in the construction and building maintenance fields. You would set up shop in a strategic location, publicize your business, and wait for your customers to walk in. In addition to employing normal promotional means, it would obviously be advantageous for you to post targeted messages focusing on each of your target groups. One way to achieve this would be to have some arrangement with other traders who deal in specialty items that are targeted at these groups. For example, you could enter into an arrangement with a store selling electrical goods by which electricians needing the items that you sell are directed by your strategic alliance partner to you, and in return, you direct people requiring electrical items to your partner. Strategic linking based on web hosting works in exactly the same way, except that in this case, you post links to each other’s websites, instead of physically directing your customers or putting up posters in each other’s shops.

Choosing a strategic linking partner

In the example given above, we talked about your store being of interest, among others, to electricians, and therefore we said that you would enter into an alliance with a store that sells electrical goods, or is otherwise of interest to electricians. Surely you wouldn’t enter into such an agreement with an oil merchant just because you liked his face, or even if you were in love with his daughter! That brings us to rule number one in strategic linking: Link with web hosting sites that have a direct relevance to your own. There’s little to be gained in entering into agreements with web hosting sites that have nothing in common with yours, even if they are able to send high volume traffic to you.

Imagine that you had a good friend called Joe, who sells goods that perfectly complement what you sell. Joe is your friend from school days, is totally trustworthy, and would give his life for you. The only trouble is that Joe does very little business himself. What would you stand to gain from such a relationship in a business sense? Nothing. It’s the same with web hosting based strategic linking. You need to link with web hosting sites that are not only relevant to yours but also do good business themselves, and enjoy high search engine rankings. Entering into alliances with web hosting sites that have little traffic does not help you in any way. So the second golden rule in web hosting based strategic linking is: Link only with web hosting sites that have a good traffic and high search engine ranking.

Keywords and anchor text

The links that you provide in the web hosting sites of your strategic linking partners are very important. If you are careless about the anchor text, and even some of the visitors fail to click on the link, you are going to lose business. Similarly, if you do not take care to include keywords, you are going to lose out on search engine rankings. So you need to take care about your anchor text and also the keywords that you include in them.

You can make money through web hosting by increasing the right kind of traffic into your web-hosting site. Strategic linking is one good way of achieving this.