How much time do you spend building links? or "am i crazy?"

Just build link when you have spare time. Getting first rank on MSN is good enough.

 

Probably about 3 or 4 hours a month.

I spent probably 3 hours a day prior, but there's more profitable things to do, it seems.

 

Ok, credit cards it is:

Let's start out and see what's the competitive field in Google:
Results 1 - 10 of about 151,000,000 ----->
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_en&q=credit+cards
That's 3/5ths of a billion other web pages competing for that term. It most definitely puts you in the deep pockets neighborhood; I know, I currently manage a website that operates in a similar competitive category and is on the 4th spot for its key phrase, here's my advice:

You will need at least 10 times the resources you are dedicating to the project; however, it can be done.

The key: Show all your hourly workers exactly what you need done, leave no stone unturned!

**** Directory listings will only get you a momentary boost.
**** Original and relevant articles are a better choice for link building.
**** Be careful with some of the link services offered, many of them will just as soon hurt your SE rankings. Remember: The low-ball price isn't always the best bang for the buck!

 

IMO two hours a day with a new site in a very competitive field will result in going absolutely nowhere. To make it to page 1 on google on a competitive term requires a lot of things including lots of quality back links. BTW where can you find anyone to work for $4.00 an hour, is that a typo?

Remember as we are all working to build links our competitors - those nasty devils- are doing much the same thing. Thus if we pick up 20 back links a day they may be adding 20-30 or more which puts us at a net gain of zero, or less than zero. It is not only what you are doing but what your competitors are doing.

It isn't just a matter of how much time you are spending, but also the quality of the links, the age of the site, the amount of content they are adding, link structure and competing against deep pockets means they can hire some college kids at $12.00 per hour and likely do.

Some of the big sites have blog supervisors who manage the blogs that write reviews for them, give free gifts to them in exchange for them and in one case I know of have 3,000 bloggers who regularly write about their sites. This is NOT to say "give up" or don't bother but as you have always heard it is very, very important to know who your "enemy" (competitor) is, if you intend to compete with him. Sad to say methinks you must - Step it up!

 

the linking debate that rages on link quality vs quantity well i think this is a no brainer

just get high quantities of good quality links then you have hedged your bets

That would be an ideal world but in reality i would say the ideal is somewhere in the middle

 

wow, that's insane. competing in that niche is like wondering which snowflake in a snowstorm fell first.

 

It is not easy to build quality links. So, I suggest you to learn more about it and ask your boy to do the tedious work of link building. Make sure to get dofollow as it will reflect in your PR.

 

For me, it also depends on what kind of project I have.. If the site's niche is quite competitive and the client is quite demanding, I usually focus more on building links for the site.

 

We should moderate between the quantity and quality. Who knows that PR0 pages that link to you one day will become PR7, vice versa.

I agreed that the OP target keyword is competitive one. But if you have passion with that niche, put much effort and sure you will achieve what goal you've set at the beginning.

 

I understand that it is not easy. Over the past year I have read almost every post on here as well as warriorforum.

Assuming that I have new content, I can get about 70 dofollow pr 2+ links in 3 hours of my time. Soon that will be 240 pr 2+ dofollow links.

The process is fully defined with a cgi tracking system "go here, do this, click done" that tracks the progress of anyone that I bring in.

"how did you find someone to work for $4 / hr" college kids, they are starving and will do work for under the table work. if they can follow instructions, and type (copy paste mostly) then they are fine. It's /easy/ to find these people, especially if you post in the craigslist "gigs" section.

Things have slowed down, since i'm working on a site redesign. but once that is done I plan on plugging in a few thansand more words of content, and continue with the link building.

Not ranking for credit cards yet, but i'm rank 1->20 on decent longtails, generating 8-30 organics a day so far. This is without having my link building contractors in yet. One week ago I was (and still am) pr0, and i was getting 0 traffic.

....
How about press releases?

I have been looking into "PRWeb" recently. Seems to me that I could run one of these per quarter, and get allot of high quallity perminant links for a onetime of $330.

 

I try to minimize link building time as much as possible, becoming obsessed with links is actually counter productive, you sort of can't force getting links.... plus most ways of trying to get links really don't work

 

But one good hit from the mass amount of links and you can hit gold. I guess what I am trying to say is that if you hire someone to get you a ton of links, some of those will turn out to be of high quality whether intended or not. You'll "accidentally" get some high quality links. I think of it that way when sponsoring wordpress themes. Some of the themes end of getting hundreds of downloads that stay the site's main theme for quite a while.

 

Between articles, blogging and forum posting I'd say about 1/2 hr per day. Some days none at all others more than an hour.

 

Why not start a collection of credit card images from around the world? I don't know if anyone else has done such a thing. You could exchange images from people for links from your site. They could blur out the personal details for security. Once you've got some images, write yourself a link from Wikipedia from the references section.

 

I don't give myself a time but I focus on number of links per day. I try to get 1-2 links per day for my main sites and a few per week for the sites that don't make me as much.

 

If you're paying college kids $4/hr to do the linkbuilding, I hope you consider your time worth more than $4/hr. Train the kids to be half as good as you are, and you're still up by a whole lot.

Spend your time building your business, doing the business development, partnerships, and advertising deals where you make the real money, and leave the $4/hr work to the interns.

 

Most certainly.

Just by direct correlation, my 9-5 job is roughly $30/hr (pre tax). I definitely think that 1 hour in the office is worth 7 1/2 hours of link building *or one days worth of wages worth 60 hours of link building for that matter*. Combine this with the fact that it is also a tax writeoff, i'm looking at *end of year* actually paying only $2.66/hr for link building services.

example of an easy link building project.

I put in an order for an article, stipulate that that it should be 100 questions, and 100 answers, all of which pertain to the site. and the answer must link to the site.

Have the college kid post the questions and answers on yahoo through proxies.

boom, 100 backlinks for 1/4 of what seo companies charge for the exact same service, only i get to make each one unique, and point to a different page.

 

I tried building backlinks with some software..don't remember the name.

 

I know that quality vs quantity backlinks have been very debatable. I only spend about "two to five blogs" a week to build back links, using commenting. But I only comment on quality blogs, i.e. closely related to my niche site, and those comments aren't even dofollows. However, traffic is amazing, and more importantly, more of my ADS are being VIEWED and CLICKED! Even my dormant Amazon account is being filled up.

I just go where the $$$ flows, dude.