Question #48: What Is The Link Colon Strategy?

Answer: One of the best way to find affiliate partners is to use the link colon strategy. Let us explain.

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The Link Colon Strategy Is…

One of the best way to find affiliate partners is to use the link colon strategy.

Here’s the way to do the link colon strategy.  Find a competitor in your marketplace.  If you want to see how many people are linked into their website, meaning many times those are affiliates who are linking into them, because they're generating income.

Find the most closely matched competitor you could possibly find.  If you don't have any competitors you don’t have a market.  The first thing you should be looking for is a competitor, because they are plowing the ground before you.

You’d better hope that they're ahead of you.  You don’t want to be the pioneer; you want to be in back of their wagon not in front of it.

I don't know if this sounds counterintuitive to you or not, but you’re going to save a ton of time and money doing competitive analysis.  Find a competitor and then do the link colon strategy.

Let’s say you go to www.AlexMandossian.com, he’s your competitor.  Once you're on that website you’ll see the complete domain, http://www.AlexMandossian.com that’s Alex’s blog.

Then in front of the http type in link: so now what you would see is link:http://www.alexmandossian.com, the full URL with the http.  What I want you to do is type that full URL in including link: into Google search. This will show you all the reverse links to a website.

If you want to see who is linked to Alex Mandossian, in other words people who are feeding traffic to Alex, if you go to Google.com at the time of this recording over 270 websites are linked to Alex Mandossian and that’s for Google.

Why is that important?  If you're finding a competitor chances are many competitors have affiliate programs and those affiliates are linked to them.  This is a great way to find out if you're not part of their affiliate program yet or if you're not seeing who their top 10 affiliates are, this is a great way to figure out who’s linked into them.

This isn’t for the reason of stealing affiliates this is just to find out who’s linked to them, because if you have a similar or complimentary program you can go to that resource that’s linked to your competitor.

Call them up, do not email them and say I noticed you are linked to such and such.  I’m wondering if you and I could do business as well that's what you tell them.

They can either say yes or no.  If they say yes, you say great.  What are the rules of engagement to do that?  If they say no, you say how come?  They give you a reason and then you move on that's it.  Make a note to self and then you move on.

If you have over 270 people to call then you're going to be busy for a little bit.  You can even have a link manager do this for you; you don’t have to do this yourself.

It gets even better. On Google if I put link: and then the entire URL for AlexMandossian.com I get over 270 links.  If I went to www.Yahoo.com, because Yahoo news is bigger and, because Yahoo is part of a directory, if I type that into the web search for Yahoo; remember I’m typing in link: which is telling me all the backward links going into AlexMandossian.com, and that’s just the URL we're using now.  You can use any URL.

I’ll find on Yahoo over 6,100 websites that are linked into alexmandossian.com.  This can be for any website, but what a great shortcut to find affiliate partners.

I told you the best way is to join an affiliate program and find out who are the top 10 and many times you’ll find it’s on a blog for the affiliate program.

Don't forget the link: strategy.