Are you a blogger or marketer whose pool of link building resources are getting a bit dry lately? Here are some ideas to quench your thirst.

Utilize your RSS feed

Register your feed with RSS feed directories: feedage.com, feedagg.com, feedblitz.com, feedmap.com, invision-graphics.com, etc.

Do you have content on sites that you have no control over, i.e. guest posts with a link to your site? Create an RSS feed of this content and put it in the RSS directories.

“Wait a minute, RSS feeds just point links at my blog posts and guest posts and not at the pages I want to rank for.”

Yep, right you are, but if your blog posts contain links that point at your target pages, then the post pages in the feed just got stronger, carry more weight and pass that on to the links contained within them.

Beware of Google’s FeedBurner

The main drawback to using FeedBurner is that your feed will no longer be hosted on your own site. Since Google bought FeedBurner, your feed URLs are all redirected to feedproxy.google.com whenever you “burn a feed.” This is bad because all those RSS feed directories are pointing at links that you don’t own and your blog will never get link credit. I’ve had greater success link building with RSS feeds since I completely kicked the habit of “burning” my feeds.

Anyway, all blogs that I’m aware of create their own RSS feed URLs that are owned by the domain name they are hosted on, so use them instead of sacrificing them to FeedBurner.

In case you are completely addicted to all things Google, including FeedBurner, there is a way to configure it to retain the feed URL’s originating source.

ComLuv Network

You’ve heard of comment spam and no-follow links within blog comments; this is a network of bloggers that takes blog commenting back to where it was meant to be – a community.

Blogs that have the CommentLuv plugin installed contain an icon (as seen at the bottom of my comments section) showing their affiliation with the network. Fellow network members can add their comment to the blog post and if approved the title of their latest blog post is linked (sometimes a do follow link) via their RSS feed after their comment.

What I like most about the ComLuv Network is it attracts intelligent comments from fellow bloggers who get a small reward for adding value with their comment.

dlvr.it

This tool distributes your blog to twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and more via your RSS feed.

Most of these social networks place a no-follow tag on your links, but if your content gets into the hands of the right influencer, they will link to it from their blog or a news/resources area of their site, and that usually means the no-follow tag has been removed. There are many different tools that do similar things as dlvr.it, so pick one and get going.

WordPress Plugins

I’d rather not obsess over SEO plugins because they can lead you to believe that SEO is all done if you implement them and yet most of the SEO plugins don’t really do much good or they can easily be abused, but here are a couple worth using:

• YARPP (yet another related posts plugin) – algorithmically finds related posts to the one just published and links to them
• RSS Footer – allows you to add a line of content to the end of your RSS feed articles, including a link or two to internal pages of your site

Social bookmarking

If you are publishing interesting content, it makes sense to let others know about it so they can enjoy it and pass it on. Most social bookmarking sites tend to favor certain types and topics of content over others; the members of the site review the content submitted and decide whether it’s good for the community or not by either voting it up or down. Obviously the best content gets voted to the top and everyone who comes to the site sees it first.

When an entry gets voted up to the first page, it usually gets a number of links to the blog post, some are do follow links. But the greatest benefit is that industry leaders and influencers hang out there and if one of them likes your post, it can get a lot of attention!

A few social bookmarking sites to check out:

• Blogengage
• Bizsugar
• Old Dogg
• Kirtsy
• Blogger Luv

Publish Killer Content

I saved the most important link building tip for bloggers til last. Today, your blog posts must move from good to great to really get the benefit out of these automated tools and techniques. So pick your topic, title and delivery well for each post – with the end result in mind. Your end result should be massive engagement, which means that people love it enough to tell someone else about it.

David Leonhardt recently wrote an excellent post on creating content that gets massive engagement and how to use it in the various social bookmarking sites: Zoom your business ahead with Social Bookmarking

Delivering your content should not be the issue, but content, yes great content is the currency of social media and the reason people link to blog posts today.

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