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No matter what anyone says or whatever you read online, the heart of any SEO campaign is link building. It is true that there are additional aspects to SEO but I doubt that anyone will disagree that link building is the core of any SEO campaign.

SEO is such a big playing field that it is so easy to get lost and lose a lot of money and a lot of time in the process without really getting any results.

The main reason for that is information overload. There is just so much information regarding SEO and the fact that all this information is only a mouse click away is bad. Very bad. It seems that nowadays everyone that manages to rank a site on top of Google thinks of himself as an SEO master and start spreading his knowledge out to the world.

Just to be clear here. I am not an SEO master and no SEO guru. All I am sharing with you here is the exact same link building plan I used when I got started and it worked great for me. This is only my opinion and my personal plan.

The second reason is lack of patience and the demand for instant results. The first thing to know when you start with SEO is that it takes time. There are no miracles here and you probably will never get a site to the top of Google within a week (unless there is zero competition). I had this problem and I switched methods and strategies every couple of weeks because I didn’t see the results I wanted. If you are looking for instant results than SEO is not for you and will not provide you with what you are looking for.

Basic, Free & Manual Link Building Blueprint Mind Map

Article Marketing

Article Marketing is the core of any link building campaign I do. If you truly want to run a successful link building campaign you are going to need to write articles because they will provide you with the high quality links you will need in order to rank.

I am probably not going to renew anything here as article marketing is among the most common link building strategies. Just write an article and submit it to the top article directories starting with EzineArticles as they have the strictest approval process and if you submit the article to any other directory first it might not be approved by EzineArticles.

The important thing to remember about submitting articles to the top article directories is that it is also a method for driving traffic so try to make your resource box appealing so it will make the reader click. The most important thing to know is that the readers don’t really care about you. I know, it’s sad, but it’s true so don’t make the resource box into the author bio box. All the readers care about is what is in it for them so keep that in mind if you are looking for clicks and traffic.

I personally hate writing articles and it was the biggest obstacle I had when I got started. If you don’t have this problem than you are golden. If you do, than you might want to keep reading until you will get to the part where I found a solution.

Here are the top article directories I submit to:

• EzineArticles
• GoArticles
• ArticleBase (No Follow)
• Buzzle

And if you want a list of the Top 50 Article Directories by Traffic & PageRank than check it out at: http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php

Social Bookmarking

For social bookmarking I use the following three free services:

IMAutomator – http://www.imautomator.com/

What I love about IMAutomator is that you don’t need to create any accounts with the various social bookmarking sites in order to submit to them. IMAutomator takes care of that for you as they use their own accounts for the submissions. All you need to do is to enter the URL you want to bookmark.

Simply enter the URL and click the Extract Title, Description & Tags button and it should auto populate all that information for you. Than just pick the category and the rate of submissions and submit it.

It is real easy and really fast to do and with the free version you get to submit 10 URLs each day.

SocialADR – http://socialadr.com/

SocialADR is another free automatic bookmarking tool you should be aware of. The free version is very limited and will not provide you with many backlinks but it can help and it is automatic so you don’t need to deal with it very much once you finish the setup process.

The way SocialADR works is as follows:

• You earn credits by “Sharing” other members’ bookmarks.
  • “Sharing” means you click a single button and the bookmark is submitted to ALL the social bookmarking services you have setup.
  • The amount of credits you earn depends on your account type.
• A minimum of 8 credits is needed before your own bookmarks can be “Shared” by other members.
  • The most effective way to earn credits quickly is to setup as many social bookmarking service accounts as possible.
• 1 credit is deducted from your account every time one of your bookmarks is “Shared” by another member and submitted to a social bookmarking service.

You won’t escape the time consuming process of creating accounts with all of the 21 social bookmarking sites supported with SocialADR. I can only strongly recommend you get a form filler program as it can really make this process work a lot faster. I personally use RoboForm and I use it mostly as a password manager but the form filler part is great for all the account creations you will do, and with SEO and link building, you will do plenty.

After you finished setting everything up you can start using the service and add your bookmarks. They will be automatically shared according to the credits you have. You will get a daily email with the 5 bookmarks you can share each day and that is all you will need to do. Simply log in using the link from that daily email and click Share All.

Again, after the initial setup process it is a pretty simple and easy process that takes less than 30 seconds a day.

SocialMarker – http://www.socialmarker.com/

Social Marker is a free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.

The red box is where you will insert the site information of the site you are looking to bookmark. You will enter in the Title, the Link (URL), a short description and Tags (main keywords for the site).

After doing that you will need to select which sites you want to bookmark to (Green). In total, Socialmarker.com has 50 of the best social bookmarking sites and although they write it would only take 15 minutes to bookmark to all of them; it could actually take you around 30 minutes.

I recommend you bookmark only to the best and DoFollow sites. Best way to do this is simply clicking on DoFollow and then manually selecting all of the top listed sites. On the left column select all until Faves.com including and on the right column select all until Blinklist.com including.

After you will enter the site information and select the relevant bookmarking sites you want this is what the interface will look like:

As you can see, there is a navigation bar at the top right corner (marked with red) and 4 information fields on the bottom (marked with yellow). In the middle you will see the social bookmarking site itself.

All you need to do after signing up to all of the sites is click on submit on the navigation bar at the top right corner and copy and paste the information from the information fields located at the bottom. One click on any information field will highlight the entire content of that field so all you need to do is copy and paste.

Web 2.0

This is another very commonly used method and it involves creating Web 2.0 properties on various authority sites such as:

• Blogger
• Squidoo
• Hubpages
• WordPress
• Tumblr
• Weebly
• LiveJournal
• Typepad

This is only a small list of the main sites I personally used and still use. I am sure you can find more if you want to. There is no real shortage of these type of sites.

Regarding WordPress, which is the highest PR site (PR9) you should know that they are very very strict. Never post any affiliate link in WordPress and try to post some articles without any links first as that will increase the chances for your account to stay active.

I won’t go over every site and what you need to do as I am sure you can figure it out yourself as it is pretty easy and similar for all the sites.

You will need an article and preferably an article you spanned so you will get several unique versions from it to post to all of the sites.

Squidoo Link List Module

This is a cool little link building method I picked up a while back after analyzing my competition links. I managed to find that an internet marketer was using this type of links in order to get top rankings numerous times so I figured I should give it a try myself.

The concept behind this method is to find Squidoo lenses, preferably with PR that contain the Link List module.

Here is an example for such a Suqidoo lens: http://www.squidoo.com/cooktops

If you will scroll down you will see a very long list of links (153 links at the time I was writing this). All of the links are Nofollow links but it seems that they still count as I did manage to see this links appear on my other sites and as I mentioned there is an internet marketer that is getting top rankings using mostly this type of links.

Besides, getting Nofollow links to your site is important as don’t be fooled by what most gurus tell you. Nofollow links do have some power and they do have a say in your final rankings. The bottom line is that Nofollow links can’t hurt your rankings but they can sure move you up in the rankings.

All you need to do is to sign in to your Squidoo account (or sign up if you don’t already have one) and click on the Add to this list button at the end of the link list. You will than simply enter the URL and Squidoo will auto populate the Title and Description. I simply change the title to contain only the main keyword phrase I want to rank for.

Keep in mind that you are signed in to your account and if you will overuse this and post to many links on to many lenses in a short period of time, your account might be suspended, so do this wisely. I don’t think creating a new account simply for this purpose is smart as it would probably be suspended if all you do is post links and not create lenses.

If you are wondering how you can find Squidoo lenses with the link list module than all you need to do is to enter the following search strings in Google:

• site:squidoo.com “new links plexo” “add to this list”
• site:squidoo.com “your keyword” “add to this list”

If you will install SEOQuake and SEO for Firefox you will be able to check for the PR of each page on the results page and that can save you time.

RSS Feeds

This is pretty simple and all you will need to do is gather all of the RSS feeds from all of the sites you submitted content to. This will include the article directories, the Web 2.0 sites and the social bookmarking sites (at least those that do have an RSS feed).

You can and should create a mixed RSS feed from all of your feeds. This can be done using many services and I personally use RSSMix. Simply paste all the RSS feeds you want into the box and click create.

Now all you need to do is to submit the RSS feeds to various RSS aggregators, such as:

• http://www.feedage.com
• http://www.feedagg.com
• http://plazoo.com
• http://feedraider.com
• http://www.rssmountain.com
• http://www.millionrss.com
• http://www.goldenfeed.com
• http://www.feedest.com
• http://www.rssmotron.com
• http://www.feedplex.com
• http://www.azfeeds.com
• http://www.myrss365.com
• http://www.rssmicro.com

Blog Network

Blog networks are truly great for some massive link building but the downside is that most of them are paid services.

The best free blog network I managed to find and use is called Free Traffic System (FTS). You will need to register for a free account in order to submit articles.

In order to learn how to use FTS and submit your articles I recommend you watch the intro video at: http://www.freetrafficsystem.com/intro-video/.

It is not the easiest blog network to use but it is free so you will simply need to adapt to it and after a short time you will do it in your sleep. What you should know is that if you are going to submit spanned articles than know that FTS is using the following spin format:

• Left bracket: [spin]
• Right bracket: [/spin]
• Separator: |

Forum Signatures

In the internet marketing world I am pretty active in 2 forums:

• WarriorForum
• BacklinksForum

Since I am active on these forums and posted hundreds of posts I am getting many links thanks to my forum signature. This is pretty easy to do as I am already active on this forums and not only it is good for link building, it is very good for generating traffic.

If you are active on forums than you are probably already using this method and if not, then start and edit your signature and add several links to your sites. It is very easy to find the top forums in any niche and it shouldn’t be too hard to find threads to comment on and join the conversation.

Please know that spending time on forums can become addictive and might turn into a time consuming problem. Be sure to limit the time you spend on forums as you want to stay focused on other, more important aspects of your online business than spending hours reading and posting on forums.

Pixel2life Method

This is a very cool method for getting hundreds of PR1 to PR4 anchor text backlinks to your sites. I already wrote a special post about this method before so there is no need for me to write it again.

You can real all about it here:

http://dbpmarketing.com/advance-link-building-with-the-pixel2life-method/

Please note that this method is not 100% free but for only a few bucks it is well worth the expense as I am sure you will realize after you will learn how it works.

Blog Commenting

To be honest with you, this is not a method I am using a lot as it is time consuming and I am getting pretty good results without it. But, since it is a very common link building and traffic generating method I just want to mention it here as it is free and maybe you won’t mind doing it.

A free automation solution for blog commenting that I know of is called Comment Kahuna. I can’t really add any value here as I only used it for a short period of time and it was a while back. You can get it at: http://www.commentkahuna.com/.

Affordable Tools

Even though this entire blueprint is focused on free link building I must mention two paid tools that are going to make this blueprint a lot better and save you tons of time. Also, both of these tools require one yearly payment and both have a very cheap one week trial so they are really affordable.

Both of these tools are focused on making the most out of every single article you write and since articles are the core of this blueprint as they are used for submitting to article directories, Web 2.0 sites and the blog network you really want to make the most out every single article you write.

Jonathan Leger is the creator of both of these tools and I just want to say that Jon is one of my favorite “gurus”. He creates the best tools and provides the best support and he is truly an SEO master so I follow him and his blog closely. Plus, being on his email list allows you to get early access to any new tool he is planning and with great discounted prices so it is well worth it in my opinion .

Instant Article Factory – http://instantarticlefactory.com/

Instant Article Factory is all about helping you write articles fast. As I mentioned before and as you probably know, writing articles is not an easy task for most people and it is very time consuming. This is where Instant Article Factory comes in to the rescue.

As always, Jon provided a very nice demo video of the Instant article factory tool and he actually shows how he writes an article from start to finish in less than 5 minutes. This video will show you exactly how Instant Article Factory works so there is no reason for me to elaborate any further.

Check it out at: http://instantarticlefactory.com/

The Best Spinner – http://thebestspinner.com/

In order to make the most out of every article you write you are going to need an article spinning software and The Best Spinner is without any doubt THE best article spinning software.

Again, Jon has a great demo video showing you exactly what this tool can do for you so I recommend you watch it at: http://thebestspinner.com/

If you want a more comprehensive review of this tool than you can read The Best Spinner Review I wrote.

Conclusion

The biggest problem I had when I got started with SEO was the lack of a blueprint. The lack of a clear step by step plan to follow. It took me quite some time to figure out my initial blueprint and what I shared with you here is the blueprint I used a while back when I was not using any paid and advanced link building tools.

Again, this is my blueprint and the way I do things. I am not an SEO master and I only share with you the stuff I did and worked for me.

If you are ready to go to the next stage of link building than you might be interested in reading my Advanced Link Building Blueprint.

Lastly…

I would really appreciate if you would share you thoughts about my blueprint. Good or bad, it doesn’t matter, I just want to hear it (or more accurately read it).

Please comment below if you think I forgot something or maybe I should remove something. This blueprint will never be completed as SEO is dynamic and constantly changing so expect there to be changes and updates over time.

Thanks.

To your success (and mine ),

Tagged as: Article Marketing, Blog Commenting, Blog Network, Forums, Link Building, Pixel2life, RSS, Social Bookmarking, squidoo, Web 2.0