Tags: inbound links, procrastination, SEO

Procrastination and the missing link

One thing I’ve noticed about success, or rather, the lack of success people achieve, is that it’s in direct proportion to their level of procrastination.

But before I get further into that, let’s do a little step by step exercise.

Let’s assume you have a site and want to attract more readers. You are already well aware that the only way people or search engine bots are going to find your site is through a link to your site. So the logical conclusion is that you need inbound links.

Step 1: Visit Google.com and type the following bolded string into the search box, including the quotation marks. Of course, use a keyword phrase relevant to your own site: “Your keyword phrase” “0 Comments” site:edu

Step 2: Click on the first, second, third… links in the organic search results (not the ads) and you’ll find one or more blogs on .edu sites where you can leave a comment on one of the blog posts.

Step 3: Read that blog post, then fill out the comment form at the end with your name, email addy and the url to one of the articles or pages on your site. Then proceed to write a comment highly relevant to the blog post.

Step 4: Submit your comment.

What’s the result of following the 4 steps above? Once your comment is approved by the author or site admin, you have a coveted live link back to your site from a .edu site. Everyone knows (ok, everyone theorizes) that links from .edu sites are looked upon by the almighty Google and other search engines as carrying more weight. And it took you all of a few minutes to do, or maybe as long as a half an hour if the post you read was long.

Now, here’s what the procrastinators have been doing while reading what I wrote above:

They’ve been arguing with me in their mind that, oh, what if the link in that comment has the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Those links don’t count. Are links on a .edu site really more powerful than links on any other site? Are links on a PR0 page on a high PR site any good at all or will I be wasting my time with this? There’s no empirical proof that what you say will work! What if I wear purple underwear while submitting my comment? Will Google still value the link as much as if I were wearing my tighty-whities while clicking the submit button?

Procrastination. All of it.

Sure, it’s good to know your stuff when doing link building and SEO, or marketing, or boiling an egg, but there comes a point when the rubber has to meet the road in order to get ahead.

And while the procrastinators were doing their thing, you just got yourself a one-way inbound link from a .edu site.