Written by: James Pruitt on June 22, 2010.

I just got a question from one of my clients asking how much time I spend on building links, and social networking. This seems to be the biggest struggle that people have with marketing their websites.  The biggest problem is that you can easily spend 80% of your time or more building links to your site.

I started in the same boat

Now, I won’t give away all my secrets here, but I will break down some of what I do in a day.

When I wrote my website traffic secrets report, I faced the same challenges. Now, this is still a good strategy, and if you are just starting out, you should really consider getting it to kick start your business. However, I found that it was still consuming too much of my time, so I started looking for a better way.

I am now writing a new e-book, which will be more detailed, and show everything that I am doing to build traffic to my sites. It still incorporates the traffic formula, but as times have changed over the last few months, I have found some easier ways. My new strategy incorporates more time on social traffic and less time wasted on posting links on worthless sites.(all my friends who have the Traffic Formula will get  free copy before it is released, so go ahead and jump on the traffic formula for now!)

How much time do you spend?

This all hinges on the keywords that you choose. You can go after keywords with 1k-3k searches per month, and get rankings with a few hundred back links to your site. However, doing this, you still spend most of your time off page.

Personally, I want to spend more of my time building my own site.

When you cut it down, and look at keywords with perhaps 500-700 monthly searches, you can easily get page one rankings with as little as 100 back links, and sometimes even less. I have one article that is on page 1 for its keyword with 10 back links. One thing that I have found with targeting these really long tail keywords is that I also tend to rank for other long tail searches, giving me even more exposure.

When it comes to my sites, I target the home page keyword for about 5-10k monthly searches, then 500-700 searches for my internal pages. This way, I can target more relevant traffic. As I build links to my internal pages, I also link to my home page, building up massive links to that page, and getting good rankings there.

If you just look at it page by page, you will start saying, this is crap. After all, you are not targeting enough traffic. But, this is because you don’t look at the big picture. I can target a keyword with 3k monthly searches and spend the next two weeks on back link building. I would write about 30 poorly written and spun articles, and spend hours submitting those articles to get enough back links, and hope I get my rankings up.

Give up on the crap content submitted to worthless sites.

In the same time, I could have written 10 high quality articles targeting 5oo monthly search keywords, giving me a wider range of potential customers, and totalling 5k monthly searches for those terms. And that doesn’t count all the other long tail searches that I can easily rank for with those same articles. I could spend a little more time writing a few high quality articles and submitting them to sites that give me traffic, and I have saved myself hours of work.Notice, I am not doing much time on back link building here.

If you know your topic (and your customers) well, you can do all that in less than 2 days, depending on how much time you have to spend.

Now, once you get these posts done, you don’t have to spend so much time on back link building, freeing you up to socialize, and create content for your own site. If you target a niche you are passionate about, you can do this without feelling like you are working, and still be getting good traffic.

How much time should you spend socializing?


Personally, I spend about 2 hours  a day, spread out across the day reading and posting in forums. At the same time, I am usually on Facebook, talking with friends, posting interesting tips to my followers, and building my relationships there.

I spend about 1 hour per day on other social sites:

Digg, Stumbleupon, Hubpage, & Multiply just to name a few of my favorites.

I spend about an hour a day spread out among other things using the Social poster at Article Productions (not using the aff link here, but if you want to support me, use the one in the sidebar), bookmarking my sites, and other sites relevant to the niche.

Also, I will spend about 2 hours per day searching commentluv blogs related to my latest post. I usually can read and comment on 4-5 blogs in my niche.

Now all this seems like a lot of time, but I am usually doing two or three of these all at once. I often have 7 or 8 tabs open on my browser, all with different sites that I am working on. For example, right now I am reading up on forums, chatting with my girlfriend on Facebook, writing this post, and answering comments on my relationships blog, all at once.

In the middle of all this, I will research and write 2-3 guest posts for other blogs, and check the conversations I have going on other sites to keep up the reputation I have built there.

Plus I have several folders open on my desktop with other things that I am working on.

Now, not everyone can multitask this way, so do what you can. Only you know how much time you have to spend. Also, start taking the knowledge you have, and build your own personal strategy. That is how I started. Besides, I am always looking for  a way to be more efficient with building my sites, and getting more exposure.

The fact is, social traffic is hard to work for, but if you do it right, you will find that you don’t need the search engine traffic any more. It can take some work to build up your reputation. This is especially true if you run in a niche like IM where people are always pushing products, and trying to sell you rather than trying to help you.

so, how much time do you spend on back link building?

what are you doing to give your site more exposure?

leave a comment on how you go about getting traffic to your site.

I am the owner of IMRelations, freelance writer, niche blogger, and usually a decent guy. I like to help people whether through my blogs, forums, or anywhere else I can meet people online.
James Pruitt
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