How to Create Your Own External Content:

The easiest way to get external inbound contextual links back to your site is by creating your own content using third party sites. The benefits are...

You can be sure they don't contain the 'nofollow' attribute
You have absolute control over the clickable text in the anchor tag (i.e. get the best possible contextual links)
You can add keywords to alt text in images
You may have control over the HTML title text
You may have control over the headline (h1 tag)

This external content can't simply be a copy of the content on your own site. To deliver SEO benefit, your external content must be unique.

The question is, how do you go about creating external content? One option is to start up a second web site. This is a viable SEO strategy, though not one everybody can easily pursue. And it won't deliver links back to your site from a variety of different domain names.

Fortunately, there are options that are both faster and easier.

Ways to create your own external content:

The following pages list many different ways to create your own external content. If you want to add your own ideas to this list, email them to me. Be sure to tell me what you're sending me, and why.

Facebook Online Promoition Page
Create a Squidoo lens
Get a HubPages account
Write articles for Article Marketing sites:
- Ezine Articles
- Buzzle
- Article Alley
- Go Articles
- ArticleBiz
- Top 25 Article Sites
- 500+ Article Sites (includes niche sites)
- A Google search for article sites
- A Bing search for article sites
Slideshare – displays Power Point presentations
If you don't have a copy of Microsoft Power Point, install OpenOffice, a free competitor to Microsoft Office. Slideshare works with presentations created in OpenOffice.
Audacity is the best free sound editor on the web. It's useful when you want to add audio to a Slideshare presentation, or create content for audio sharing sites (e.g. podcasts).
Audio Sharing:
- Social Media Portal accepts podcasts, and helps you share them with a wider audience
- Podomatic is a free podcast sharing site
Start your own blog and publish content to it
Find out how to recycle content without incurring duplicate-content penalties from search engines
Use Social Bookmarking Sites:
- Delicious
- Technorati (for blogs)
- StumbleUpon
- Junta42
- Dropjack
- Digg (news)
- Yahoo Buzz (news)
- Top 20 social bookmarking sites
- 125 social bookmarking sites
- A Google search for social bookmarking sites
- A Bing search for social bookmarking sites
Video Content Sharing:
- You Tube
- Ourmedia
- Blinkx
- Ebaum's World
- Veoh
- 4 Video Sharing
- Wikipedia's list of video sharing sites
- A Google search for video sharing sites
- A Bing search for video sharing sites
Photo Sharing:
- Flickr
- Smugg Mugg
- Picasa Web Albums
- Photobucket
- Facebook
- WebShots
- A Google search for photo sharing sites
- A Bing search for photo sharing sites
Self Publishing:
- Lulu – publish, promote and sell your book, ebook, calendar, cookbook, photo book, CDs and/or DVDs through this site
- CreateSpace – publish, promote and sell your book, music and/or film (i.e. like Lulu)
- Go Publish Yourself – resources for self publishers
- WordClay – book self-publishing
- A guide to self publishing
Social Media Portal – get your content, information, news or event listed here
Free online press release distribution
How to use a press release as marketing tool (article)
Create Another Website (for free):
- Webs – no HTML skills needed
- Weebly – free website and a free blog
- Dot Easy – free business web hosting
- Heart Internet – more free web hosting
- Free Business Hosting – ditto
- A Google search for free business web hosting
- A Bing search for free business web hosting
BT Tradespace – showcase your business
Add This – enable content sharing on your site and/or blog
Create your own survey and invite people to take part

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to publish and promote your own content on the Internet.

For an in-depth treatment of how to use sites like these, see my next book (currently on hold): The DIY Guide to Targeted Traffic.

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