Linking building should be an important part of any website. Not only do links provide multiple avenues for people to find your site, they also are one of the most important factors search engines use when ranking your pages within their search engines. I’ve always worked at building links as I can but I’ve been thinking lately it would be useful to develop a strategy for building links.

I’m a fanatical reader of DailyBlogTips and this post on Blog Goals for 2008 is what has gotten me to thinking about where I would like to see this blog go over the next year. I’m too late to win the theme that was being given away in that contest, but I already own a developer license of the theme being given away anyway so that is not a big deal. But setting goals is really a good activity for any blogger

One area where I’m really weak in is the amount of backlinks that Google reports for this blog. Google never reports the actual number of links, but it should be showing more than I currently have showing. Yahoo is actually a better resource for determining the number of links you have to a particular site. SO one of my goals for this year is to create and follow a link building strategy. I currently submit links every chance I get in the form of Comment posts and on other sites that accept link submissions. I also utilize the social sites to help drive traffic and create backlinks. While this is effective, I’m sure I can do a better job in this area. I’ve been using Google Docs a good bit lately and this platform works out nicely to help monitor my link building. I will set up a spreadsheet and list any websites where I can obtain links. I also need to do a better job of contacting other webmaster in similar niches and request link trades. If I monitor my progress and make good choices then I should be able to build up a significant number of new avenues into this blog over the coming year.

Another of my goals is to increase my subscriber count into the 4 digits. I’m sure this is an obtainable goal. The first step to obtaining more subscribers is to write frequent content. As long as I keep posting regularly then I’ve noticed my count continues to rise.

Contests are also an excellent method to increase the number of subscribers to your blog. Winning the Web has an excellent post on how a contest can help your subscriber count. I will be watching the progress of this site over the coming months as he has some really good ideas on how to effectively market a blog. Another method that is effective in building of subscriber counts is to submit your feed to RSS directories people will locate your feed and some will subscribe. This practice also has the added benefit of building additional links to your content.

My third goal is to increase my page view counts. We currently run about 50K page views per month, but I’m sure I can do better than that. I would like to see that number doubled at least in the coming year. I’m sure if I accomplish goal number 1 and 2 then this goal will take care of itself.

I neglected this blog a little this past year as I was working on other money sites and just did not spend enough time on this site as a result my numbers for this site did not grow. I’m now changing my focus as many of my other sites are now on auto-pilot and won’t require as much care to continue to bring in traffic and revenue. This gives me more time to work on this blog which is what I will be doing. I will post at minimum of three times a week on this blog with cornerstone articles which should really help to bring in more SE traffic and to gain more subscribers.