Running a website in conjunction with selling Ebooks is almost a necessity - for many reasons:

#1. You need a place to store all your digital products - and preferably, a script to deliver them.
#2. You need a place to store all your graphics - unless you plan to pay Ebay extra for additional graphics.
#3. You need a place to handle your opt-in mail list, and newsletter services... don't even think about selling ebooks without the capability to build an opt-in mail list.
#4. You eventually would like to do as much of your selling from your website - after all, there are no listing fees and no final value fees.

Hopefully, as you begin to sell ebooks, you'll have a website in place. However, simply because you have a website designed to support your Ebay efforts doesn't mean that you can ignore the normal practices that every website needs to engage in. You still need traffic to your website.

There are many ways to develop traffic to your website. (I list 50 different ways to develop traffic on my website!). However, one of the major ways that you develop traffic is by having a good partner linking strategy in place.

Search engines aren't human, they are merely computer programs - and as such, they need a way to figure out the 'authority' of any given website. Google, for example; is leading the pack in usage simply because when you click on any of the recommendations on the first page of results - you usually end up on a pretty good site - one that is relatively well suited to the topic you're trying to research. One of the ways that Google determines the 'authority' of a website is by viewing how many websites are linking to it. In essence, Google (or most other search engines, for that matter) views this as an election - if I have 100 websites that link to Mysite.com - and 200 website that link to Yoursite.com; Google will rank Yoursite.com higher in their listings... because they see that one website has twice the 'votes'.

So obviously, you need to have a strategy for getting links. There are many ways to do so, and I'm going to discuss one very simple way. First, let's go back a number of years, and remember how it used to be done... you'd look around and find a website that you think would be a good 'link partner', and you'd send an email to 'admin@yoursite.com' asking if he'd like to link to you. This approach was always very hard work, since few people could manage better than about 10% responses. How would you like to research and write 100 emails, and get less than 10 links for your trouble?

So - to the present... computers and scripts are constantly improving, and programmers have put together scripts that do all this work for you - searching out good link partners, and doing all the HTML work necessary to put together a link page. Instead of a 10% response, you're ending up, depending on your website, with 70-95% success rate... since the sites you're linking to are doing the same thing you are, they are automating the process - and have already demonstrated that they want partner links.

So as the evolution of my off-Ebay website has taken place, I knew that I'd need a good linking strategy to get links coming to my site. And since scripts are constantly evolving, I knew that the scripts I'd used in the past might not be 'state of the art'... and sure enough, they weren't!!

I ran across an Auto Linking Script that had power and complexity that simply amazed me. Although they have a 'free' version that has a few of the most powerful features disabled, I immediately reached into my wallet to pay $79 for the 'Pro' version of the script.

This script runs on cron jobs, and operates on a very simple idea - that most people are difficult to get reciprocal links from - but those websites that are running automated linking scripts are pretty much a 'sure thing'. Instead of getting less than a 10% chance of being able to reciprocally link with someone (chosen at random), you stand as much as an 80% or higher if you're dealing with automated linking software.

It's a brilliant and clearly workable strategy - and you can still control your linking by specifying the page rank or the category of links that you're looking for. You also have the ability to automatically reject links based on keywords, for example; the ubiquitous "Viagra" websites.

The author of the script has written an excellent ebook on the topic of website linking strategies, you can download off of my website for free. Unfortunately, Ebay forbids links to anything outside of Ebay - but feel free to type in 'khadaji.com' into your browser window, and jump to my blog section for a link to this free book, as well as more detail about the pros and cons of this particular script.

One interesting thing that the author mentions is that search engines such as Google will penalize you for gathering too many links too quickly. And because of this, his Auto Linking Script is controllable for how many links it gathers each day. The author suggests that you set it for no more than 20 new links each day.

Another fascinating concept that this script employs successfully is excellent SEO practices. Many people still don't understand what it takes to get your pages well indexed by the search engines, but this script has clearly taken a lead in this critical area. There are many linking scripts that still don't employ RSS feeds, as well as metatags, keywords, and good crosslinking to keep the search engines happy.

The free version is limited to just 100 automatically gathered links - although you can continue to manually locate and add them. The software still helps you quite a bit with manual addition - so even the free version is quite worthwhile.

The Pro version of this particular script also comes with some interesting bonus items - as everyone has come to expect nowadays. One of them, which I've not tried yet (but looks really interesting), is an automated content engine that creates new website pages for you automatically - using article directory content based on the keywords you supply. I suspect that I'll be busy for quite some time with utilizing the power that these scripts give me for improving my off-Ebay website.

Please feel free to visit my About Me Page for more information.

If you found this information helpful, I'd ask that you vote "yes" below!

Thankyou!