Leverage Report

The Leverage Report: A
Companion to the “Leverage
Engine #4 Blueprint” Video

Humbly submitted for your perusal and review
by Dan Thies
(Author of SEO Fast Start & The Search Marketing Kit, StomperNet’s Dean of Faculty,
Godfather of Grunge of SEM, Keyword Guru, the original White Hat Black Belt, etc.)

Approximately 18,907 people have the same question right about now:

“Hey Dan, What’s A Leverage Engine??”
This may be the hardest writing assignment I’ve ever had… and I’ve had some tough ones –
from explaining how PageRank works, to exposing a dangerous bug in Google’s duplicate
content algorithms.

It’s difficult to write this, mainly because the audience is so vast.

By the time you read this report, thousands of people will already have seen my “teaser”
video on Leverage Engines, and everybody wants to know…

“What the heck is it?”
A Leverage Engine is just a tool – software that you deploy on a web server, or in a web
browser, to help you get exponentially more benefit out of your link building campaigns.

Leverage engines don’t “get links” by themselves, at least not at first. In fact, you’ll have to
do a little bit of promotion and link building for some of them to make them work.

Don’t worry, though – because getting links is actually pretty easy, once you know what
you’re doing.

In my video, I briefly mentioned 4 specific types of leverage engines:

• #1 – The Link Collector
• #2 – The Content Pump
• #3 – The Market Multiplier
• #4 – The Index Driver

As I describe each one, you’ll begin to see that these are really very familiar things – in fact,
there are probably thousands of them out there in your market, waiting for you to use
them.

The key difference is that when you understand the concept of leverage, you’ll begin to see
these familiar tools in a new light – and as I teach you more ways to get and leverage links,
you’ll develop the ability to instantly spot these opportunities.

As in, “wow, this would make a great Link Collector” – or “hey, if we did this, we could turn
that into a nice Content Pump.”

Now, before I get too far along – I should mention that using someone else’s leverage
engine isn’t always the best thing to do – in fact, a lot of the time, you’re far better off
building and owning your own.

Leverage Engine #1 – The Link Collector
This leverage engine does a simple thing – it takes in links (URLs) and descriptions, and
converts that data into a format that allows you to feed it into other leverage engines.

You’re probably familiar with RSS feeds by now – just about every blog and news site has
one or more “feeds” of RSS data that you can subscribe to with a “news reader” – or even in
your web browser.

Now, we’ve all heard of SEO “schemes” that use RSS, so before you start thinking that this
whole thing is some kind of black hat, content stealing, splogging type of operation, slow
down.

They don’t call me the “White Hat Black Belt” for nothing. A lot of the tools and technology
that you’re going to use in Link Liberation are also used on the “black hat” side of SEO – but
you’re going to use them for good.

Yes – some of the links that you collect will point to other people’s content – and in fact,
promoting other people’s content is a key part of making your leverage engines work, and
doing so adds value to the web.

By adding value, and occasionally mixing in a little selfpromotion, you get the best of
both worlds, and then some.

A good example of how you can use someone else’s system as a Link Collector is Del.icio.us
‐ When you add a bookmark to “Delicious,” your user profile has a page that shows the
pages you’ve bookmarked. On that page, there’s a link to an RSS feed.

So, to put links into your Del.icio.us link collector, all you need to do is bookmark pages
using a browser plug‐in or other tools, and they go right into that RSS feed.

What’s interesting about this is that many SEOs have dismissed Del.icio.us as useless for
link building, because the links on the user profile page are “nofollowed” so that search
engines don’t read them, but they’re missing something important. The RSS feed doesn’t
have nofollow in it, and you can even link directly to your RSS feed and get it indexed!

Oh well – their loss – because all that “noindex, nofollow” actually works to your
advantage! Once I show you how to whip that RSS feed through a second leverage engine
and get links with it, you’ll be laughing all the way to the top.

But not every social bookmarking service is so easy to use – StumbleUpon uses redirects, so
you need to “launder” those links with a redirect to make them useful, and that’s a little bit
more work.

You can also run your own Link Collector system – I’ve developed some software for Link
Liberation to manage all this stuff, so if you have a whole bunch of link collectors pushing
RSS feeds to you, it’s not a huge pain to keep track of everything.

You can have someone else run that software for you – as long as they know how they’re
supposed to handle each source, you’re good.

This software also lets you (or your staff) manufacture custom RSS feeds “on the fly” right
from your web browser, so if you can’t find an appropriate link collector for a particular
purpose, you can always force‐feed it with a few clicks and keystrokes.

The main reason why I built this software, though, is to be able to have ONE Link Collector
set up with ALL of your site’s incoming links in it – so that over time, you can continuously
drip link juice into each of the pages that’s linking to you.

Ah, leverage. You gotta love it.

Link Collectors can also be used to feed an endless stream of link‐getting opportunities to
you or your staff – I’ll even show you how to “borrow” link collectors from other people –
you may never have to go hunting for places to get links ever again.

In order to make the most of the techniques that I teach in Link Liberation, you’ll want to
use multiple Link Collectors to feed data into your other Leverage Engines, and to your
link‐getting team.

Leverage Engine #2 – The Content Pump
Article marketing, aka “syndication,” is one of the oldest tricks in the link builder’s
playbook.

The idea is simple – you write articles, these articles contain a link to your web site, and
you submit those articles to directories that “syndicate” or distribute them to other sites.

But you wouldn’t believe how many people are doing it wrong.

Here’s a little fact for you to chew over:

When everyone does “what everyone is doing,” it only takes a few little tweaks and finesses
to gain a huge advantage.

In 2006, I taught an article marketing technique called “beating the bushes,” that’s
still reaping benefits for many of my students to this day.

Instead of trying to get links from the article directories, the goal of this technique is to use
the article directories as a mini “leverage engine” to identify web sites that are willing to
take your content.

You do this not only by monitoring Google Alerts for placements of your own articles, you
can also keep an eye out for the articles written by other authors who cover the same
topics.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, article directories are a great example of a kind of Content
Pump that you can use. There are also lots of email lists still in use, that distribute articles
for reproduction, even though most marketers are blissfully unaware of their existence.

There are also some very strong distribution channels out there for press releases and
other public relations type content – and who knew that you could actually push
instructional articles out through some of the same networks?

There are literally hundreds of channels available for content distribution in almost
any market, and they’re easy to spot once you know how to look.

For a variety of reasons, including the simple fact that it works extremely well, you’ll
probably want to develop your own Content Pump, which is a queue of articles or other
content that you want to get distributed onto the web.

Naturally, all of this content will not only link back to your site, those links will carry the
rank‐boosting anchor text that everyone else thinks is so hard to get.

With a properly configured Link Collector or two (or five, or ten…) firing opportunities at
you or your staff, it’s a heck of a lot easier to generate links with your valuable content.

I know people who never even bother with syndication – because their Link
Collectors feed them so many opportunities that every article they write goes
directly onto someone’s web site.

You can also set up your own Content Pump in “broadcast mode” – one of my students got
so heavily into article marketing, and was doing so well with it, that he decided to create his
own article directory for the webmasters in his market.

It takes a little work to get something like this off the ground, but he’s totally killing it with
this approach – and building incredibly valuable relationships by providing a great service
to the community.

You see, advanced SEO is not all about “black hat” tricks – sometimes you can do well,
simply by doing good.

Leverage Engine #3 – The Market Multiplier
Not everyone will need to build one of these – and there may be some opportunities to use
“someone else’s” – but in a tight, tough market, it can be well worth the investment in
setting one up.

Market Multipliers come in many forms – but the most common are social bookmarking
sites (not what you think, wait for it) and discussion forums.

Let’s start with an easy example:

Sphinn.com is a “vertical” social bookmarking site targeting the search engine marketing
community. The content on Sphinn is primarily of interest to industry insiders and
professionals, and not to the larger market of clients that they serve.

But Sphinn doesn’t exist on its own – it serves as a vital hub for the parent company’s other
properties, including the SearchEngineLand.com news site, and various for‐profit trade
shows, such as the SMX Advanced conference that I recently spoke at in Seattle.

Although there’s no doubt a fair bit of work involved in running a high traffic site like
Sphinn, it delivers a lot of benefits

• Advertisers pay to get exposed to the people who are looking at the site and
participating in the community
• It gathers an audience together where the owner’s other messages can be heard in a
non‐threatening and very positive way
• By freely giving links, it creates an enormous amount of good will and reciprocity
(link love too!) from the entire industry

Everyone in the industry can benefit by participating in Sphinn and contributing content, so
the owners of Sphinn don’t have to do all the work.

Any social bookmarking site, discussion forum, or other system that gathers the community
together can be a Market Multiplier.

The advantage of the social bookmarking format is that it’s designed to send out links. The
comments and discussion that take place on the bookmarked “stories” can also become a
magnet for links. It’s powerful stuff.

In Link Liberation, I’ll show you how to do the necessary market research, evaluate
the opportunity, and set up your own Market Multiplier, using free software.

By the way, all of the software we use for this just “happens” to speak RSS. That’s right –
you can even set up a Link Collector channel that automatically pumps your own content
into your Market Multiplier’s outbound link stream.

I don’t mean to suggest that actually building a Market Multiplier is right for everyone – or
that you will be able to turn it into a huge business on its own. To go that far, well, it’s a lot
of work, but the benefits can be astonishing.

Leverage Engine #4 – The Index Driver
One of the most powerful leverage engines of all is the Index Driver. There are so many
ways to create one that it’s almost dizzying to imagine all of the possibilities.

The purpose of the Index Driver is to give you more control over whether the search
engines find your links on the web. You do this by pointing links (sending link juice) to the
pages that link to your main site – the one that you’re trying to get ranked.

The technology you use is almost irrelevant – it’s the concept that makes this work.

As an example, in the “Leverage Engine #4 Blueprint” video, I show how you can put
together an industry news site, using nothing but Wordpress. I show how this simple
platform can be combined with a few Link Collectors, a little light editorial work, and some
simple promotion to become a force to be reckoned with.

But it doesn’t have to be news.

Imagine you’re selling something in the wedding market – your Index Driver site could be
news and information for brides‐to‐be, or just answers to the most common questions –
which you can collect from the web using a Link Collector.

Do you think you’d be able to get people to link to this? Do you think you’d be able to
generate links to it from sites like discussion forums, Yahoo Answers, and other sources? Of
course you could!

Could you set up a half dozen, or dozens, of portals on content sharing sites using the RSS
feed from your Index Driver? Sure you could.

It’d be easy – and you’d never be begging for any of those links.

It takes a little market research to make the most of this, but guess what – there isn’t a
single link building technique I can imagine using, where a little market research doesn’t
dramatically improve your results.

An Index Driver leverages nearly every link building technique that I teach, in
profound ways.

If you take my advice on article marketing, for example, the Index Driver will harness the
energy of other people to create more opportunities for you – and you don’t have to pay
them a dime.

In fact, as you build the kind of relationships that I will teach you to cultivate in the Link
Liberation course, you will discover that you can spend less and less time operating your
Index Driver, because others will benefit by helping you out.

Everybody wins – except maybe your direct competitors.

What Link Liberation Is All About
“You must know why things work on a starship.”
‐ James T. Kirk, The Wrath of Khan
Those are some profound words right there – even though neither one of us is ever going to
have to work on a starship.

That’s because the Internet is a lot like a starship. Given the size of the thing, the Internet
may be even more complex, but either way, it can be a rough environment to do business, if
you don’t understand how things work.

Link building can be especially difficult. Ask just about anyone what their biggest
SEO struggle is, that they’ll tell you that getting links is by far the hardest part.

Reminds me of when I was a kid, dying to learn how to program a computer, because
everything I’d seen on Star Trek told me that computers were really cool. If I could program
a computer, I could make it do my math homework – sweet!

Plus, if you wanted to hook up with a hot babe like Uhura or Ensign Rand, you’d better be
on the ball with those computers.

So one day I rode my bike over to the big brick Computing Center at the University, across
the street from the hospital where my mom worked.

They had a big room full of terminals upstairs, and nobody seemed to mind or even notice
me, so I slid into a chair and discovered something terrible…

You can’t just tell the computer what you want it to do. Captain Kirk was a fraud –
and don’t even get me started on Spock!

I was majorly disappointed, but they had a little library downstairs, so I went in and asked
the lady there if they had any books on how to program a computer. She laughed and said
that they were ALL about programming a computer.

It wasn’t going very well.

That’s when I got the break of my life. A funny sounding student who called himself Raj
handed me a book about FORTRAN. He said that if I’d come by the next afternoon when he
was “sysopping” he’d show me around.

As it turns out Raj and his sysop buddies had been watching me on the security camera and
laughing their asses off at what I was typing – oh, the embarrassment!

The next day, I got to see what a real computer looked like, inside and out. Raj showed me
how to work the punch card machine, and I actually wrote my very first program that day –
to calculate the first 10 digits of pi. (π = 4/1 ‐ 4/3 + 4/5 – 4/7 + 4/9 … etc.)

I’d probably have given up on computers if it hadn’t been for Raj. He was a great mentor,
and he also used to slide me stacks of “spits” (leftover punch cards) from time to time,
which was a big help for a kid on a $5 a month allowance.

Programming a computer didn’t turn out to be quite as easy as I had hoped, but it
didn’t matter, because I had a good teacher.

Programming with punch cards was a lot like link building in another funny way. You had
to submit your card deck, and come back in a few weeks to get the results, whenever they
got around to running the freebie jobs.

If you made the tiniest mistake, you got garbage for a printout – this is where the phrase
“garbage in, garbage out” comes from.

We all want instant results. We all want an easy push button solution. That’s why blog
networks, paid link brokers, and even link exchange software developers can still find a
ready market for their products.

I can’t offer you a push button solution for link building. There’s no such thing, I’m
afraid.

What I can offer you is the combined knowledge and experience of myself, my clients, my
students, and my many friends in the industry, wrapped up in a step‐by‐step training
program that gets you way beyond the basics, to transform you into a true badass of link
building.

That’s what Link Liberation is all about for me – delivering the best tools and training that I
possibly can, to a group of students who are ready to put it to good use.

I owe it to you, and I owe it to Raj, to do a good job. I won’t let you down.

The Buddhists have a saying: “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

That certainly happened for me.

If you’re ready to learn, and apply what I teach, we’ll begin your training program on
June 18 at 3pm U.S. Eastern time.

If you’re not sure I’m the right teacher, that’s understandable. So I’m going to make it easy
for you to decide.

Link Liberation will be a 12‐week long program. The first 8 weeks will be intensive
instruction, followed by some case studies and additional instruction to make sure you’re
able to put it all to work in your business and outsource the parts you need to.

The very first class session, “How Search Engines See Links,” will be open to everyone
who registers for it, at no cost. Once that class is over (it will run between 75‐90
minutes), I’ll open up my shopping cart, and start taking registrations.

Because a lot of folks are going to want in, and space is limited, I can’t guarantee that
everyone who wants to join this class will be able to do so. I know that sucks, but I want
you to get the most out of it, and that’s not going to happen if I let a thousand people in.

Some folks (those who have known me for a while) are already emailing me and asking
when they can sign up, so I will do a brief “early bird” registration prior to the first class.
Don’t worry, though ‐ I will hold some spots open so you will still have a chance to get in,
even if you want to “try before you buy.”

We’ll Talk More Soon
I’ll be back in touch soon, to get you the registration link for the first class, along with a
little light homework to make sure you get as much out of it as possible.

If you received this from a friend, but aren’t on the Link Liberation mailing list yet,
just go to my site, watch the video, and join up. Here’s that link:

http://www.linkliberation.com/freeblueprint/

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