Part of building my online empire has been consumed with a lot of research. As you know creating a website is only 1/4 of the battle. The idea of “if you build it they will come.” is not true anymore in an online medium.

One of the most difficult parts of building an online empire revolves around drawing visitors to your sites and converting them to repeat readers of your blog. There are more than a dozen ways to go about this. I tried one method over the weekend and got some amazing results.

Photo Credit tschnitzlein

Get thousands of visits in a day.

No trickery, no link bait, just a genuine desire to share information. Finding a way to attract over a thousand hits of traffic to a site in one day is something I am humbly excited about. Sure there was a little bit of luck involved but it all spawned from one act that anyone can replicate to get more traffic to your website.

Build a massive link list in a niche.

What niche is your blog in? Lets be honest. If you are in the “make money online” niche you have a lot of company. Though this site would fall into that space, I also think their are many sub categories available you can get involved in that make your blog even more specialized. Make money online from affiliates is an example of a sub category. The more granular you get the more you can been seen over the noise.

Recently I spent a couple hours going through my favorite websites about marketing and making money online to find a special link list of the ‘top social media links‘ for information. I did this for two reasons.

1. I am a huge fan of anything in the social media / social networking space.
2. Sharing the information would draw a few new readers.

The results we stagering.

In one day a modest blog was almost crippled by the amount of traffic flooding in. My hosting company actually called me on Sunday to make sure the sites were not being attacked by a DDos attack or something. “Nope, I just posted an article that is getting some viral attention.”

This started me wondering if something as simple as a list of links to news on social media sites could be replicated on any level. Yes it can and I’ll be posting some other results soon.

How to build the largest link list in a niche for more traffic.

As I mentioned above. If you are in the “Make money online” niche you have a lot to draw from. You should also know who the major players are. ShoeMoney, DoshDosh, John Chow, BloggingExperement, John Cow are just a few of the hundreds of quality sites available to look at.

There are many ways to go about this. I go about it in an ‘old school’ way and maybe one of my readers can educate me on a better way. Using Google reader I have all of my favorite sites saved into specific folders based on what the general site topic revolves around. I do a search for specific terms in the niche i am looking for and ABRACADABRA, there are all the links for my link list.

Now this requires subscribing to a lot of different site feeds for links, but you should already have some and if you do a little digging, you will find hundreds more to choose from. Once you have the list of links to sites you read and have narrowed it down to a specific topic, just do some copy and paste.

GO BIG OR GO HOME

You can create a basic list of sites for some general link love or you can spend a little time and put together a list of 50-100 links to post. The wider the selection of sites you can pull from the better. Give your readers something to keep checking back into. No one has the time to click on 50-100 links, but they do have the ability to bookmark your site to their favorite social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and even repost to a site like Twitter.

The idea is to make your list so large and so comprehensive that people will want to share you list with their friends in the same niche.

You stole my idea!

Creating a massive link list is not without its draw backs. You may have to deal with the fact that someone just copies and pastes your article and posts it as their own. These things happen. There is really nothing you can do about it. Write a comment in the offenders post without sounding like an asshole and move on. Most bloggers will moderate new comments so not sounding like a monster could get your comment accepted and that’s the key. If he gets any readers, they will probably check out your site too.