In the past, I’ve written about using Associated Content to create backlinks to your own blogs. It’s kind of like guest-posting, plus you can make revenue off the actual AC article if it generates substantial traffic.

If you want to do this, here are a couple tips.

Write a original article about a topic you wrote about on your blog. For example, today I wrote up a quick review of Mozy, an online backup service. I had written about that several times before on my photography site. This allowed me to a) write up an original piece of content and b) naturally link back to my own site in the text of the article.

Use natural links in the article to “deep link” to your content. When I write up the article, I don’t just include a link back to the root page of my site. That’s kind of senseless self promotion, and SEO-wise it’s probably not the best idea. The idea here is to create deep links – links to actual articles that you’ve written. Plus, these links will flow better with the article that you’re writing for AC. Check out my AC article on Mozy to see what I mean.

Link to Your Site’s Root in the Additional Resources. There two kinds of links in the SEO world – “rel=nofollow” and follow links. When a search engine like Google sees the “rel=nofollow” attribute on a link, it discounts that link in calculating page popularity, search engine rankings, and such. The gold standard in SEO is “real” follow links.

When you’re writing an article on AC, you need to understand that links in different places work differently. If you include a link in the article (as per the above tip), it’s a real link, no “rel=nofollow” strings attached. If, however, you link to a site in the additional resources (which appear in the sidebar of your article), they have the “rel=nofollow” attribute. I typically use this area to link to my site as well as one or two others that might have general information about the topic.

The important thing to remember is to write something useful and don’t just link to your site. Read your article over. Does it include some useful information for the reader, even if they don’t follow the links? If yes, you did a good job and your article is acceptable. If not, then you did a lousy job and you should re-write it. Chances are, that kind of junk will not get read and could probably get flagged for removal.