You can read all sorts of link building advice on the net. How to get backlinks, whether or not chasing external links is valid strategy, how to drive your readers to speak up and leave their links in your comment section, how to find strong, quality backlinks, and the list goes on.

But there’s one super-powerful link building strategy hardly anyone seems to mention. And that’s having an affiliate program.

Think about it. It’s so easy to create a digital product, upload it to Clickbank’s marketplace – and having Clickbank handle everything, including signing up and paying your affiliates on time. Having your URL on Clickbank itself – with its Alexa traffic rank of 333 and U.S. rank of 135 – is also a great backlink.

Give Your Affiliates a Complete Link Building Campaign

Don’t just abandon your affiliates to Clickbank, however. Create a resource center for them on your product site, complete with snippets of code, social media campaign snippets, banner and button ads, self-improvement PLR articles, tips, FAQs and anything else that will help them enthusiastically sell your product.

Also provide them with a free brandable report they can redistribute to their list. If you’re not a writer, have a good ghostwriter produce it for you, filled with high value tips. Offer to do interviews and don’t forget to upload YouTube videos (yet another “must-do” place to get backlinks!) showing your affiliates how to create link cloaking redirects, or how to use your product, or whatever useful video you can think up.

The bottom line is to be ready with anything they need. Give them a complete link building package, and they’ll gladly promote you. The better quality your product – and affiliate resources – the more enthusiastically they’ll promote you, and increase your link power. Add that free brandable report and watch your links explode!

Creating physical products to complement your coaching practice is a great idea and is easy. My friend, Ronnie Nijmeh of PLR.me, has put together a quick video to show you just how easy it is to create physical products with PLR that will add value to your coaching packages.

In the video, he suggests setting up a Cafepress store and using inspirational wallpapers (included in PLR.me memberships) to create posters, calendars, and notepads.

And you don’t need to have a PLR.me membership to create great coaching products. You could design your own, but the premade wallpapers in the membership will save you tons of time that you would spend finding images and quotes. All you do is brand them with your logo.

Are you working at branding yourself or your business?  If so, consider adding StumbleUpon to your arsenal of strategies.

But branding isn’t going to happen unless you have a clear target. Decide who you want to be known as on StumbleUpon, and what for. And thoroughly research your potential audience.

The real trick, however, is not to spread yourself too thin. It’s better to be known for one thing you do really well than for your average performance in several areas.

12 Tips for Tailoring Your Branding to StumbleUpon

Once you’ve got who and what you are on StumbleUpon firmly fixed, it’s time to implement your StumbleUpon branding strategy. Make sure…

- Your profile reflects your brand

- You stumble each entry on your blog (but not all at once!)

- You stand out from the crowd: Speak with your own unique “voice”

- Be friends with fellow Stumblers. Review their pages and sites – but keep it honest and real. (Never do this just to “collect” friends!)

- Visit and stumble only quality sites. Don’t mix business with personal, if the personal doesn’t enhance the business

- Read reviews to see what people are really thinking and feeling about a site or issue

- Stumble your “competitors” favorites to find out what gaps they’ve left you

- Factor backlink creation into your branding strategy

- Guest post on your Stumble buddies’ blogs.

- Stumble your Stumble friends’ posts

- Be consistent in your Stumble life

- Stumble your guest posts!

Once you’ve decided on a course of action for your StumbleUpon branding strategy, do your best to stick to it. After all, consistency is the most important key to branding. (Think how disoriented you’d feel if Coca-Cola suddenly started producing bright green cans with a rocket ship as their mascot, instead of a polar bear!)

Don’t forget to tie your Facebook and Twitter strategy in with StumbleUpon too… And if you’re a LinkedIn user, make sure your profile and information on that site reflects the image you’re portraying in your other social sites.

Remember that in branding yourself, the most important thing is to create and nurture your own strong, separate – and consistent – identity. So ask yourself, what do you want to be known for?

And an easy way to put together a coaching package is with private label rights content. This can be done in a few quick steps:

1.Choose the topic – As a life coach, you want to pick a topic that you coach on, and one that your clients are interested in. But you can make the decision easier by letting the PLR decide. Go through your stash of PLR on your computer and find one that fits your target market.

2. Determine how many “classes” there will be in your coaching package - The number of classes may depend on your target clients and/or the topic. Some clients want a quick 3-part, “tips”-oriented seminar, while others may be looking for 8-week ”hands-on” coaching. By the same token, some topics lend themselves to shorter courses, while others need several classes to cover all the material. Either way you go, just make sure you cover everything that needs to be covered, or your clients will leave feeling short-changed. And we don’t want that!

3. Divide the PLR into class topics – Now that you know how many classes will be in your coaching package, review your chosen PLR and begin separating it into topics. This step is probably one of the easiest since most PLR comes in packages of articles. Just start pulling individual articles under each topic heading. If your PLR is in report form instead of articles, this report may already be divided up into topics for you! If it isn’t, then you’ll need to do this step.

4. Determine the delivery method – The first option is group coaching. Many coaches offer group coaching sessions either in person, or via teleseminar. But this isn’t the only option. You can also load your coaching package into an autoresponder and turn it into an ecourse. For an example of this, go to the box up in the right-hand corner and sign up for my free 10-part ecourse on how to boost your coaching business by using PLR.

5. Market your coaching package – this topic is an entire article in and of itself. Heck, it’s an entire coaching package! And how you market definitely depends on the method of delivery you chose and your target clients. For now, I’ll leave it up to you to determine the most effective method.

Great sources of PLR that are perfect for creating coaching packages:

• PLR.me – self-help and personal development PLR for life coaches. You get articles, affirmations (these are really great coaching tools), checklists, inspirational posters, etc. Learn more about PLR.me. Or get a free 12-pack sampler here.
• Easy PLR - very affordable article packages on a variety of topics, many of which are suitable for life coaching and business coaching. Can easily be organized into a coaching package.
• Special Report Club – business coaching topics in the form of reports, along with all the marketing material you need. This is an unbeliavable resource for business coaches.
• Mostly Sane PLR – offers prewritten ecourses ready to load into your autoresponder. I must confess, my free 10-part ecourse on how to boost your coaching business by using PLR offered up in the right hand corner is one of the courses offered through this provider.

Check out these PLR providers or use content you already have to create a coaching package this week. Then come back here and tell us about the new service you’ve created for your clients. I always want to share your successes with you.

It’s a given that you should have a FAQ page about general coaching questions, like how appointments are scheduled, payments are received, and sessions are structured. But the best use of FAQ pages is to showcase your specialty and expertise as a coach.

For instance, I have a particular “approach”–a standard initial assessment followed by a general process through some common goals–that I use with my coaching clients. I have thoroughly explained the approach on a separate page on my Web site. It’s not specifically titled as a FAQ page, but it does function as one.

Of course, the most effective FAQ pages are the ones that directly address the potential client’s challenges. As a wellness coach, I work with individuals to improve their health, but each client has different reasons for seeking a health coach. Some want to overcome particular health issues, others want to prevent them. Having a FAQ page for each of the most common challenges my clients face shows them how coaching, and me in particular, can help them reach their health goals.

Now, I know you’re thinking, “Man, that’s a lot of pages to write!” But actually, it can be accomplished pretty easily, especially the pages dealing with specific client challenges. You already know what I’m going to say, don’t you? PLR!

There is a lot of great PLR out there that addresses many of the problems we help our clients with, such as time management, goal-setting, business strategies, organization, etc. It can easily be reworked into a FAQ or “‘how to” page.

Check out some of these PLR providers and see if you can add a few FAQ pages to your Web site today.

• PLR. me - PLR specifically for coaches
• Easy PLR – lots of niches including business, health,  and internet marketing
• Special Report Club – mostly business-related PLR
• All Private Label Content – many niches including business and health

Maybe the idea of making and marketing an infoproduct is too overwhelming for you right now, even if all the research and most of the writing have been done for you. After all, actually selling the infoproduct is a lot of hard work. I totally understand. I’ve been there, done that.

Well, guess what? There are way more things you can do to cash in on your PLR content right now, other than creating an infoproduct to sell!

After just sitting on my bum for a few minutes, I came up with 10 different ways you can make money from your PLR.

1. Make an E-book, special report or E-course to give away as a bonus for signing up to your mailing list. Remember, the money is in the list, so grow that list!

2. Create a product for a special giveaway with a joint venture partner, designed to get more people to sign up for your opt-in list.

3. Use the information from an Ebook to write unique articles and submit them to article directories. In the author’s resource box, add links to your website or to an affiliate product.

4. Write a completely unique article out of a PLR Ebook or multimedia product, and submit it to a profit-sharing article directory, such as Associated Content.

5. Create an infoproduct as a bonus for the sale of a product or service that you’re already marketing.

6. Get material for a $1 teleseminar or webinar. This is great for building a quality list, and promoting a higher-priced product or service.

7. Extract blog posts from the PLR and plug them into a monetized blog to publish for the next 6 months. Voila, your blog runs on autopilot!

8. Select the most actionable points from a PLR Ebook and make an autoresponder course – with a subtle promotion of your products and services, of course.

9. Produce short videos with useful tips for your target market, and blast them on YouTube and the rest of the Internet using TubeMogul. Make sure the videos have the URL to your website.

10. Use PLR content to make OFFLINE marketing materials for your biz, such as post cards, magazine advertorials and fliers.

I’m sure you can find at least one thing on this list that you can do today. Think of it: in a couple of hours, you could be growing your list, driving traffic to your site, selling more of your own or affiliate products, or set your blog on autopilot. The possibilities really are only limited by our imagination.

I’d like to make this list much longer. Got anything to add? Please post them in the comments section. Thanks!

I even downloaded a free report about how to use – and make money from – PLR content. By the way, if you’d like a copy of that free report yourself, sign up here. (It’s on the bottom of the page.) I actually read that report, but still thought PLR had no place on my Web site. I was convinced I could write everything myself.

As I learned more about marketing my coaching business, I realized that I needed to create a lot of content. I needed to write site content, blog posts, newsletters, articles, coaching tools, etc. And writing can be a challenge for me sometimes.

I like to keep an open mind, so I finally tried PLR through a free PLR offer. I took one look at the articles and then I junked them. They were crap! I could not put my name on that stuff! I was better off just writing all the content I needed by myself. So I continued to write all my own stuff.

Fast forward six months: I have 3 blogs, dozens of article directories to submit to, guest blog posts to write, electronic newsletters to send. I would love to write an ebook, too, but I’m busy servicing my clients. Let’s just say I am beginning to really dread those writing tasks!

I consider myself a pretty fast writer, but somehow, I was falling behind on my article marketing. And then it struck me: unless I get help with all the writing I need to get done, my coaching business is going to stagnate.

Yes, I am the voice of my life coaching business, but I simply cannot do all the writing myself. At least, not from scratch. I’ve thought about hiring a writer, but then the good ones charge more than I do , which means I’ll end up spending more than I earn. And the cheaper ghostwriters will produce stuff that I’ll have to rewrite anyway.

Being the open-minded entrepreneur that I am (and somebody at the end of her rope), I gave PLR a second look. This time, I actually paid for it. This time, I asked around and went with the PLR provider that is a fellow wellness coach, and one whom I greatly admire. And you know what? My mind was blown away!

I now have all the content I need for my blog posts, article marketing, email autoresponders, and all the infoproducts I had planned to write. In fact, I have fresh ideas for many more!

Sure, it’s an additional expense, but it costs much less than hiring a ghostwriter for all the written stuff I need. Plus, if I consider all the profits I am NOT making because I don’t have the time to write the ebooks I have outlined, it is definitely worth it!

Wait, don’t think I don’t do any writing anymore. I do. But this time, I’m not starting with a blank page. I’m not spending 30 minutes researching the topic. I have the raw materials in front of me. I change the title to include my keywords. I rephrase the content to make it relevant to my target market. I pull things apart, rearrange stuff, combine different pieces of content, add what I already know, and I end up with content that is truly, uniquely my own.

So if you want to provide quality content without spending 8 hours a day writing, or paying top dollar for content, then you need PLR. The key is to get the best PLR out there and to recycle and repurpose it to make it truly your own.