I stumbled across a neat little piece of software today. Something that I believe could help me (and you) gain some extra traffic from Twitter and it has nothing to do with setting up multiple accounts or spamming thousands of people.

When you post a tweet on Twitter there is normally a link under the tweet that says from Tweet Deck, Web, or what ever program you are using to send the message. This means that lots of companies are getting free traffic from piggybacking on your tweets.

That is where TweetBrand comes to the rescue and helps you take back those free links.

What TweetBrand does it is removes this link and replaces it with a link that you can decide upon. For example you can have a link to your own site and also anchor text of whatever you want.

It is free and it runs on Adobe Air which is also free. There is a very informative video to help you through the process which took me about 4 minutes to complete.

I am trying it on http://twitter.com/indblog so why not have a look and see if it is something that might interest you?

I think it is safe to say that we all want backlinks. Backlinks are a major factor that Google takes into consideration when they dish out the Page Ranks every three months or so. It is very clear, the more backlinks you have then the better your chances of increasing your Page Rank will be.

But the question is just how do you go about getting these backlinks? Do you pay those backlink selling companies $300+ for the privilege of them putting your link on their network of faked Page Rank sites?

I have one rule when making money online: Don’t spend money to make money.

There are a number of free ways to gain backlinks, I am going to go over three of those methods in this post.

Comment On Other Blogs Related To Your Niche

Many blogs will happily allow you to drop a link to your blog when you leave a comment on one of their posts. Blog owners see this as a kind of swap deal, they get a comment on their blog and you get a free link to your blog.

A lot of these blogs will have do-follow turned on which means it will count as a backlink. Some blogs might insist on a couple of comments before turning on do-follow.

It is important not to spam when leaving comments. Always try and write something other than “great post” or “nice site”. This will only get your comment put in the spam bin.

This blog, for example, is a do-follow blog. Feel free to comment and gain backlinks.

Swap links with related sites

Do you know anyone who runs a blog that is in a similar niche to yours? If you do then why not contact them and ask them if they would like to swap links with you. You put their link on your blog and they carry your link on their blog.

If you don’t know anyone, but you know people who have blogs on other niches then you could still ask them to swap links. Although unrelated linking will not be as effective it will help bring in traffic.

Do-follow Forums & Book-marking Sites

I recently published a post featuring a list of message boards (forums) and book-marking sites that offer do-follow. This means that leaving a link in one of these message board signatures, or book-marking one of your posts, will count as a backlink.

If you know of any other methods then feel free to leave a comment.

Social Spark is owned and operated by the company Izea – the same people who are also behind PayPerPost, the giants of the blog review network. Just like PayPerPost Social Spark has been launched amongst much fanfare and criticism.

They offer affiliate marketing opportunities, pay per click offers, blog review posts and also straight link swaps.

I’ve not yet used the affiliate marketing, link swap or the blog review posts but I have used the pay per click offers and today I received my first payment from them. It was not for a lot but it at least proves that they pay out.

Sadly the pay per click offers have dried up for my blog but hopefully they will resume very soon.