Can you really trust the online marketers who peddle “hope”?

With the conviction of James Arthur Ray still fresh as the trail of his victims lay in our eyes and being smeared in our faces by local media, you have to wonder. Can you really trust the “Gurus” who peddle hope in little golden boxes at thousands of dollars per download?

This has been a crazy year for well known internet marketers all over the United States with Perry Belcher’s issues, Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins and all kinds of wild things going on!

I remember a time when the “Gurus” were good people. I mean, 99% of those who claimed to be successful, rich and living amazing lives, really were.

A Christian and extremely ethical guy like me finds it difficult to recommend a website that’s filled with swearing, discusting humor and unforgivable NOT safe for work humor… But if you can imagine a statement like, that I submit to those with the stomach, open-ness and profane ignored… The Salty Droid….

When I first stumbled across this site, as mentioned by Ryan Healy in some of his “Exposing the Guru” posts, I have to say that I was really shocked by the attitude and information presented. I immediately ignore and *instantly* loose respect for anyone who swears both in person or in public. It’s just not acceptable (Yes, I’m in that camp…). That’s why I just can’t have any respect for a guy like Tony Robbins anymore. The guy has impressive energy and skill and motivational abilities, but his mouth – needs soap!

Anyway… I have to say that much of the information at The Salty Droid can be verified. It’s obviously a slanted one-sided view of the entire situation, but it’s equally interesting…

The big question is, who can you really trust?

Let me stretch out on a limb and make some bold statements that could easily offend and bother people…

#1. If it sounds too good to be true, it is…

#2. If it sounds easy, it’s probably not (without a ton of background knowledge on the topic)

#3. If you just got started in online marketing, you have at least a year (maybe more) of learning before profit is a discussable topic.

#4. Gone are the days when pictures with Gurus = Trust. Ignore that.

#5. Pretty much anyone who’s sales angle is “financial freedom” – “Work in your underpants”  – “retire in your 20s” or “automated cash” can make an excellent toilet tissue for your water closet <wink>. I’ve started unsubscribing from any Guru/Newsletter or company that promises GARBAGE like this.

#6. Social proof is power. Search Twitter, Search Facebook, Search Forums and groups and read all you can about someone before making a big purchase.

#7. Stay focused on your goals **AND** the direction you’ve chosen to achieve that goal.

-          If you said you were going to make your living thru affiliate marketing – do that.

-          If it was via selling a service – do that.

-          If it was selling an ebook, cdrom or download – do that.

But whatever you do, don’t deviate or chase money or ways of making money or strategies, or other people’s ideas!!

RANT OFF..

When I worked with Corey Rudl, and eventually Derek Gehl at The Internet Marketing Center in Vancouver B.C., I recall many times when ethics prevailed. The company and Of course Corey & Derek were highly ethical people and never promoted anything that didn’t work, or truly couldn’t help people. It was a culture I’ve never seen before – and never seen again. It was truly amazing and exciting and I actually couldn’t wait to get to work each day.

Every day, I was on the phone with clients and customers helping them build their online businesses and it was truly a dream come true. I met with other gurus while working there on the phone and in person. In fact, I remember when IM Gurus were truly *ONLY* known by other IM Gurus and not by their customers so much…

There was a time when Customers and sales made the GURU. Today, a Guru decides he’s going to sell IM garbage and becomes a GURU on his own. Corey, became a guru by selling kit car books and eventually thru the sales of the book Car Tips Revealed and of course, selling Ferrari Emblems and other such car gadgetry.

Still, earned reputations!

I dare gurus to show significant proof that they’ve actually sold products outside the internet marketing niche! Most certainly before I felt qualified to start posting tips, I constantly wrote ebooks like Classified Car Tips, Training Cats Easily, Removing Smoke, and others. I wrote a book on writing great newsletters, and then eventually moved into a few internet marketing products like unstoppablekeywords.com and such.

Anyways.. Interesting how this industry’s evolving. At this moment I’d say there’s very few IM products out there that are truly worth recommending so if you *ever* see me post on any (which there aren’t many I do) I’d strongly recommend buying them, as my word is the only thing I have.

It’s obvious that consumers see things differently than an educated online marketer, web developer or novice computer user see things. There’s no secrecy there. But, sometimes when you’re at wits end, or need a refresher – something to change up the usual, try looking at your pages from the customer view.

If you’ve been executing some form of online marketing for as long as I have, you know that’s not easy… But I have a few strategies that could help you in that regard…

#1. Buying Industry Magazines.

The other nite, I was at Safeway (A local grocery store) and picked up a copy of a novice computer magazine… It was relatively expensive, thick and loaded with newbie tips that I didn’t need to read, but what I saw sparked some SEO ideas, so I figured it was worth the investment. I think I see that completely differently than some. I can say that spending $16.99 on a brand new idea that could get me an avalanche of new website visitors is well worth the spend!

But, besides the SEO sparks and flames the magazine had other benefits. It gave me an insight to how the novice computer consumer sees the online marketing industry, the writing and blogging industry and a much more simplistic view. Such a refresher and really makes it easy to start writing to those folks on your sites.

FACT: The average person who will visit your site will have a grade 8 reading level.

#2. Your Internal View Of Others…

Huh? Yeah I know, it’s a weird thing to say, but stay with me here for a minute. One time I was super bored on the Vancouver SkyTrain (commuter train), on the way home. I was reviewing the salescopy for one of my ebooks and I thought to myself, what would my mother-in-law think of this copy?

Background: (She’s a senior who has no computer knowledge, and probably wouldn’t buy things online) but I know her well enough that I could just see what she would say in the back of my head, in fact nearly every answer she would give picking it apart.

I wrote down every objection she would have like wildfire, probably lighting my pen on fire right there! She gave me tons of ideas, and I didn’t even ACTUALLY ask her!!

#3. Cruel Comments From Your Friends

Hopefully, your friends like you! If they do, they won’t say anything mean or nasty about your website… They won’t be honest to your face, and if they’re not, they’re really no help to an honest feedback campaign, now are they?! BUT… print a copy of your website (or show them your screen) one day and ask them… “Get a load of this guy’s site…” OR  ”I’m thinking of investing in these guys..” and see what kind of feedback they provide then!

#4. Reading Reviews Of Similar Sites

There’s tools like Zing (some tool from the miracle whip manufacturers) and xmarks and a ton of other social tools like mcafee’s site advisor that let you see real world reviews of what other people think of related sites, they can be of use…  as well as “domain.com forum” in Google to see what others are saying about that domain…

#5. If Your Having An Off Day..

Ironically the way I started writing this post.. I saw myself looking at a landing page I just developed for a partnership deal I just signed, and I could see what a customer was thinking. It was a de-cafinated moment… A litteral mind-haze, but still! It was facinating and I realized I could easily figure out all these neat ways of getting back there.. But if you don’t feel yourself one day, go look at your website – see if you can jump out of your skin. Would you buy your own stuff? Would you subscribe? Why not!!

Cheers!
Daniel J Deyette

Making videos is often easy enough with all the technologies available today. You can easily do a screen recording, or video recording or even use your cell phone to record a video. However, getting a video to go VIRAL isn’t easy. I mean, lets face it – if your not the most important person in the world, who’s going to watch your video or visit your website?

The word Buzzworthy was used and abused by a number of marketers, and so was “Going viral, go viral, viral content etc..” and I don’t think most people really TRULY understand what that means.. So, I’m going to create a series of materials that I like to call “Tell a Friend” Content.

What is Tell a Friend Content?

Would you tell a friend about it? Then it’s definitely tell a friend content… That’s what it’s going to take to get your video to the masses at blistering fireball speed. You want your youtube video to get 1 million hits? This is how you can achieve it.

I’m starting in the realm of video but I will touch on viral content as well before this series is over.

The first video in the series

In This Short 8 Minute Video I Cover:

• Why you would want a video to go viral and have people spread the word
• What 3 common types of videos get the most views
• How to find keyword research that’s instant, 7 days old or 30 days old.
• Which videos are not viewed as sales garbage and are easy to create
• Over 8 different call to actions you can use

It also offers a bit of a tease as to what the next video will include. The next video we’ll get into how to submit the videos to multiple networks without signing up to any expensive tools or blowing your marketing budget. In fact, unless otherwise noted most of the strategies we teach are completely free.

WARNING…

You won’t probably remember to keep hitting refresh on the Youtube Channel, you won’t remember to visit my twitter account or much else, so If you WANT the video coming out next “Submit to 15 video sites on autopilot completely free”, then sign up to my newsletter on the right side. You’ll get a free book out of the deal (3,000 emotional words) so you can’t complain… You can always opt-out any time so it’s not like your signing your life away!

My friends, I made a bit of a mistake end of December in thinking that the Google Caffeine update was going to finally stop new websites and new links from taking crazy time to be utilized… It seems Google promised and even thru various developers I spoke to had PLANNED on making full use of instant news-style spiderage.

However, that’s simply not the case. Even with breaking news, we discovered last year when Michael Jackson passed away on us that Google was unable to keep up offering real-time results in it’s searches for appropriate terms…

What’s the big mistake?

From all the technical information I recieved thru various sources, and a few tests of my own… I saw websites popping up in Google within hours. Sometimes within hours of registration and zero links and starting to show up and rank… However this was not an effect of Caffeine taking action. This was a mis-leading fluke in some very non-competitive industries.

Spidering Indexing & Ranking

For the last 6 years I’ve been able to stand firm on the fact that it took 90 days to see the full effect of your effort in SEO, and it looked like in 2010, that would all change (As it should!). However, at least with this update, I strongly believe that’s not going to happen.

I noticed with some client websites in competitive spaces that the link strategies we applied are only now starting to take effect that are from nearly 2 months before… It’s hard to tell clients that to their faces when they’re so money starved, so anxious to make a buck that these long term investments will pay off… And in the SEO world, it’s easy to become unsure yourself! – But they do pay off.

I made the mistake of second guessing myself on that fact, and there are some general old-school strategies that are still getting results in low-lying markets and they will have a blip-on-the-radar effect on competitive markets… So it’s not without reason.

Anyway, enough ranting. Enjoy your day!

Rest assured that if your selling SEO even if you (By total fluke) see a bump in traffic in under 90 days it’s probably not intentional or should be expected…

I know I’m getting asked this by clients, I’m having friends and co-workers ask me this… It’s not an easy answer and it’s not something someone can easily just say… It’s one simple strategy…. Do this and you will be successful…

Fact is everything’s going Pink… (No-Follow), and everything’s getting censored and all the old white-hats and blackhat’s aren’t working the way they used to… To re-cap here’s a few strategies that won’t work well for you in 2010…

• Article Marketing (unless you plan to become the guru of the topic)
• Social Bookmarking (a few sites help, but unless your content is fantastic… this is dead)
• Paid Links (Google has ways of figuring these out even if it’s not ever published…)
• Blog Comments (yes, even the do follows don’t do much)
• Wikipedia Links (For SEO? Nope.. But for click traffic it’s still good)
• Social Profiles (for link building no, for ranking for niche phrases.. maybe..)
• Parasite hosting (not very ethical… and they do get deleted, then what?)
• Directory Submissions (the main directories and niche topic ones.. will help, but the smaller ones wont.)
• Hub page creation (for niche phrases, short term strategy perhaps but not long term as competitors creep in)
• Guestbook Signing (hello 2003, I was finding this effective for a bit, but now they’re so heavily monitored…)
• Online classifieds (45 days worth of link juice… if it doesn’t get deleted…)

So what do you have to do to get rankings and long term traffic?

Fact is that one of my favorite things to say for the last 6 years has been this… If it makes good business sense to get advertising from a certain site or join partners with a certain site, then it makes good SEO sense too. The best strategy that existed before modern SEO strategy is to get people talking. Write about topics people want to hear about… I think this will be the age of Real time search, where believe it or not… Tools like the Google keyword tool, Wordtracker and those others will be completely obsolete…

Your new keyword research tools are:

• Twitter (search “I want to know…” – “I can’t find..”)
• Yahoo Answers
• Google Answers
• Forums around niche topics

By the time 30 days rolls around and the search volume data is available to Wordtracker and Google, it’s 30 days old. It’s ancient news. It may not even *BE* In demand anymore. Oh yes, you’re going to see that real time answers are the next big thing. If you’re not on top of your game, your niche. If your finger isn’t on the pulse of your customer’s wants, needs and desires, you’re dead in 2010.

Am I being unfair? Nope.

Update from Wordtracker:

“The only point I’d like to raise is that Wordtracker’s data isn’t just 30 days old. While the US dataset goes back 365 days, new data is added every day, and this new data is between 16 and 30 hours old when it hits the servers.”

Many of the information and advice I post on here from time to time is straight technical traffic strategies and that was my original intention. However, it’s been on my mind to pass on some of the hard lessons of 2009.

For the last 6 years, I’ve provided SEO, Copywriting, PPC, and a whole heap of other services through my company, AnswersWanted Inc designed to boost client website traffic and of course, sales.

With the issues facing the american economy, I was forced to many jobs this last year that aren’t really my specialty… Things like accounting, sales, customer service, contract writing, and a whole host of other hats that I’d never had to wear… This forced me to learn some amazing lessons worth their weight in gold that I’d like to pass on to my friends and readers.

The Top Lessons in Offering SEO Services as A Freelancer…

#1. Always ALWAYS get a signed contract…

Yeah, small job, right? No need to get it all out on paper! I mean, seriously this job is going to be super simple and the client understands all the technicalities, and all the challenges etc… YEAH RIGHT!

Truth is, if you don’t outline what your offering, what your expecting from them, how much you expect to make, where you’ll meet, how often you’ll report, how many hours they get, where they’re money is going etc..

And.. plan for what happens if your strategy or plan doesn’t work… Sure, it worked the last 36 times, but that doesn’t matter. Plan for when it stops working and write a plan in your contracts for what then…

#2. NEVER offer anything free…

Seems so rude, rough and mean to say… In fact it’s hard for a guy like me to say that… over the years I’ve offered so many things free… Consultations, meetings, analysis, research… I want to help clients so badly that I’ll do anything to ensure they succeed…

Aaron Wall pointed out some time ago, and it’s a well known fact in business that the more you offer free, the more they want free. It never ends and it continues to de-value your work… Completely un-doing all the reputation earning and hard work you’ve done…

One day, you deliver an invoice and they scoff at it… How dare you charge? You’ve done it free all this time! Both you and the customer loose.

#3. Set expectations and deliver on them

Always create deadlines, and communicate them to your clients. Put things on the calendar, always give projects and jobs a timeline and stick to it. Just like being late for an interview, no one hires someone 15 minutes late. Always be on time, always set a deadline and meet or BEAT it.

Not only expectations within time, but expectations about the project…. How much traffic will a customer get with your strategy? How many keywords you focusing on? How many media outlets you distributing to? Seems like lots of work ironing out those details, but it’ll burn you if you don’t.

#4. Set specific hours, and take breaks.

Insanely important to not answer emails, phone calls or text messages related to work during your off time. You’ll never have a girlfriend or a wife very long if you’re taking calls, emails and texts during dinner, anniversary’s or honeymoons.

It’s not only that, having downtime helps you think, it helps you rest and prepare for a hard week. Some weeks might feel like you need less or more. In the end it’s like air, you don’t know how badly you need rest until you stop taking it.

#5. Don’t answer your phone

I’d even go as far as to say turn off your cell phone and office line durring business hours and respond to voicemails twice a day. Never answer calls… Why? When someone calls you if you respond while in the middle of a project they steal your time, your productivity and your energy.. They can blind-side you when you’re not prepared for it.. They control that call because they initiated it…

Let the voice mail catch it, educate your customers to leave DETAILED messages or they don’t get response… You can follow up via email if they phoned to check the number on an invoice or some other insignificant thing…

** Update ** – This isn’t really targeted toward 100% of clients, but i’m sure you have call display, and some clients can easily phone so much that you don’t get any work done. Anita and others are right though, there should be some hours you turn off the phone maybe 3-4 hours a day and just focus on work. Turn off MSN, Gtalk and other distractions too. Rich Schefren I think talks about the 45 minute egg timer of focused work for productivity too.

This isn’t my suggestion to IGNORE folks, or not provide good customer service. These are critical. What most probably don’t realize when reading this is that my business model often includes a weekly or every 2 week conference call. Not always, but often. With a setup like that, we’re always keeping in touch.

#6. Use some kind of online organization

One saving grace that has helped me over the last 2 years more than anyone knows is my Wiki. I use it like a CRM system for managing customers and clients.. I don’t always remember to use it for everything, but even just for passwords and contact info it has been a life saver. I can access it from home, office, client places and everywhere. It’s amazing.

#7. Trust your gut instincts all the way

Yeah, it’s hard if you don’t have a strong self esteem to trust your guts… and sometimes it’s tough to NOT take a deal or contract with a pushy client if your struggling for money, but trust me… Don’t do it. Your guts are the most useful business tool you have and the right opportunity will come along and you’ll know it, and when it’s not… your instincts are vital.

A few times I’ve looked at working with clients where it just didnt’ feel right, but I was in a position where I needed an extra gap filled to keep all my staff employed… and when my gut told me no,  I took the deal and it backfired.

#8. Startups…

In the contracting world, whether it’s SEO, PPC or any other service… Unless you own it, or own 50% of it… You really don’t wanna help startups in many cases. They don’t know how valuable your services really are, they may never understand, they may not have proven their product or have a good conversion rate… It could be complete garbage… Most independent contractors will tell you that the best clients are those who have spent $10,000 on a magazine ad “test” and failed.. living only to test again.. Startups spend $1000 and cry all the way the bank.

Some startups, organized and started by folks who have started many businesses before could be a perfect fit… but trust your gut before working with just anyone.

Anyway, to any contractor looking for advice re-selling internet marketing services, these are some of my biggest lessons that should make 2010 the best year ever.

Daniel J Deyette

#1. SEO will change in 2010

Old blogs seldom updated and seldom kept up will suffer and cry mercy to blogs that are updated every day – even if only updated by lesser knowledgeable people. This seems to be the iPhone Generation’s thirst for information at rapid speed. It’s unfortunate though because it does seem that older, quality information will be sacrificed at the face of “Real Time Search”.

#2. Cloud computing will really take off

Google’s new algorithm has been reported by several people to be dramatically impacted by speed. Which is one reason they’re putting out all kinds of tools to help webmasters speed up their sites. Now, no matter what you do, on a shared host your going to have slowdowns. Not having a nearby server in your area, is going to cause slowdowns… The only answer for total speed, is… The cloud.

#3.  Frequently updating old content matters more

According to a report by Mashable (known more for their social media news than their SEO news), even those slight updates like an old article with no change other than updating the death toll number on an earthquake report can quickly shoot up higher than other articles.

#4. Opt-in list matters more now than ever

As social media climaxes in 2010 being the ultimate interruption to workforces and to personal lives, email remains our old dear friend. A way to stay in touch with those with less computer skills, internet savvy skills and online Bravado. It’s also an excellent marketing tool and unshaken by Google movements and algo updates and unmoved by PPC costs.. The ultimate in online insurance. According to Pew Internet, email remains the top activity online to this day.

#5. Viral marketing campaigns

You’d better still be creating purple cows in 2010… But you should avoid the mistakes you made with the purple cows in 2009… Like not making it DEADLY easy to pass your purple cows along to friends via Facebook, Twitter and Email a friend buttons on your pages/site. Like telling the right people in the industry with popular sites, twitter accounts and facebook fan pages ABOUT your purple cow with the right language…

I could predict more – but lets leave it there for now – very interesting…

If you don’t understand something that I’ve written but desperately need assistance in some area, drop me a line. dano@answerswanted.com – I might not be available over the holidays tho.

Problogger launched a recent note on their blog combined with feedback from Twitter Users, that truly was worth repeating in every sense of the word.

It instantly made me realize what I was missing and challenged with… and what causes my day to go poorly. Yes, I’m a stats junkie and these numbers and challenges are reflected by that… So without hopefully too much frustration from Problogger, here’s the piece of his post that I’m going to re-print with the idea of “For internet marketers” instead of just “for bloggers..”

• Turn off Twitter – 6 minutes an hour
• Turn off Facebook – 3 minutes an hour
• Stop checking your Traffic Stats – 2 minutes an hour
• Stop checking your AdSense Earnings – 2 minutes an hour
• Stop Tweaking your blog design – 3 minutes an hour
• Stop checking your Google Page Rank – 1 minute an hour
• Turn off Email – 5 minutes an hour
• Log out of your RSS Feed Reader – 2 minutes an hour
• Stop checking to see if someone Dugg your latest post – 1 minute an hour
• Stop checking affiliate earnings/e-book sales earnings – 2 minutes an hour
• Turn off any other Social Media Sites (LinkedIn/StumbleUpon/Plurk/Reddit etc) – 3 minutes an hour
• Turn of Skype, Gtalk and all other IM services – 4 minutes
• Stop Reading Blog Tips and Start Blogging – 3 minutes an hour

His concept was how to gain 37 minutes an hour… but if anyone’s like me this is like 4 hours back from the average day… Well maybe 2 hours but still, very true and very useful!

Daniel J Deyette

For those who haven’t been paying attention or just simply can’t keep up with SEO and Google… This page should be considered one of the most comprehensive overview’s of WHAT Google Caffeine really is and what you NEED to know about it, and what you can stop worrying about if you’re thinking this is going to change all that much.

Google Caffeine Timeline – Leading up to Launch

August 10th 2009 Google invites webmaster community to see Caffiene Sandbox
August 11th 2009 Adds country & language specific feedback to Sandbox
August 12th 2009 Register describes GFS – Google file system behind Caffiene
August 14th 2009 Matt Cutts reveals the reason for Caffeine and some detail
August 26th 2009 Google goes decaf – shuts down sandbox for for upgrades
Sept 12th 2009 Rumors float around twitter of Caffine, but there isn’t any yet.
Sept 18th 2009 ReadWriteWeb says – Caffeine ranks the same 80% of the time.
November 10th 2009 Caffeine Sandbox closed from feedback completely.
November 10th 2009 Matt Cutts announces Caffeine roll out after the holidays
November 27th 2009 Caffeine Live on one data center – others sched for after holidays

That sums up where we’re at today, and – if you had time to read every article, you’d basically get the gist of why it’s called caffeine and what they’re planning to do — but i’ll spare you the reading.

Google Caffeine Overview:

• What does Caffeine do? Keep you alert!
  Google’s plan is to index search at a more real-time pace. I used to tell clients 4-6 weeks before rankings would really start to develop and that may have to change much sooner. Real time results isn’t just about Twitter either, it’s about blogs now beginning to have a bit more authority than they used to have.
• What was holding them back before?
  The file system was under a heavy load, the spidering was slower and the index held less information. Hence the invention of Google’s new file system GFS2 (Google File System 2)
• What’s New in Caffeine?
  Bigger Index – Google now holds more data than in the past.
  Faster Indexing – Google now gets current events quicker than ever before.
  Ranking Update? – Slightly higher authority of sites that are being updated more often than others. Blogs get more authority, but also get held more accountable for their approved comments & spam links.. Both posted on other sites and on your own site.  Other than that 90% of rankings stay exactly the same according to Summit Media’s Report after checking over 9,000 search keywords.

What should you be doing BEFORE the holidays are over to ensure a smooth transition and continued business into the new year? Quite simple… Here’s a easy to follow checklist to help you be prepared for the Caffeine update.

• Check all comments on your blogs & websites for any approved content linking to spam websites.
• Ensure your plan in 2010 is to update content more regularly & quickly even minor edits will help.
• Look out for a potential slap if you’ve gotten text content links from other blogs that were nothing to do with your community or niche market.
• If you haven’t already, sign up for Twitter and try and get into Google News and constantly update your material.

If any of your SEO friends tell you that the big ranking change in the New Year is a response to BING’s real-time search? Tell them straight up that you know for a fact GFS2.0 file system and the next generation larger index and faster indexing has been on the horizon since before Bing’s launch.

If any of your SEO friends tell you that Matt Cutt’s warning ” …but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.” as some kind of signal that this update is HUGE and will change EVERYONE’s rankings, they’re sadly mistaken. Fact is that Google wouldn’t be creating any friends by announcing a new algorithm during the Christmas retail season and Google does serve BOTH users and webmasters whether you choose to see it that way or not. Plus, not launching Caffeine durring the holidays is probably only 50% “doing it for the webmasters” and more like 50% because of Google’s yearly winter code freeze that happens every year anyway.. Which is why we saw so many new features launch in the last few weeks.

I hardly had the time to write this detailed post, for those who know me. But – I’m hoping to take the stress off everyone and educate those who wanna know more about this impending update.

Post your comments! I invite all conversation to this blog

Daniel J Deyette

You know, often I think we SEO folks get so tied up on links that we forget the fundamental concept behind good link building and simple rankings…

If your goal is to build an authority in your niche market, simply imagine what the top sites in your industry would look like from the outside looking in…

Imagine if you had the very best XYZ Industry Site… Who would link to it? Why? What other sites within your community would link to it?

I’m beginning to see that you can get hordes of traffic to sites as your building them up and designing simply by getting the right sites within the niche to link to you… I noticed with a few sites I’ve built up from scratch recently that what really drove their success was not the sheer volume of links, but the quality. I mean.. Yes everyone sings that song… But I mean more specifically… RELATED and TARGETTED sites… and it’s so easy to get those links in many cases….

Example… Lets pretend you designed the ultimate car transmission.

• Shifted faster
• Saved you gas
• Made the car quicker
• Lasted longer etc…

What kind of sites would link to your website about this performance gear?

• High performance car sites?
• Blogs about new and cool car parts?
• Mechanics?
• Distributors?
• Any auto show you attended?
• Consumer blogs?
• Auto journalists?
• Trade magazines?
• Car Forums?

Obviously submitting to a pile of article sites wouldn’t help you!! It’s not natural! Duh! No gear head’s gonna do that!
See, the more natural your link profile and how much it fits to that particular niche, the better off you are.. and the silly thing is… the more out of your comfort zone you get, the more you pick up the phone and the harder you work at building your business the more these things happen on their own anyway.

Building a natural link profile is easier than spam!

Until Next Time
Daniel J Deyette