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.”

#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

Sometimes, I think quite a few people get so wrapped up in sales that they forget the value of Branding. We’re often so focused on a well performing PPC campaign, and a well oiled and lubed SEO campaign that we forget that some efforts that do not produce instant sales and subscribers can have extreme value.

Igniting the conversation online…

Since the 1940’s, Coca-Cola and other big businesses knew the value of getting their logo and a graphic of their product on every wall, flyer and poster out there. They understood visibility = recognition & eventually sales. The more people know about something, the more it becomes socially acceptable and people become aware it exists.

How do you do that online? Especially, with a low budget?

Fact is… It’s going to take man hours, labor.. But it can be done quite affordably beyond the time it takes to do it. First thing is to consider where your target audience hangs out, what sites they visit, what questions they ask themselves each day… And what sites appear when they ask Google those questions in searches…

These sites your target audience hangs out on have comment forms (where you can make your brand, your name or your product name show up in regular conversation – NOT SPAM).

These sites have forums where you can bring up your brand/name/product in a conversation or leave it in your signature.

These communities are often wanting something they can sink their teeth into… Like wallpapers for their computers you can submit to tons of directories.. You don’t get a link, but you sure do get brand visibility.

Sites are always looking for fresh content to post on their blogs and pages. Short article snippets about relevant topics they wanna hear about.  Giving them re-usable content and letting them state who the author was and what the author is known for (IE: Product, Brand) etc…

But those aren’t the only strategies… There’s TONS of ways to get under the skin of that community and start making your presence known. What are you waiting for?

By getting your brand/name/product out there, you invite conversation.. The more conversation about you the more links build toward you automatically and without request. Thus in the end your SEO does benefit.

Dan

The old myth has been circulating around the internet for over 8 years, and I even believed it, thinking if a client had a brand new domain, with very little link popularity or even zero that there was no way to expect any kind of organic Google traffic early in the game…

PPC being your only option to getting some testing & search traffic up and going until we did a pile of link building and general press before you got traffic…

Last week, Google proved me wrong. Thanks Google!

Domain Created on: 18-Nov-09
Links built on the 20th (about 8 ~ 10 directories submitted)

Yes, within 10 business days, the site received about 20 hits via very specific searches. No, no waterfall or firehose of traffic by anyone’s stretch of the imagination, but still! Within 6 days, it started ranking in organic searches for search terms… Many clients have wanted the domain to show up for it’s own NAME within 2 weeks and that doesn’t happen, this one not only does that but also gets searches for it’s content!

Proof there are still niche markets to be had out there. Keep hunting, because treasure troves are still out there. No, 10 searchers is nothing to get excited about, but I will say that this market I’m referring to is huge, so when it DOES start ranking for the terms we’re aiming for we’re in for a BIG bonus.

Just wanted to clear that myth up because truth is the more content we post and the more links we build the more that will really come into play in the next few days.

I won’t post the topic or niche though because this client deserves a fresh chance at the market before anyone else jumps in…

But still, you should know it’s possible!

Until next time
Daniel J Deyette

So, with the widespread publicity around Google’s Chrome OS one might start asking themselves, why not go ahead and get into it the second it’s ready? Before you start thinking that this could solve your PC computing problems for good and that this is your next big move away from Windows & Mac operating systems and into the cloud computing world where data backups aren’t neccesary… Consider the Google track record for customer data and security…

Consider when A bank forced the suspension and deletion of a Gmail user’s account and all his emails.
(Imagine if that was your "email" program on Chrome OS)

Or when one of the writers on Lifehacker’s Wife had their Gmail account hacked and started sending out weird emails to her list…. (Imagine if that was your Chrome OS)

Or when one of the Twitter employees had their Google Docs account hacked , giving them access to her notes, spreadsheets, calendars and other documents the company relied on…

Cloud computing is a dream everyone shares, but it’s also a big nightmare waiting to happen. Google and others are saying you wouldn’t rely on this for your full time computing needs but a great thing for netbooks, but often I think the tasks we do on our netbooks and other gadgets are sometimes the most sensitive tasks we ever do!

Paying bills, buying things, logging into accounts remotely to check up on things, accessing our work VPN.. Many things you wouldn’t realy want to trust Google Chrome to help you do… If you really do everything online, that’s great… But I would suspect that Chrome OS might not be your best friend for all things "internet".

Consider Google’s track record for helping users with their "Free" services , and at what cost… I mean, when even Twitter’s Google Docs get hacked, who’s safe?

Recently, Microsoft announced they’d offer cloud computing and they built these huge servers in Chicago or somewhere in a big building filled with servers.

The concept is to offer a cloud computing service where all the processing and data storage exists only on the web and not on your local computer. Yes, there’s all kinds of big brotherish kinds of discussion possible… Yes there’s all kinds of scary thinking around who’s going to protect this info, who’s going to police it and what happens if something goes wrong…

What’s so scary about that? I mean, Amazon’s offering it and a ton of other places are, but seriously what’s the big concern?

Microsoft is notorious for not playing nice, not being good corporate citizens in policing data and they’ve also lost tons of people’s data recently on an enterprise level!

They’re building a cloud computing infrastructure for the wrong reasons. They’re doing it because their competitors are, and they want a chunk of the pie… Not because they can build the best cloud computing system in the world, and because their team is excited to do it…

They built a server operating system that uses juice to run the Graphical User Interface (Processor clock cycles) that could be very well used to serve users content… At least linux servers and other simple operating systems use 98% of the processor for the job it was asked to do!

Anyway, you may here more about Windows Azure and cloud computing from Microsoft over the next few months… Should be interesting to watch, really great article in Forbes magazine this month, well written.

Here’s a video inside the Microsoft Azure Facility in Chicago..

It’s kinda strange to look at this facility, it really does look just like “The Matrix” movie with all these rooms upon rooms of servers, it looks like something straight out of a science fiction novel. You can only begin to imagine the security concerns, the down time concerns and other issues that can come up from cloud computing and trusting all of our data to these huge companies.

Is it just me or is it really strange, scary and odd to think that Yahoo or Microsoft may one day have access to 1.2 billion SIN numbers with credit scores etc…

I can understand these companies know how to organize information on a colossal level… But these ’super companies’ are kind of umbrella organizations that really shouldn’t be involved in that level of gov’t in my eyes…

Depending on your situation, using free services online like Google Analytics, Gmail, Hotmail and other very useful tools could be costing you much more than you think…

Sometimes you have to ask yourself, what’s the cost?

Google Analytics – On the outside, their enterprise level statistics are extremely versatile. They let you view tiny market segments and massive movements and dig into every part of your site… All free! But at what cost? You can’t backup your data for previous years… That data is valuable and could be come important to learn from in future, however there’s no way to download it all *AND* If Google went out of business, or discontinued the service, it would be a dramatic loss for many. Omniture & Coremetrics offer more robust systems than Google Analytics, however the value Google’s providing becomes immediately clear when you discover how much it costs to go from free to enterprise level stats…

Google Gmail/Hotmail – You know, I can’t help but keep thinking about that Wired Magazine story  of how Google went and deleted someone’s Gmail account because a bank screwed up and sent a sensitive email to the wrong Gmail account. Or… When Stephanie’s account got Hacked… I mean, these things happen. Saying “They won’t happen to me” Is the same mentality of those people living in mobile homes in Tornado alley… It will eventually! An alternate option is enterprise level email like Microsoft Exchange. Offers webmail and years of backup and searchable emails.

Wordpress/Blogger – Hosted on their server… You’re at their mercy. You have no access to the database or the code, and if they deem your information innacurate, incorrect or someone lobby’s against you… It’s gone. Deleted. Imagine if a credit card company sues Blogger.com and 300+ posts and 4 years of stories about your children or business are gone! A good reason to not ever use those free services and keep your blogs hosted on your own server that you back up frequently. (You do back your stuff up, right?)

Google Docs and Other Office Providers – When your writing a nice love letter to your girlfriend, or building a comprehensive study on your competitors – or who knows what.. inside MS Word on your laptop, you never for a second think of it getting into the wrong hands, do you? But you should be thinking about that if your using the services of an online “Free” service. Yet, what happens if someone somehow finds/hacks/gets your password? At least stealing an entire computer is harder than hacking a Gmail/Hotmail Account.

If you’re a business owner of any kind, even a small business you have to consider what these “Free” services really cost you. Not just what features they lack but what features they INCLUDE that shouldn’t be there all to keep the service “Free” and whether you’d acutally gain money, traction or peace of mind from having the enterprise level versions….

Until Next Time
Daniel J Deyette

This is a test in some ways. I just found out there’s acually a free app for Blackberry phones (I’m writing this on a Bold 9000) where you can manage just about everything from approving comments to writing posts 100% from your smartphone!

I bet you wonder like I do how some folks manage to pour tons of content into their blogs each day with little time on their hands and you yourself struggle to get a few simple posts in a week.

Could this be a solution? Heck! I could have named this “how to monetize your spare time using wordpress and two thumbs” haha.

Remember not all blog posts have to be a long drawn out writeup…

This week when my new Bold 9700 shows up (on thurs or friday) Ill go ahead and post how well this works on that model.

If your a pro Blackberry – anti iPhone user like me who knows that productivity is more valuable than a popular toy the in crowd plays with then check out my post comparing the Bold 9000 vs the Bold 9700 (or Bold 2).

P.s. I’m not against iPhones, I just don’t think they’re as much a business tool as they are a personal toy.