Web Marketing Business Blogging Link Building

Branding campaigns appear in many forms online besides the ubiquitous banner ad. There are blogs, RSS feeds, paid search ads (e.g. Google AdWords), contextual ads, natural (organic) search listings, text link ads, microsites, and podcasts, to name a few.

• Gain an understanding of each of these channel’s unique benefits and where each fit in your brand strategy
• Learn best practice techniques applicable to these new channels, with numerous examples

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New digital communication technology has drastically changed the landscape of possibilities in reaching your audiences. Find out what the latest technology trends are, and how they can be utilised to add value to your brand.

• New communication channels and their use
• Using technology effectively
• Viral marketing trends
• Emerging PR tools - RSS, blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, social tags, search engines

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I’ve posted onto BusinessBlogConsulting.com a list of my favorite WordPress plugins and what they do and why I like them. If you’re blogging under the WordPress platform, you might want to trick out your blog with some of these great plugins.

The list includes: PodPress, Popularity Contest, Google Sitemaps Generator, Akismet, Adhesive, Ultimate Tag Warrior, EmailShroud, Transpose Email, WP-EMail, WP-Print, Subscribe2, In-Series, Permalink Redirect, Gravatars, Subscribe to Comments. WP-Notable, A Different Monthly Archive, Related Posts, Related Posts for your 404.

That’s not quite 20, so I’ll add one more to that list — a suggestion from commenter Neville Hobson (thanks, Neville!) — FeedBurner Feed Replacement, which makes it easy to “migrate” your pre-existing RSS subscribers over to Feedburner once you sign up for the service (which is excellent, btw).

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What follows below are some of my favorite WordPress plugins and why. Many of them I have in common with Cavemonkey’s excellent Top Ten WordPress Plugins list. Here’s my list, in no particular order:

• PodPress - makes it super-simple to post podcasts; includes an inline media player
• Popularity Contest - offer a leaderboard of your Most Popular posts based on views and ratings
• Google Sitemaps Generator - creates a Google Sitemaps XML file. What’s killer about this is that it uses Popularity Contest’s ratings for the priority scoring that Google uses to determine how frequently to spider your pages
• Akismet - you’d be a fool to run a blog with comments turned on and not use this plugin to stop the flood of comment spam. ’nuff said!
• Adhesive - gives you the ability to flag certain posts as “Sticky” so they float to the top of the category page regardless of whether it’s the most recent
• Ultimate Tag Warrior - creates tag pages and a tag cloud. Great for SEO as I’ve said before.
• EmailShroud - an email address obfuscator to thwart those evil email harvesters. Scans for email addresses in posts, but won’t work on email addresses hard-coded into your theme.
• Transpose Email - another email address obfuscator. Doesn’t automatically scan for email addresses, but can be used from within your theme files.
• WP-EMail - “Email this post to a friend” functionality
• WP-Print - Printer-friendly version of posts
• Subscribe2 - let your readers subscribe to your blog updates via email
• In-Series - link posts together into a series, regardless of dates posted or categories selected
• Permalink Redirect - fixes the canonicalization problem where the same page loads whether the slash is there or not. Important for SEO.
• Gravatars - puts the commenter’s “Gravatar” image next to their comment
• Subscribe to Comments - a commenter can check a box on the comment form so that they get notified of further comments to that post
• WP-Notable - places a row of buttons alongside your posts so the reader can easily add your post to their favorite social bookmarks service (del.icio.us, digg, etc.)
• A Different Monthly Archive - a pretty way to display links to archives by month
• Related Posts - link to related posts automatically based on the content of the post
• Related Posts for your 404 - your File Not Found error page can now suggest related posts to the misguided user. Cool!

What are your favorites? Did I miss any important ones?

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Links are the currency of the web. Not only do their drive traffic in their own right, but they also are essential to high search engine rankings. Without good inbound links to your web site, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts won’t get off the ground.

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This session explores how specialized blog and feed (RSS/Atom) search engines gather content and provides tips on tapping into these growing forms of traffic.

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services, FeedBurner
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit

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A report conducted by the recruitment firm OfficeTeam, the Office of the Future: 2020, looks ahead to the future of office work and the kinds of jobs that will be invented in the coming years, which they purport will include such things as Virtual Meetings Organizer, Human Resource Coordinator, and Information Integrator/Abstractor.

It was the Information Integrator/Abstractor role that intrigued me the most. According to the report, the job will include the collecting, compiling, and indexing of text, data and images in order that this content can be searched in a variety of ways.

It occurred to me that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the information integrator/abstractor of the future. After all, what does a business blogger do but the following:

• identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
• take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
• ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
• cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
• republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world

This could be the job description for a Corporate Blogger in 2006 as much as it could be one for an Information Integrator/Abstractor in 2020!

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You’ve probably heard it before, that the vast majority of the jobs that our children will hold when they grow up haven’t been invented yet. But what you may not have heard yet are some example future job functions being postulated.

According to the Office of the Future: 2020 report, these new roles will include:

• Virtual Meetings Organizer
  who will help employees schedule conferences and set up the required cameras, projection systems, electronic whiteboards, meeting software, audio equipment and related tools
• Contract Resource Coordinator
  who will bring together the right contract workers for a given project, like a movie producer assembling a cast, camera crew and production team
• Information Integrator/Abstractor
  who will collect, compile, and index text, data and images so this content can be searched in a variety of ways

It was this last role that most intrigued me, since I am a search geek after all! I just imagine a scene from The Minority Report where the Information Integrator waves his/her hands in the air purposefully and talks to a computer while within a virtual world of information projected onto the back of his/her retinas. In this world he/she categorizes schemas for datasets, slices and dices incoming datastreams into more manageable segments, gives directions to an AI to do further categorization on its own, and so on.

As a business blogger, I also got to thinking that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the “Information Integrator/Abstractor” of the future.

Think about this, what does a business blogger do but the following:

• identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
• take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
• ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
• cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
• republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world

Sounds like a plausible job description for an Information Integrator/Abstractor of the Year 2020!

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There’s an art to making an effective link request. For starters, you should not propose a reciprocal link, for 2 reasons: 1) the reciprocal nature of the link will basically nullify the SEO benefit you would have gotten, and 2) all the link request spams flooding webmasters’ inboxes are of a reciprocal nature and you need to differentiate yourself as much as possible from that rubbish. Say these sorts of things and rest assured that your link request will go straight into the recipient’s Trash:

• “Hi, Let’s swap links!”
• “I’ve already linked to you.”
• “Great site!”
• “You already link to our competitor XYZ.com and we offer a better/complementary product.”
• “Please use the following text in your link…”

When requesting links, think and act like a PR professional or a biz dev director, not an SEO. Or even think and act like an end-user of their site. “Hi, I found a broken link on _____. Have you thought about adding features like _____ to your ______ on your site? BTW, you might want to add xyz.com and abc.com as links.” Just don’t be disingenuous; provide real value with your suggestions. Even suggest links to competitors or sites that you have no vested interest in.

We all get link request spams, even Google engineers! (such as this one posted by Matt Cutts). Here’s one I got recently:

Subject: Quality link request

Hello,

I found your website www.stephanspencer.com on Google.

We have a quality website at www.ace-mobility.com that will be well ranked on Google.

We are happy to upload a link onto this website in any way you request in exchange for a return link. I’m sure you appreciate that this would be of great benefit to us both.

To go ahead with this exchange please upload our link information below to your links page.

Please reply to to say where you have uploaded it.

If you would like your return link presenting in a particular way please include this information in your email.

I will then arrange for your link to be uploaded and email you again to let you know.

Thank you.

Regards
Jessica

Please note, the link needs to be set out as below in order for it to be returned.
[rest of email ommitted]

All I’ve got to say to that is, “Yeah, right!”

Eric Ward shared some secrets on how he crafts link requests that work in Thursday’s link building webinar for MarketingProfs which Eric and I co-presented. MarketingProfs will post the archive of the webinar in their Premium Library soon. And for those of you who aren’t MarketingProfs premium subscribers (you should join, btw, it’s well worth it!), I’ll see if I can get permission from MarketingProfs to post an archive of the webinar here on my blog.

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Everyone seems to be in a frenzy to get links to their sites. Usually for the wrong reasons and from the wrong sites. Terms like Link Popularity, PageRank, Hubs, Authorities, Hilltop, Sandbox, Anchor Text, etc. are being bandied about and discussed ad nauseam. Marketers obsess over concepts like link leakage, bleeding PageRank, nofollow tags, triangular links, link architecture, link equity. There are many companies selling linking services that are absolutely 100% worthless.

Get past all the misinformation and disinformation and join two of the top-most experts on link building, as they share their favorite tips, lessons learned, tools, and success stories.

This seminar will be rich with case study examples.

This seminar is for you if you:

1. Know that you’re missing out on key linking opportunities, but you just don’t know which ones and how to find them
2. Don’t have all the answers on what it takes to get coverage and links in the right places from the right people
3. Don’t have a current linking strategy or have one with holes

Successful link builders take an active role in the process. They don’t just sit back and hope that links happen. They make them happen! Take the first step by registering for this virtual seminar today.

You will learn:

• To build a comprehensive linking strategy (including: portals, blogs, feeds, niche venues, vertical search, authority sites, e-newsletters, zines, awards, mailing lists)
• How to get the best anchor text that you can
• Holistic linking
• How to receive online publicity
• How to purchase links
• How maximize on-site and off-site link architecture
• How to mine and analyze competitor site links and industry-specific links
• The biggest link building mistakes and myths
• To generate buzz
• How to write and release effective press releases
• Link building in blogs and RSS feeds
• How to the right people with the right message
• How to optimize your link architecture to get the most out of your inbound links

The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.

ABOUT THE PROF EXPERTS

Eric Ward founded the Web’s first service for publicizing Web content back in 1994, and he still offers these services today. His client list is a who’s who of online brands. Eric is best known as the person behind the original linking campaigns for Amazon.com Books, The Link Exchange, Microsoft.com, Rodney Dangerfield, WarnerBros, The Discovery Channel, the AMA, and The Weather Channel. His services won the 1995 Tenagra Award for Internet Marketing Excellence, and he was selected as one of the Web’s 100 most influential people by Websight magazine in 1997. Eric also wrote the Link Building column for ClickZ, the NetSense column for Ad Age magazine, and is a 4-star speaker at major industry conferences.

Stephan Spencer is founder and President at Netconcepts, a 9-year-old, multi-national interactive agency specializing in search engine optimization, web redesign, usability, e-commerce, website auditing and email marketing. Clients include Verizon, REI, Gorton’s, Cabela’s, InfoSpace, The Sharper Image, Wella, Northern Tool, Sara Lee Direct, Midwest Airlines, Guild.com, and MP3.com. He has contributed to magazines such as Catalog Age, Unlimited, Building Online Business, and NZ Marketing. Stephan is a frequent speaker on Internet marketing topics for organizations such as the DMA, the AMA, Internet World, and IIR.

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