Over the past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to stay at a few different hotel locations. Many of them had their gyms, pools and spas. While at the Marriott Newport in Rhode Island this past weekend, I started to think about how the way hotels present and advertise their gyms and spa areas are a lot like how marketers promote and generate leads through online landing pages.

Hotel Gyms and Landing Pages Sell Dreams

When was the last time you went looking for a hotel online. There is a very good chance that you went through picture galleries of their hotel and the various areas they may offer, which includes the gym and pool area. Most people will look at these pictures and see the gym and say to themselves, “Wow, that’s a nice gym, I think I’ll work out while I’m there“… but in the end we know 99% of the people at the hotel will never use the gym.

This is exactly what I saw an experienced while at the gym in the Marriott Newport, and this was a really high quality gym! Inside they had around 20-30 different machines and all of them are high end Precor machines. Definitely a $100,000+ investment alone.

Now what’s the return on investment for this gym area? Very hard to tell… but still, it’s all about selling the dream (experience) and adding it as one of the benefits to staying at their high end hotel.

Take this same concept and apply it to any landing page and how marketers are selling the dream of weight loss, dating or any other service or product out there. How many products and services that are actually bought through landing pages are actually used by the customer… probably not too many… it’s about selling the experience and dream, not the end product.

Visualization is Everything

As mentioned earlier, the majority of hotels are now booked through online web sites and having a photo gallery to demonstrate the best features of a hotel or destination is everything. Just like a hotel puts a lot of money and work into their gym area setups and experience, marketers and designers are busy working on their landing page call to actions and trying to display the benefits of their service or product in the few seconds they have.

Just like you wouldn’t want to promote a quality product or service that you believe in with a unappealing or cheap looking landing page, hotels aren’t going to want to post pictures of old exercise machines and scummy looking work out rooms. In the end, no matter if you are promotion a weight loss offer or something as simplistic as a gym at a hotel, it all comes down to selling the experience and quality of that experience.

Learning from Marriott’s Web Site

The Marriott company is very well at what they do, and that is getting people into their hotels and providing a quality experience. My stay at the Marriott Newport in Rhode Island was excellent. With that said, I am even more impressed with how their run their web sites and setup for each of their hotels.

There is nothing worse than looking to book a stay at a hotel, then they have a generic hotel web site that doesn’t provide location specific information and pictures for each hotel location. In the screenshot below you will see a screenshot of the actual site for the specific Marriott Newport in Rhode Island location.

As you can see, the photo in the screenshot on the “Fitness & Recreation” of the gym area is quite similar to the same picture I took myself. The pool photo on the web site is also the same pool that is in the hotel… my point is that Marriott is awesome at building web sites that are specific to every one of their main hotels and highlight the individual features and selling points of each… exactly what marketers have learned works best, keyword/topic/product specific landing pages.

While we are on the topic of landing pages… here are some other great resources I have previously written about.

Create Killer Landing Pages: Free Template – One of my most popular and most appreciated and commented on blog posts, is the one where I give away a free landing page for anyone to download and start using right away. If you are new to landing pages or don’t want to spend any money on a custom designed landing page, this is a great place to start.

7 Kick Ass Landing Page Tips for the Dating Niche – It’s quite hard to find a niche more competitive than the dating niche. Take a look at the many different landing pages out there and see what you can learn from how others are marketing their pages and increasing conversions with very smart and attractive call to actions.

How to Easily Split Test Landing Pages and Traffic Sources – There are many different solutions out there for split testing your creatives and landing pages, but LinkTrackr makes the process a lot easier by using their already built and hosted platform.

Let’s face it… no one likes sitting around and working on link building all day. Fortunately there are numerous ways you can generate legitimate links back to your web sites and blogs, and most of them can be outsourced. With Google wiping out all of the link building blog networks and changing their algorithms to rank web sites on a changing basis, it’s now more important than ever to make sure you are generating quality content and building links that Google deems as acceptable.

One link building and content generation service called GetLinksPro offers a wide range of link building solutions, which we will break down in detail below. It’s important to make sure that you are building only incoming links to your site that Google finds acceptable, as it’s now easier than ever for Google to simply wipe out your business and leave you sitting in the dust.

Here are some of the most effective ways to bring in quality links to your web site, which can also be outsourced if you don’t have the time and patience like many of us!

Guest Blog Posting

I’ve always been a big fan of guest blog posting and I even accept a decent amount of guest posts through my network of authority sites. In addition to writing guest blog posts for other high end sites and getting backlinks, you are also building new relationships with blog owners around the world. Blog posting is one of the most beneficial ways to build incoming links to your site because you are not only just gaining backlinks, but blog posts are read by a lot of people, which means they are more likely to click on your links and actually come back to your site.

I still make it an effort to occasionally guest blog on other web sites and blogs around the internet. The problem with guest posting is that it can take a lot of time and you really need to create great content to have high end blog owners accept your content. With all of that said, it can become quite the time consuming task to write up articles and then search out sites you can submit your content to.

GetLinksPro also offers a guest blog posting service, where they will actually write up original articles for you and get them posted on relevant and high end blogs. The cost for this service is around $20 per article. Consider that the average guest post will take you around an hour to write, research and contact other blog owners, this might be an excellent opportunity for you.

Article Submissions

Just like guest blog post submissions, it’s all about the content and process of writing and submitting your content to the necessary places. Many site owners are still focusing their efforts on article marketing. No matter what niche you are in, people are always going to be looking for more information and if you can provide these sources, it’s a great way to get incoming backlinks for your site.

Article marketing can be anything from article spinning and submission to multiple directories, or focusing on higher quality articles and submitting them to top directories like EzineArticles and GoArticles. These article directories have been around forever and still send a ton of traffic to their authors and site links.

Again, while article marketing is a great way to build up your links over time… it’s still time consuming. GetLinksPro also offers article submission services, which includes the writing of original content articles and submission to more than 100 different directories, with rates in the $25 per article range.

Social Bookmarking

Moving away from content creation, it’s also important to focus your link building efforts into the world of social networks and marketing. Once you’ve created killer content and backlinks, you will want to build even more incoming links to those sources so more people can find them. One of the best ways to do this is through social bookmarking. There are plenty of services out there that can automate the process, but they will usually charge a monthly subscription and many people believe manual social bookmarking is much more effect.

Like all link building and bookmarking solutions, doing them yourself will take a lot of time. GetLinksPro also offers a social bookmarking service, which includes 100 social bookmark submissions for only $15. The next time you write up an excellent blog post and want to get that extra needed exposure, for only $15 you can get your content and site across the major social bookmarking platforms.

Outsourcing Your Link Building Efforts

Guest blog posting, article marketing and social bookmarking… as you can see, there are plenty of ways to start bringing in quality backlinks to your web site. In the end it’s all about content creation and building quality links. The link building blog networks are getting wiped out like crazy by Google, so you need to focus on building quality backlinks and not waste your time and money of crap efforts that can hurt you in the end. In addition to the link building methods above, GetLinksPro offers a wide variety of link building methods for local advertising and sites of all sizes. Be sure to check them out and see how you can start outsourcing your link building efforts, which will allow you to have more time to focus on building out your online business.

I was devastated when I read an article from Zac on John Chow’s blog recently about how Google is shutting down blog networks, the major victim being Build My Rank. I was already considering using Build My Rank when this happened, but what happened proved the importance of not relying on just one traffic source.

You might be thinking the problem is with Build My Rank’s approach to link building, but I can tell you from experience that even innocent webmasters are suffering from the many changes Google has been making lately in the name of “improving search engine results”.

Traffic from Google is great, especially if you can master how to get a lot of it, but on the long run it is important not to let your business rely on just one source of traffic. There are smarter ways to generate traffic to your blog, especially ones that will ensure you don’t have to rely on Google forever.

1. Work on Building an Active Mailing List

You’ve probably heard it several times over that the money is in the list, but the reality is that the traffic is also in the list.

Your email list is an asset, and you can use it to drive traffic to your blog repeatedly if you can cultivate a relationship with your list.

I’ve heard it somewhere before that it takes around 7 – 8 appearances of an ad for it to stick in the head of the viewer. The same thing goes for email marketing, and the more you get in touch with your subscribers, the more likely they are to check out your brand.

You can build your list using any of the other tactics I’ll be sharing below, and you can also build your list using Google if that’s what you want. But first, focus on getting the subscribers, cultivate a relationship with them and look for ways to drive them back to your blog.

Aweber is the preferred mailing list among most internet marketers and site owners.

2. Multimedia Marketing

SEO is the rage these days, and a lot of us are focusing only on ways to get our site ranked in the top search engine rankings instead of capitalizing on the untapped power of multimedia content.

It could be via videos, podcasts or even presentations, there are huge sites online with an audience waiting to be tapped into.

Youtube alone serves over 1 billion views every day, and there are several other video streaming sites with a huge market share. The iTunes directory is also being used by millions of people, and that’s a great place for you to get exposure for your blog.

Don’t just focus on the written text. Capitalize on other forms of content to get more exposure for your blog.

The good news is that Youtube is owned by Google, and multimedia content is being favored by the search engines lately. In other words, instead of optimizing your blog to rank in Google, optimize your videos and audios to rank well in Youtube and iTunes, and you will increase your chances of multimedia success.

3. JV and Partnership Opportunities

There are influencers in every niche, and there always will be.

Smart marketers learn to leverage the audience of others. The reality is that there are hundreds of people who have spent years and decades building their own audience, and these people have been able to grow over the years and get their audience to trust them.

You can get more traffic to your blog by looking for a way to partner with these successful people while growing your blog at the same time. The truth about this is that it isn’t always about money, but creativity. Some people won’t give you access to their audience no matter how much you pay, but they will repeatedly write about you if you’re creative enough.

Sometimes, you only need to exchange a service they really need with them in exchange for plugging you to their audience. Some people you can target are email marketers, bloggers with big audience, social media influencers, and interview based sites. Look for ways to contribute value to the lives of these people, and they’ll happily give you free exposure in return.

4. Write Case Studies and Tutorials

Look for magazines and company newsletters in your niche, especially those whose services you are using, and look for a way to help them solve some of their problems. Sometimes, a problem they want to solve is getting people to believe more in their services, and a case study on how you got great results from using it will be mostly beneficial. Sometimes, a problem they might be facing is with explaining how their services work to their users. You can solve this problem by writing a tutorial on how to easily use the service. Each of these problems present you with an opportunity to market yourself, and if you can capitalize on this they will end up calling you back to share your experience in the future.

5. Reply to Every Comment, Email and Social Media Comment

Engagement is the currency of the web, and smart people are discovering this right now.

The real key to business success is to get a lot of word of mouth marketing; otherwise you will keep on marketing for years and have little to show for it.

The key to creating more word of mouth marketing isn’t just to have a great product; it is to create a good first impression. Reply to emails and comments on your blog in minutes, focus on helping your readers as much as you can for free, and they will contribute so much traffic than money can buy.

What’s more important is that we trust our friends more than marketers online, so if you could get people to recommend you to their friends you will be able to get more exposure than any marketing could.

This guest post was written by John Holt, a led lights wholesaler.

When you examine Pinterest looks only like a place for visitors to discuss photographs regarding wedding ceremonies, cookies, recipes as well as crafting suggestions. This is correct essentially (in large part to their mainly feminine market), and the great looking Pinboards are really easy to use, there is however a lot more under the skin than originally meets the eye. This begs to ask how can I the lowly internet marketer control Pinterest to get more traffic and prospects for my business.

1.  Showcase Your Own Brand’s Individuality and Flavor

Pinterest is a great destination to showcase your own brand names picture and function, if you’d like . . . nevertheless it would be much smarter to demonstrate an infinitely more entertaining and light-weight facet of the enterprise. Reaching like-minded pinners and discussing related pins that allude to more about your organization as compared to strictly clients are a powerful way to help improve your boards while at the same time staying strongly related your own interests. You’ll find nothing incorrect with having a few boards which can be associated with the company’s graphics or tangible products. The most effective businesses boards I’ve noticed doesn’t just provide their particular company products, and can additionally show off their staff’s picks regarding movies and guides as well as anything else that tickles their particular taste. Producing your own brand to stand out through exposing several personalities is a great method of getting seen and will aid to increase your Pinterest user profile.

2.  Make Sure Your Posts Are Marked

As a website design company I am aware far to often of the perils associated with ripped off articles as well as possible copyright infringements, they take place on a regular basis. So when it comes down time to start revealing my own use the concept of Pinterest, My partner and I felt like it will be sound practice to incorporate a watermark and a footer certification to be able to use my own images. This provides me with exclusivity on them and when they may be shared and also repinned, the users that discover their whereabouts are fully aware that they may be my articles. This might apply nicely to your photography enthusiasts, designers, musicians, and also graphic designers especially. Giving a  a way to find their way back to your website is vital and you’ll notice the results in your site visitors increases when you implement this particular tiny yet essential step.

3. Assist – Courses – How-to’s & Infographics

Pinterest not merely allows for you to only pin a number photos, you can also contain videos which is when the actual energy is needed. Simply by featuring simple how-to’s or perhaps training video clips over a wide array of topics linked to your business, you are able to make use of consumers looking to find out more about a specific niche subject matter and as a result they’ll share and also repin you meaning more traffic for your company.

Infographics tend to be an excellent way of “lending any hand” and oftentimes infographics will provide a ton of insightful info about your small business or even specific factors you’re seeking to market.

4. Make Use of Pinterest’s Present Area

Pinterest not just permits you share pins and Pinboards, you might be running a good e-commerce system this will let you concrete service or product you desire to provide, you may use the actual devoted gift area on Pinterest that permits you to draw images through cost whenever uploaded. This process gets all of them instantly listed in the Gift’s section that can assist bring customers and probably sales for the merchandise or providers.

5. Help Additional Pinners Locate Your Content

Inside comparable fashion to be able to Tweets, Pinterest allows you to make posts that consist of #hashtags within your information which along with labeling the hooks as well as panels will make all of them quicker to discover if people are searching for the brand name or perhaps product. Users can easily search simply by entering keywords, planks the ones which means you ought to do your prefer and be sure you use key phrases which can be very easily familiar and allow you to ultimately easily be identified.

Pinterest is a superb local community much like some other social networks on the web nowadays as well as the same rules utilize. Offer top quality content, don’t unsolicited mail your product or service incessantly and also communicate as well as engage folks of the local community to aid develop have confidence in and brand name awareness. Pinterest provides verified it is not going anywhere soon, therefore hop on the pinboard and see what type of good success you are able to push for your business.

This guest post was written by Lorne Fade, an Internet search marketer for 9th sphere a Toronto SEO, web design & marketing firm.

Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of activity and talk about the latest Google updates and algorithm changes. Just like Google went after the article directories and content farms last year, now they are going after the link building and blog networks hard!

Last week one of the largest and most success link building services and blog networks, BuildMyRank had to completely shut down their business and service. For those of you that don’t know already, BuildMyRank was a link building service where people could pay a monthly rate to subscribe to their service and submit 150+ word articles. Once these articles were submitted to the site, they would then be placed on one of the high page ranking sites in the network. Once Google came around and de-indexed all of BuildMyRank’s blog networks, they pretty much made them useless. BuildMyRank came out with an announcement last week that they had to close the service down due to the mass indexing of their site.

So what does this mean for linking building and blog networks?

There are still plenty of BuildMyRank alternatives out there, and many people feel they are next on Google’s radar, if not already. Once a complete blog network like BuildMyRank is shut down and de-indexed, it pretty much kills any web sites that were relying on this one platform for generating links to their site. Getting top ranking listings through services like these for long tail keywords was quite successful. Unfortunately too many sites were self reliant on just using BuildMyRank and not making use of other legitimate link building methods such as guest blog posting, article marketing, press releases, social bookmarking and more.

It will be interesting to see how these other link building networks continue to operate over the coming weeks and monthly. Many of them have already had some form of de-indexing happening to their networks, as Google continues to crack down on link selling across the board.