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.

To a lot of people, SEO is a form of spam.  Over the last 10 years, affiliates and webmasters have invested an endless amount of time trying to arbitrarily “fix” Google’s ranking algorithm and cash in on the 1^st page rankings.  Users have complained, Google has invested in countless updates to trim the spam from their search engines, and webmasters have lost their income source.

What people forget however is that there are also A LOT of big brands and marketing agencies who use SEO.  Whether Google likes it or not, SEO has become an integral form of online marketing in the 21^st Century.

There no two ways about it – SEO isn’t going to disappear overnight.  I remember reading in the WebmasterWorld.com Forums, after one of the Panda updates in October 2011, that it signaled “the end of SEO”.  It was now impossible for one-trick ponies and black hat gurus to rank their sites in the search engines.

SEO still continued however.  Webmasters just worked out how to beat Panda. They, you, and me evolved.

Will Google be Able to Penalize Websites in the Future?

In a lot of competitive industries, such as gambling, porn and pharmaceuticals, everyone is engaging in some form of grey-hat SEO.  Even the biggest brands and companies are breaking Google’s Guidelines about link purchases and manipulating the search results.  I was at the LAC (London Affiliate Conference) last week listening to a lecture from UniBet’s Head of Search, who was talking about grey-hat tactics.  In industries like this, grey-hat has become the norm.

But whether or not the biggest brands are engaging in SEO is irrelevant.  The big issue for Google is that SEO is going mainstream, and it isn’t disappearing overnight.

The search engine index has become the new “marketplace” for ecommerce and retail sites, which are rapidly encroaching the high street market demand (particularly here in the UK and USA).  SEO is becoming a legitimate, cost-effective, method for companies to market themselves online – just like Facebook adverts and PPC marketing.

Some of the top SEO experts, working for big brands such as Amazon and BMW, have already estimated that grey-hat SEO marketing is around 10^th the cost of running an Adwords campaign for the same traffic and keywords.  Grey-hat SEO can also generate an ROI of 130%-500% depending on which industry you work in.

The problem for Google is that if SEO continues to become the norm for online marketing then they’re going to be limited to the extent to which they can penalize websites in the SERPs.

Think about it.  If everyone is doing it, it creates and ethical dilemma for Google.  Of course it’s impossible for them to condone link purchases (Google’s own SEO Guidelines literally haven’t changed since 2003), but there will come a point where Google has to realize that everyone is buying links.  The “natural” link graph won’t be legitimate anymore and neither will the “social graph”.

Companies have a “right” to market themselves through SEO just like any other form of online marketing.  It’s not even just about Google.com.  It’s about marketing through all of the majors such as Bing, Yahoo and Baidu, to which Google cannot simply say, “No, this is wrong”.  Google penalizing sites for engaging in SEO will be like a TV network prohibiting companies from marketing themselves during adverts.

Google Will Continue to Rank the Best Results for Users

Naturally, Google will aim to promote the best results for users and will continue modifying, adding or removing factors to their search engine algorithm, which currents stands at over 240 unique variables.

I think there’s some interesting economics data to think about in the future of SEO though.  If grey-hat SEO does become more mainstream, for example, then will the companies that invest the higher amount in SEO marketing deserve to rank 1^st in the search results?  Surely just like offline marketing, the most efficient companies will be able to outspend their competitors, which will also be the ones that provide the best user experience and value.  As such, maybe the top SEO spenders will be the best sites for users.

Google will get better at finding unique signals that indicate higher quality sites.  But the problem is that if all of the high quality sites are engaging in SEO, and all of them already have positive signals such as social media followers, return visitors and strong analytics then there will always be “something” left in the algorithm to game – hence SEO will never die.

Why Most of the Information your Hear About Building Brands is Wrong

One of the things that’s starting to drive me crazy is the number of bloggers and affiliates now providing guests posts talking about how you have to “add value” to the Internet.

It’s really easy to say this, but 95% of the time I think the people writing this are talking the talk but not walking the walk.  These are the same “innovative minds” that think paying someone to design a few info-graphics on their site all of a sudden makes their site amazing!

It doesn’t work like that.  The best sites and brands on the Internet have slowly grown over time, either through takeovers, re-designs, partnerships or mergers.  You can’t just take a 1-month old site and turn it into a brand overnight.  Brand building takes time and hard work, in addition to a HUGE amount of investment in human capital, coding, editorial staff, marketing teams, and resources – something which I’ve never seen anyone mention when talking about building online brands.

Everyone acts as though the difference between a low quality affiliate site and building a brand is just about a change in mindset.  It requires a completely different set of skills and investment though.

Trust me, I regularly talk to webmasters who spend $xxx,xxx on premium domains and then $xx,xxx on design and coding.  I know a huge company in the finance niche who are about to launch a site that they’ve invested over $x,xxx,xxx in the last few months.  These are the real success stories that will get you the “band metrics” you’re looking for.  Not the smaller affiliates that decide to hire a slightly better writer for $0.04c per work.

Why you shouldn’t Worry Too Much About SEO Changing in the Next Couple of Years

First of all, SEO hasn’t changed much in the last 5-10 years.  It’s still more then 60-70% about links, keywords and optimizing your page titles.

Sure, the latest 2011 search engine ranking factors from SEOMoz.org shows that social signals and brand signals are a tiny bit more important then they used to be. But so what?  The fundamentals have stayed the same.  Build good content, make your site good enough for users, and buy a bunch of links.

Facebook has remained a closed network, which prevents Google crawling a lot of its data, and if Social Media signals start replacing link metrics in SEO then you’re going to get a wild amount of social “noise”, and social media brokers selling Facebook Likes etc over the internet.

Even if content becomes more important, you have to remember that users prefer to read short 500-600 word articles rather then reading 1,000 – 2,000 word essays.  Long articles turn off users and if anything it will damage your user metrics and increase your bounce rates.  Hence, improving the rankings for sites with longer articles doesn’t make that much more sense if you’re Google.

The only thing that we can say for sure is that Google will likely be highly dependent on the link graph for the next 3-5 years.  As long as you keep building good sites, which are relevant and provide some sort of value to the visitor (such as recommending the top online casinos) then you are good to go.

This guest post was written by Adam, who has been successful in affiliate marketing in a number of industries such as gambling, trading, binary options and banking.  He also runs his own affiliate blog at AffiliateFYI.com.

When it comes to link building and search engine rankings, we all have a lot of questions. The truth is, as much as we would like to be geniuses of affiliate marketing, masters of our own domains (and web sites), and well trained veterans in all fields of marketing… we simply can’t be the jack of all trades. So it often helps to get advice from others in our industry who are simply good at what they do.

I’ve always found search engine rankings and link building interesting, so I thought it would be useful for everyone out there for me to interview Alex Pyatetsky, one of the co-founders at TheHoth.com, which is a service that specializes in link building through the use of article marketing and web 2.0 properties.

The interview below covers a wide range of questions that every day marketers may ask, while also getting into some of the advanced and most effective ways to build backlinks and seo campaigns around web sites. Should you have any more questions, feel free to leave them in the comments area and we will do a follow up post with all the answers. Enjoy!

What is the best way to start building backlinks for a new web site?

In general, I advise people to follow my Link Building Pyramid strategy. Its proven and it works.

Start off by asking all of your relevant contacts, industry and otherwise, for links on their respective sites/blogs. This seems obvious, but amazingly few people do it. These are people who will help you because they have a vested interest in your success. This includes employees because they want to keep their jobs, investors because your success is their success, vendors because they want to sell you more stuff, industry groups because they want you to keep paying dues and family/friends because they want you to remain happy and not kill yourself. Likewise, keep in mind industry contacts who want to help you out because they believe in “business karma” or may want to ask you for a link/favor at a later time. As you network with more people in the industry, you’ll find more opportunities to get these type of irreplaceable, authoritative links.

Doing this will build up foundational authority for your site. Think of it as showing the search engines “I’m new, but people like/support me.” This type of foundational authority allows you to be much more aggressive going forward with your link building and not have to worry if each additional link you build will sandbox you.

Another tip I’ve been hearing a lot recently is to start off building links with branded anchor texts instead of commercial ones. I haven’t tested this, but, intuitively, it makes sense.

For example, if you just started Petsmart.com, in your early link building you’d focus more heavily on anchor texts like “Petsmart” and “Petsmart.com” and ones like “pet supplies,” “pet food,” “pet toys,” etc., less so. The idea is that as time goes on and Google recognizes you as a legitimate, respected brand, your site will be able to handle many more commercial anchor texts. Personally, I’ve never gone out of my way to do this and still ranked my sites, but that may be because many of the links built for a real company will be branded anyway.  Regardless if this is true or not, diversify your anchor texts in the beginning a don’t get married to a single pet keyword.

That’s how I’d start.

That said, I think most people are too conservative when starting a site. If you build foundational authority, you should be able to start building links normally without many additional constraints. I’ve discussed this with SEOs that have ranked top 3 for terms you’d trade limbs to rank for and it seems to be a consensus.

Is there a certain amount of content a web site should have before a backlinking plan is put in place?

I have no hard rules for this.

If you have a real company, your site will likely grow and evolve no matter what. If its an affiliate site, I’d say have 10ish decent articles on there before you start building links aggressively and hopefully at least 5 more you can add later (ideally, you have some kind of ongoing content schedule). This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build any links to the first 10, but take it a bit easier (i.e. just social bookmarks). That said, if your foundational authority is strong, you can probably go hard from the beginning.

Keep in mind, there’s been a very strong correlation documented between the amount of content on a page and how well it ranks. Its hard to say if this relationship is causal or if longer content just ranks higher because its more valuable and attracts more links. Regardless, make sure that the pages you want to rank are developed with a generous amount of quality content.

For more info on this last point, watch the EXTREMELY worthwhile Panda Update webinar from Guerilla @ Dripfeed Blasts. Its one of the top 3 presentation on SEO that came out in 2011, if you ask me. (I can’t tell you what the other 2 are, I just assume they exist…)

How important is internal linking when it comes to search rankings?

Internal links count. Period.

If SEO is an election and building links is pounding the pavement and shaking hands, then internal linking is interparty endorsements. Its a way to throw around accumulated clout (e.g. site authority) and focus it on the pages that you want to win the SERP election.

Here is a true story to help illustrate.

I was recently consulting for a client who previously owned several of the top blogs in his niche. He’s in a space where keywords have very brief lifespans, roughly 2-4 weeks before everyone forgets and moves on to the next thing. Once upon a time, every post on these authoritative blogs would rank in the top 5 within days/hours. But one day, it all changed and his fat, healthy cash cows went on the Olson Twins’ diet.

Upon reviewing the site, I noticed that he had no “Recent Posts” section, which would create a site-wide link to each of his new posts. This would allow him to throw around his site’s built-up authority to the new pages that need it most, when they need it most so they can rank faster.

As we dug deeper, I learned that one of the talking heads in the SEO industry previously told my client that having a site-wide element like a “Recents Posts” widget could hurt his blog because it would count as duplicate content.

This, of course, is the epitome of B.S. Global elements like “Recent Posts,” “Most Popular Posts,”etc., create great navigational experiences for users and very strong internal link structures for crawlers to index featured pages. Its ridiculous to think that they could hurt a site.

So guess what! My client got scared and took off the “Recent Posts” widget on all of his blogs as part of a sweeping round of changes. Magically, all future posts failed to rank.

Sure enough, he implemented my advice, returned the “Recently Posts” widget, and with a few weeks he started killing it again in the SERPs.

The moral of the story is:

1) Don’t listen to the talking heads. [I'm referring to worshipped industry idols who preach unhelpful dogma, not the band. The band is awesome.]

2) Internal links count. Period.

What are the potential drawbacks to running an aggressive backlink campaign for a few months, then abruptly stopping?

Its not natural for sites to go from raging popularity (e.g. tons of links coming in) to total obscurity (e.g. no links coming in).

If this happens, your rankings may slip. Operative word: may.

Are you guaranteed to get penalized if you stop building links?

Do you have to keep building links at the same rate forever?

No, not necessarily.

If you build links to a page on a generally authoritative site over a few months instead of a few days, you’ll probably be in pretty good shape for the long term.

I’ve experimented with building links very quickly as well. A ton of links in a day or two makes your new page look like a news article with immediate, but not long term value. It can often rank very high very quickly, and then suddenly fall several pages to a more appropriate long-term ranking.

Likewise, if some of the links you get during your highly aggressive period are really solid authoritative ones, they will back up the others and your rankings may endure for a long time. I have a site that dominates for an entire product line worth of popular search terms that hasn’t had any links built to it almost for 18 months.

Here is one of the inalienable truths of SEO – If you’re competing for desirable terms and you stop building links for them, your rankings will fall sooner or later. Sometimes they’ll endure impressively long, but don’t be surprised if and when it happens. On the flip side, if you’re busy building authority to your site, putting up useful content, getting links back to it, etc., your rankings for individual pages will endure much longer.

Regardless, if you stop competing for a term, expect to be outcompeted by someone who wants it more eventually.

I see a lot of link build package on Fiverr, where you can have original articles spun into thousands of links back to your web site. What are your thoughts on these services, the quality of the links, and how they can impact a web site that is using these methods?

As someone who employs a sizable team of writers and link builders (shameless plug: The HOTH builds links for hundreds of agencies & publishers worldwide, every month), I’m intimately familiar with the costs of content creation and link building. Once you do the math, its blatantly obvious that you get what you pay for with these services on Fiverr.

First, lets look at the content. If you go an average internet marketing forum, oDesk, Elance, etc., and find an Indian/Filipino writer to write content for you, you’ll find that the baseline going rate is $1/100 words. You can find some for cheaper, but despite what you heard in 4 Hour Work Week about hidden Einsteins working for pennies on the dollar, writers working for less than $1/100 words probably produce complete garbage and have the reliability of fruit flies.

So let’s say you ask your writer to create a 400-500 word article (standard 20 sentence length), spun at the sentence level 3 times. This means you’re asking for 1200-1500 words of content total. That’ll cost you $12-15 at 3rd world rates.

So what are the guys on Fiverr doing? Although I haven’t done a detailed investigation, I can almost bet you that they’re mostly plagiarizing content and running it through automatic spinners, which turn it into gibberish. If you’re remotely paranoid/risk-averse in your seo, this is the diametric opposite of what you want your link builders to be doing.

Next, they are probably building links in an extremely primitive, obviously footprinted manner. The reason is because there is readily available software that can do this for them. In order to feed themselves off of your $5 order, they can’t afford to spend an extra minute on your work and will need to automate it however possible. This poses a rather serious risk for you. In the best case, you’ll be flushing a perfectly good fiver down the toilet and in the worst cases you’ll be putting your site and its rankings at risk.

A popular footprint that you’ll see all over Fiverr is the link wheel. Its one of the most primitive and easily detectable link structures out there. I’m betting that anyone that’s made it through 2 semesters worth of scripting language classes can write a script that detects link wheels. Trust that the folks at Google can do far better.

To build any links of quality takes time and skill. The vendors on Fiverr either have no skill and are therefore willing to work for pennies just to produce something, no matter how crappy. Or, if they do have skill, they are knowingly passing off a crapy, fully-automated deliverable to you. If they had skill and were spending time creating quality links for you, they’d be charging substantially more than a fiver.

The only value proposition these guys have is that they’re cheap.

Would you drive a car that had a 33% chance of spontaneously combusting each time you reached 20MPH? How about it it only cost you a Fiverr?

Lastly, can you tell us about Hoth and how it works as a backlinking service?

I’m thrilled you asked! I’ll give the short version here and invite your readers to watch the video on our homepage for the whole thing.

The HOTH is an outsourced SEO link building offering. It was created by accident when we had some extra capacity at our private agency, HOTH Tactical, and decided to offer it to other agencies. We presented our highly-evolved, viral link structure, which is virtually footprint free and allows us to build quality, contextually-relevant links quickly and aggressively without putting clients’ sites at risk. Upon debuting it, we got an unbelievable response along with some industry rockstar endorsements. We’ve been refining the product ever since and have worked on 1000s of campaigns for 100s of agencies, publishers and site owners to date. [For full viral link structure explanation, check out the video.]

Here are some quick reasons why people love The HOTH

A lot can be said about the way the 2008 Presidential election was won. Some will say Barack Obama would never have become President if it wasn’t for his aggressive online marketing and social networking exposure. As internet marketers, we can truly appreciate the power of the internet and how we can influence people through social networking. Through the use of capturing email addresses and using Twitter, Obama was able to connect with the younger generation and be cool with technology, in addition to being able to instantly contact millions of followers for donations. After the 2008 election, people finally started to realize the power of social networking and how online communications will affect the way elections can be swung and won.

With all of that said, let’s take a look at how some of the top 2012 Republican candidates are making the most out of their web sites and email and social media efforts, while trying to win the 2012 election.

Mitt Romney

From the landing pages listed in this article, I would have to say Mitt Romney has the best setup. There is already a massive following behind Gov. Chris Christie, and by associating his approval with Mitt Romney, it gives you more of a reason to follow/like/vote for Romney. In addition to an immediate call to action (email/zip code), the page also demonstrates all of the necessary social networking buttons than many of the other candidates lack.

Rick Perry

Though he may not be running in the election for much longer after her little stunt last night during the debate, Rick Perry still has a decent landing page for his web site. An immediate call to action with a nice looking design, along with the option to skip right to the web site if you don’t want to signup. Not providing this option, or making it hard to find, can really irritate web site visitors.

Herman Cain

Herman Cain has been in the news from the start, with his 9-9-9 plan, to the recent allegations against him. We don’t care about any of that… instead let’s focus on his web site landing page. A great looking design with minimal distractions (various colors), but still an immediate action, which is to enter your email address and zip code. Again, the option to “continue to website” is still prominent.

Michelle Bachman

The web site for Michelle Bachman has taken a different approach from the others in the group, which is to offer a choice to the visitors… something I don’t recommend. If you click “Donate Today”, you are sent to a long registration form about donating and volunteering. You also have the option to get email updates… which just doesn’t sound that exciting. Adding one more distraction to the page, you have the option to buy her book. When giving the user too many options, many will just leave or start browsing without a direct goal in mind. I would have just went along with the other candidates and grabbed the users email on the main page.

Ron Paul

It’s not surprising that Ron Paul has taken a different approach from all other candidates, not just in his politics, but also with his site structure. When you visit Ron Paul’s web site, that’s exactly what you get… a full web site. There is no email caption or donation button in your face, but all of the content on one page. You will see placements through out the site for email updates, donations and social links, but they are not stand alone lead generation pages like many of the other candidates. This is an approach New Gingrich did with his web site.

Republican Candidates… Who Get’s Your Vote?

No… not to become the leader of our country, but for the best web site and landing page? With the ridiculous amount of money that will be spent and wasted pushing users to vote for these candidates, if they don’t have the right online setting and social pretense, their campaign may already be doomed. With the simple means of ONE CLICK to “like” or “follow” through Twitter and Facebook, it’s surprising to see more candidates aren’t making use of these powerful means of communication.

With the passing of Steve Jobs, everyone has their own special thoughts and memories about how Steve and Apple has changed the world. One of my favorite movies is “Pirates of Silicon Valley“, which is a fun movie about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates growing up, and how they both started their own companies and got to where they are today. Over the next few days you will probably learn a lot of new things above Steve that you never know, such as he played a part in the construction and design of those crazy glass stair cases in Apple stores, along with the sleek wooden tables, which are based off the same design of the desks in Apple headquarters.

Yes, Steve will be missed, but he did change the world in the process and his products and brand is well known through out the world today, and for many decades to come.

With all of that said, let’s take a look at the progression of the Apple logo over the years, and how it’s become one of the most recognized symbols in the world today.

What’s that funny logo at the beginning? Yes, it’s actually the Apple logo back in 1976! The concept is Isaac Newton sitting under an apples tree. As you can see from the dates under the logos, this one didn’t last long. It was missing simplicity and color, which Apple soon implemented into their colorful new Apple design, which lasted over twenty years. With more people using computers and the internet growing like crazy, it was time for another updated and sleek design. Apple would go live with their latest futuristic, yet still simplistic Apple logo.

So what was the story behind going from one crazy original design to a completely new concept?

Jobs thought that the overly complex [Newton] logo had something to do with the slow sales of the Apple I, so he commissioned Rob Janoff of the Regis McKenna Agency to design a new one. Janoff came up with the iconic rainbow-striped Apple logo used from 1976 to 1999. (source)

Works for me! Imagine if Apple still had they same logo today? Things could be very different. I can’t imagine seeing that logo lit up on the back of laptops everywhere, or people placing stickers on their cars or getting “Apple Computer Co” tattoos on their bodies, like we see today!

With the passing of Steve Jobs comes one more Apple Logo that will be sure to be used and spread around for many years to come. Another simple design, yet is speaks so strongly to all the Apple users around the world about the loss of Steve and his impact at Apple. This design was created by a 19-year-old artist named Jonathan Mak, a self-described designer, photographer and philosopher living in Hong Kong. Since posting his design, his page has had nearly 900 comments and has been receiving world wide television and internet exposure.

Simplicity and color are key when it comes to creating a brandable logo. Just think about the greatest and most well known companies/brands in the world… Pepsi, CocaCola, Apple, Nike and Starbucks. They’ve all made progression with their logos over the years, but have always stayed true to have a brandable design with simple colors and design that are memorable.

By the time you read this post, another several thousands of iPhone and mobile devices will have downloaded the world famous Angry Birds gaming app. I’ve already written on the app several times now, but there just doesn’t seem to be anything that can slow Angry Bird’s growth down.

In the latest Angry Birds news, the company has now reported that there have been over 350 million downloads of their gaming apps. Quite amazing! Last year I wrote about how Angry Birds generates over a million dollars a month, imagine how much it generates now! With over ten times more downloads and users, the company is just a pure cash cow!

Here’s a few more amazing statistics from Angry Birds / Rovio.

• Every day over 300 MILLION minutes are spent playing Angry Birds on mobile devices.
• 3 MILLION plush toys of Angry Birds have been sold since June 2010… but latest reports are over a MILLION plush toy sales per month!
• Over 1 MILLION Angry Birds tshirts sold every month!
• Angry Birds is now playable on over 25 different platforms, including iOS, Android, Nook, Chrome Web App

So how does Angry Birds keep the trend going and make users keep coming back for more? It’s all about the updates and new versions of the game that come out each season.

Make Money Off the Angry Birds Craze

Let Rovio worry about how they can continue to bring in more and more players. Instead you should be worrying about how you can start cashing in! Refer back to my “Make Money with Angry Birds” post a few months ago and read about how some web sites are selling for over $80,000 on Flippa, just for helping other figure out how to beat Angry Birds levels! Since I wrote this article, there have been several more Angry Birds sites that have been sold for big money on Flippa.

As mentioned earlier, there is also a huge craze for Angry Birds plush toys and clothing. Yes… there are even Angry Birds Halloween costumes available. Halloween and Christmas are going to be very kind to Angry Birds this year. Don’t forget to get in on the action!