The web today is comprised of trillions of links. Who links to your site and how they link to it is the fundamental factor driving your search engine rank and your website traffic.

If you're not sure where to begin when it comes to building links with other sites, here are 10 easy ways to get started:

1. Create a blog.

Creating content on a consistent basis not only builds links internally (by linking out from your posts), but it also gives you the ability to build links naturally, because content is your greatest asset when attracting links. A blog is essential to many strategies outlined here, such as linking out. You absolutely need a blog in today's online environment to survive.

2. Internal linking.

You have pages and posts on your website, so make the most of them. Internal links are huge for link building because you can control everything about them, from the location on the page to the anchor text. This is something that most people overlook--please do not! Make sure to steer your content in the direction of other posts or pages so you can link to them.

Warning: Do not use exact-match anchor text in your site's navigation (sitewide links). This will most likely be another spam filter from Google.

3. Resources/links pages.

Other webmasters have created links, or resource, pages, and these are legitimate opportunities to get links. If the links on that page are relevant, you've got a chance.

Unfortunately, it's not as easy as just asking for a link. The following two suggestions are specific strategies to help you get webmasters liking you before you ask and greatly increase your chance of getting the link.

4. Ask people you know for a link.

Whether it's your friends, relatives, employees, colleagues, business partners, clients, or anyone else, ask them for a link. Someone you know has a website or blog, so take advantage.

5. Make it easy to link to you.

If you want people to link to you, make it easy for them. Create HTML-ready snippets that people can plug right into their content to link to you, because some linkers in your community might not be too web-savvy. Either create a "Link to Us" page or use a little JavaScript to generate the HTML at the end of each article or post.

Note: This might not be the best option for every community. Are you in the cement niche? Then this is perfect. Are you talking about internet-related business? Then this might not be your best bet, because the majority of your audience probably already knows how to link.

6. Research your competitors.

When it comes to finding new link opportunities, competitor research is one of the first things you should do. Essentially, you're piggy-backing off their success. While some links are unobtainable (that is, a random mention in a news post), others can be diamonds in the rough (a high-quality niche directory).

Try using SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer for this. Plug in your competitors and export their backlinks to a CSV file. Do this for all your competitors so you can get all their links in one place in a spreadsheet workbook. Then you can sort them by various link metrics to find the best opportunities.

7. Link out.

Linking out is huge. Don't be a link hoarder; you're going to create content, so use it to gain favor with other people.

8. Build relationships.

This is the No. 1 link-building strategy in the world. Get to know people! Build relationships with them, because it'll come back to you in the form of links (that is, if they're the right people).

The best part about this is that it's just like real life. Remember how people say, "It's not about what you know, it's about who you know"? The same goes for link building.

9. Niche-specific directories.

As opposed to general web directories, niche-specific directories only accept sites that meet a certain topic criteria. For example, one directory might only accept sites about arts and crafts. Some of these directories are free, while others are paid. One example is Business.com, a directory for business websites. The cost is $299 per year.

10. Paid directories. 

Some directories ask for money before accepting your link(s) in their listings. Dir.Yahoo.com, for example, is a paid directory. Once again, while some of these can pass on legitimate value, others offer little and aren't worth your time or money.





































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Outreach and submissions only go so far. Sometimes you have to let your content attract links naturally to get the results you want. If you create content that naturally attracts links, it not only saves you time getting them manually, but it also increases engagement on your blog (if it's worth linking to, it's usually worth reading). This is where your content and link-building strategies meet.

How-tos and tutorials.

Whether it's a tool, DIY project or anything else, showing people exactly how to do something is extremely helpful.


Quizzes and tests.

Testing your reader's knowledge and letting them share their results with their friends is always a great idea.

Timely or seasonal content.

Creating the right content at the right time can get you a ton of attention. Creating an infographic on the statistics behind this year's Super Bowl the day after the event is a perfect example. The same goes for seasonal content. Whether it's Valentine's Day, Halloween or Christmas, you can create holiday-themed content that can get a ton of attention over a short period of time (and every year after).

Case studies.

Everyone loves a good case study. Real results with real numbers can instantly catch people's attention. If you offer a product or service, this is a no-brainer. If you give out advice, find someone who's used it successfully.

Printable resources.

People like hard copies of useful guides. By creating a printable resource with an awesome design, you can almost guarantee a few links will come your way.

Creating contests.

Entering contests is great for link building, but creating them is even better. By requiring your participants to write about and link to the contest from their blog, you'll not only get links from them, but their posts will increase the exposure of your contest, thus growing your number of contestants -- and thus, the amount of links you get -- at an exponential rate.

Infographics.

People love data, but sometimes it's hard to digest. Creating an infographic on it is a popular way to change that. Not only will it naturally attract links, but you'll also get other bloggers embedding it, which means even more links. Not to mention you have control over the anchor text of the embed code.

Web tools.

Creating free online tools, such as specialized calculators, is a fantastic way to attract links. They don't even have to be complex. If it could save me five minutes, then I'll probably use and share it.

Interactive -- content your user can alter, change, or remix.

The next big thing in linkbait is interactive content. The reason: because it's flat out cool and few people are doing it.

Review something new.

Just like with news, if you're the first to review something, and if it's awesome, your review will get tons of attention. You can also use this to gain favor with the creators of the product or service you're reviewing.

Webinars.

Spending a couple of hours every month doing a webinar is a great idea for attracting links over the long term. Set up a page on your website solely dedicated to webinars and as you create new ones, the links will roll in each time.

Surveys.

There's generally a two-step process to attracting links with surveys. The first step is asking people to participate. If it's on a particularly interesting topic, reaching out to bloggers, experts and industry news sites to ask to spread the word both on their blog and on social media sites is a great way to attract your first wave of links.

The second step is releasing the results. Combine the release with some nice visualization and a bit of controversy, and you've got yourself a fantastic piece of linkbait.

Google maps mashup.

Google Maps is a great tool, and you can use it to attract links if you get it in front of the right audience. A great idea would be to map out all the industry events taking place this year.

Lists.

1. People
2. Love
3. Lists.

Why? Because the content is super easy to digest.

Debunking myths.

If there's a common misconception in your industry, make sure you let everyone know. If it's big enough, and if your statements are bold enough, you could get some serious attention.

Interviews.

Interviewing industry experts will always be a fantastic way to attract links, but getting them to interview is only half the battle. The other half is asking great questions. A good way to find out what questions you should ask is by holding a Q&A with your blog's community, whether it's on Google+, Twitter or any other site. Ask what kinds of questions your readers want to see answered.












































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Linkable assets are the experts, pages, widgets, tools, discounts, relationships and any other people or pages related to your organization that incentivize others to share a link with their site visitors. When you understand what's linkable about your organization, as well as what types of assets earn links in your market, you'll have a much easier time identifying your link opportunity types. Knowing these types makes you more effective at prospecting for these opportunities.



The following linkable asset categories will help get you thinking about what your organization's linkable assets could be. Thinking broadly and creatively at the beginning of a link-building campaign can open you up to a stronger, more effective campaign design. After all, you could be sitting on a link magnet and not even realize it.

Free apps and tools on your site.

Do you provide any free applications or web-based tools to your site visitors? If so, it's likely that these have already attracted links naturally. If you haven't promoted these tools yet for the purpose of link building, then these assets could help you develop even more links. Be careful, though, when designing and building a tool or app -- they can be expensive (sometimes two to three times what you expect or what you're quoted), can seem to take forever to develop, and could still flop. That said, nothing demonstrates your expertise like a custom tool you've crafted to make your customers' lives easier.

Products and services to give away for donations, contests or review. 

If you have products or services you can give away, you can earn links through donation thank-you pages, through contests, and via product/service reviews from experts in your market. Often this asset is one of the easiest paths to developing links. However, it's fairly easy for your competitors to emulate. Further, these approaches to link building can create enormous and unexpected logistical nightmares, such as shipping and packaging, or even getting the winner's contact information from the site conducting the giveaway.

Widgets, tools, images and data for publishers. 

Have you created widgets, tools, images, or data that publishers of other websites are free to add to their websites? Infographics, embeddable tools, research data, and other types of information created for the express purpose of giving it away is a classic and powerful method for earning links. If you have any of these assets and you haven't aggressively and extensively promoted them, then you're leaving valuable links and relationships on the table.

Thought leaders and subject matter experts. 

Are there thought leaders and subject matter experts in your organization? Do they have time to write or in some other way share their expertise with the market? These linkable assets could generate links in the form of interviews, guest posts, and quote contributions to industry news publications.

Partner relationships.

Do you have business partners, vendors, customers, and technology licensees? Each of these represents a potential link in the form of testimonials, published client lists, and "powered by" buttons. Gather a list of your vendors and partners, and look for ways to acquire (and give) links to all of them. Think interviews, think link requests for their vendors and partners pages, and think updated "powered by" badges.

Job listings, events and coupons. 

If your organization consistently publishes job openings, puts on events, or launches new products, then you've got quite a few link opportunities open to you. Colleges and industry vertical sites are sometimes willing to link to pages that feature new job openings. Many cities have event calendars that will publish details about your event and post links on their site for sign-up and more information. If you consistently offer coupons to your customers, then you'll find massive numbers of coupon-listing sites, many of which link back.

Consistent publishing via blog, video, podcast, Twitter and more.

Do you or does your organization publish content consistently? These linkable assets open you up to numerous link opportunity types from around your industry -- everything from blog directories, to niche social news sites, to blog lists, to PDF submissions, to distribution sites. In some industries, the fact that your CEO blogs is link-worthy and notable in itself.

Budget.

Money is almost always a linkable asset in that if you have the money, you can offer it to another site in exchange for a link. However, the link opportunities that you can purchase are often easy for competitors to duplicate. Further, some search engines aggressively penalize (in the form of lowered search rankings) purchased links that aren't labeled or coded as advertisements, making them a potentially risky investment that could end up costing far more in damages than they bring in search traffic. Some sites, such as directories, require a budget as well.


































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The web was dominated for a decade by two key elements. Search engines and content.

If you wanted  information you asked Google. It was simple.

This led to the rise of a new industry called “search engine optimization” or if you love acronyms “SEO”. Experts good, bad and scammy emerged from the web mist to offer your website the holy grail of being ranked number one on a Google search result page. This was important because that gave you 40% of all clicks. Ranking number one could mean the success or failure of your online business.



This led to dubious practices and activities and content farms that just replicated content popped up. Unique and interesting information was being buried and overwhelmed by poor duplicate content.

Google decided to change the game as their search results were becoming more irrelevant and of lower quality.

They decided to work out ways to identify great content through social signals (hence the launch of Google+) and other technologies that rewards the content creators and not the content copiers.

Google got smarter. The web became more human.

Content on purpose 

Content creation on a smarter and social web requires you to ask some questions. So before we start writing our next piece of copy we better stop and ask ourselves what its purpose is when published on the Internet.

• Is it fresh and unique, or are we just adding to the duplicates, risking to get penalized?
• Is it readable and persuasive, or it pushes our readers away?
• Does it answer the questions the readers ask, or are we wasting their time?

Writing a high quality copy requires thorough research on the subject, taking you to all sorts of blogs and articles people from all around the globe have shared, but sadly, this pile of content often consists of far too many articles that fail to comply with the three goals we mentioned above. Not that these three goals of a quality copy are all we should meet, but if you want to truly grab the interest of your target audience, you should give them a second thought before you or your marketing team decide to publish the next post.

Since Google Panda was launched  you should be aware of duplicate content on your website, so writing the unique and quality content is extremely important, with free duplicate content checker PlagSpotter you can find out who steals your works without citing you.

Google is changing copywriting

It is true that Google’s algorithmic updates have caused many transformations in SEO copywriting. We all need to align the way we write with these constant changes. But, instead of us trying to stay one step ahead of the search engine equations, we can create our content with our human audience in mind, and meet them at the finish line.

Google will always have good user experience as their primary goal, and each update they make will be in the direction of better understanding of the content from a human perspective. If you guide your copywriting to provide what your readers look for, not only that you’ll get more loyal audience that loves to come to your website and read what’s new, but Google will also award your actions with a higher ranking in their search result pages.

So how should you write?

Here’s what you should ask yourself before you publish your writing on the Internet:

#1. Would my friends or colleagues walk away if I read this to them?

Read your copy out loud to better understand the flow for each sentence and paragraph and to see if the content is interesting enough to capture the interest of an audience. This will also allow you to clean up your typos, punctuation errors and unnecessary words.

#2. Do the headlines in the copy explain enough about its content?

If somebody reads only the headers of your article, will they understand what the article is about and what is its main idea? Ideally, the headlines should, provide transition and a description for each of the paragraphs.

#3. Are the keywords repeating too often?

When writing content for the Internet there must be some focus on the important keywords, but the density should always float somewhere in between 1% and 3% if we don’t want the writing to sound forced or spammy.

#4. Are my intentions being honest as a writer?

Why are you writing this copy? What is your purpose with it? Is it a complete plagiarism, or an effective idea sharing? Provide your readers with links to other websites, articles, pictures or videos related to your content to be able to achieve better SEO.

#5. Does the copy offer anything new to the readers?

This question builds off the previous point – will those who read your writing learn something new? Your content should match your goal of satisfying the curiosity your audience has on the particular subject. Only new, fresh and organic content is the way to more quality visits and better rankings.














































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Global revenues from social media are projected to hit $16.9 billion in 2012, a 43.1% jump over the previous year, according to Gartner.

The bulk of that will come from advertising, which will contribute $8.8 billion. Social gaming revenue is next at $6.2 billion and subscriptions account for another $278 million. The researcher predicts “moderate growth” for the segment in coming years, though Gartner declined to share specific figures.

The advertising figure appears to be in line with a similar projection by eMarketer, which predicts $7.7 billion in social media ad revenues for 2012 and $11.9 billion by 2014. The U.S.’s share of such revenues will stay at around 53% over the next couple of years, according to eMarketer, which does not have an aggregate figure for social media revenues.



To put the figure in perspective, the Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates that global ad revenues for Internet advertising were $31 billion in 2011. Display ads accounted for $11.8 billion. The IAB didn’t break out figures for social media advertising.














































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Winning in sport or business is imagined by almost everyone. What child hasn’t dreamed of being a star athlete or a millionaire.

Imagination is a powerful force that can motivate us to succeed in life.

Imagination is also one of the keys to enjoying a book as our mind takes us on journeys that suspend us from reality. Children are fabulous to watch as they save damsels in distress, leap tall buildings in a single bound or fly to faraway galaxies. All done while wearing pyjamas and from the safety and comfort of  the family home.

As a child I constantly imagined my self as having super powers that bent and warped my world the way I wanted. Cartoon books helped maintain that illusion which provided constant entertainment for me without the iPad or Xbox to be seen. Flying was one of my favourites.

Magical and marvellous powers are something the comic series “Fantastic Four” had in abundance and were a dysfunctional yet loving family who possessed super powers that saved the world day in and day out.

The Fantastic Four received their powers after being exposed to cosmic rays during a scientific mission to outer space.

“Mister Fantastic” who is the leader of the “Fantastic Four”, is a scientific genius who can stretch his body to incredible lengths and shapes. The “Invisible Woman” can render herself invisible and project force fields. The “Human Torch” can generate flames and can fly. Monstrous “Thing” possesses superhuman strength and endurance.

Now as a marketer, who wouldn’t want magical powers that make your brand and ideas spread magically and strongly at lightning speed?

Maybe being invisible though, is not something that business owner would want to invoke.

Building the Online Assets

Before we summon the super powers of the “Fantastic Four” of  digital marketing you need to have established the businesses online assets.

It is not hard to place value on our bricks and mortar assets whether it is your shop or office and all that is contained within those walls. A business has real physical objects and value that accountants love to count and stack. Things that you can see and touch are easier to place a value against. What is not often valued properly are the intangible online assets that are now vital to  every business.

• How do you value a website that receives 300,000 page views a month and 170,000 unique visitors?
• What is the financial value of  a Facebook page with 100,000 fans that provides customer feedback and crowd sourced  research worth to a business?
• What is a Twitter tribe of 100,000 worth that allows you to spread an idea or a promotion in an instant?

These are assets that are hard to value but their importance is usually and “vastly underrated” because your accountant doesn’t know how to.

1. The Website Assets

Websites fall into three broad categories. The corporate content website, the online store and a blog.  A well designed website that makes it easy for customers to navigate and use is worth gold.

2. Social Network Assets

Building a tribe and network of loyal customers on multiple social that you can engage and communicate with is now mandatory. These assets give your brand reach and leverage and should continually be built and invested in. How to do that efficiently and well is the challenge.

3. The Mobile Assets

Mobile “Apps”. Building mobile apps that make your content and products easy to view are starting to become an essential part of  a businesses online presence. Also “optimizing for mobile viewing” requires building websites that are easy to read on  a Tablet or smart phone and can now make a big difference to obtaining that lead or inquiry or sale for your online store. Last year nearly half a billion smart phones were purchased and their users are buying and sharing information in their billions every day with these little devices that are adictive and portable. There is now nothing to stop people buying on the bus or on the beach..and they do!

There are two addictive trends in digital. One is social media the other is smart mobile devices. Don’t ignore them. Build mobile assets.

The myth of “build it and they will come”

There is a myth about building your online brand circulating which spreads the fable that if you design and build a great website then traffic will just “turn up”. The reality is much starker. Once the online assets are built then the hard work begins. Marketing and promoting with email and social media marketing, writing contagious content and optimizing your online assets for search engines are all essential activities that need to be resourced.

This activity needs to be relentless and persistent. It is not “set and forget”

How to Win in a Digital Economy?

The Fantastic Four of Digital Marketing

The digital marketing landscape can seem like a morass of noise and confusion. Essentially though there are 4 core types of digital marketing that will provide your business with digital marketing super powers if you are prepared to focus and apply the right resources.

1. Paid digital marketing

If you want to fast track being found online then paying for Google ads that appear when potential prospects perform a Google search is a great catalyst to accelerate your brand awareness when first establishing or launching an online store or website. If budget allows it can produce a ROI that pays for itself as part of the continual marketing of your business.

Also a Facebook ad that targets a city and audience demographic that suits your business can also work well.

These tactics can help you from achieving a super power that no business wants which is “invisibility”

2. Optimising your websites for search engines

Two things are important here. Firstly designing and building websites that make it easy for Google’s spiders to crawl and find, especially for the key words and phrases that customers will use to search for you online.  These key words and phrases need to embedded in your website. This is called “Onsite SEO” (Search Engine Optimisation). There are also other important elements that a good web designer developer will implement to achieve this.

Secondly, the other important strategy to invest in that requires active SEO investment and resources usually by an SEO consultant and expert is “Offsite SEO” this includes researching and building inbound links and other tactics that makes your  website appear on page one of a Google search.

3. Email marketing

Despite the shiny new toy of social media blinding everyone, email marketing is an absolutely vital part of a digital marketing strategy that should be invested in from day one by every savvy business. This includes B2B and B2C companies.

Do this well and you will build up a valuable “Optin” database of subscribers that are an asset that you own and control. This is a list you can email whenever you like and are usually looking forward to receiving your educational and inspiring content.

4. Social media marketing

Social Media marketing done well can provide your marketing with leverage and marketing velocity. Nothing like the many to many multiplying effect of social media where your brand receives exponential sharing as people share your businesses ideas and content with friends,family and colleagues on social networks. I like to call it “World of Mouth”

The real power of social media is that people can create more stories and share them online than you can ever hope to achieve on your own whether paid or not. Allow the crowd  and tribes online to share your storys. This is crowd sourced marketing and it is free. To do that you have to have a presence on social media and do it well.

What About You?

How many of these four are you implementing in your business? Have you tried paid digital advertising. Is SEO in your marketing mix. Could you do email better?
What has been your experience with social media for your business?































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