First and foremost, it should be understood that not all video content is viral-worthy. There are millions of great videos on YouTube that haven’t reached atmospheric-levels of popularity, thanks to constant sharing among friends. For further clarification, here are some tips Terpin discussed some general ideas concerning online videos:

- Educational videos don’t need virality to be effective

- Video increases engagement on Facebook updates, tweets, Google+ and other social network engagement

- Universal search means that video will show up higher

- Videos continue to grow as a percentage of content in the “how to” space

- video nearly always improves clickthrough for a search result

As you can see, social platform success doesn’t necessarily mean viral-levels of popularity, but when people do share your video content, it almost forces people to interact with it. How to videos are great for attracting visitors, as well as increasing your perceived level of authority. Of course, there are many different ways to engage the social media side of web users with video, and Terpin discusses a few of them:

- Webisodes

- Video catalog with ecommerce links

- Repurpose live footage

- Instructional / customer service (keep it short, entertaining)

- Viral event marketing, tied in with Facebook, email

- Viral video (or at least videos hoping to become viral)

The downside to attempts at going viral is you have little-to-no control once the video goes live. You can’t control how people are going to react to your work. What you may perceive as being funny may be viewed as being lame. It’s important to know what your audience is looking for and create accordingly.

As for people marketing directly to the consumer, with ideas of using YouTube as a platform for your videos, here are some things to consider. First, the good aspects of using YouTube:

- Free, easy to upload

- Can be repurposed into many forms of social media and social networks

- Universal search brings video results gives video a boost in search results

- Mass virality is possible with the right ingredients and promotion into the blogosphere

Now, for some things to watch out for:

- High quality production can be expensive

- Sound quality and lighting makes or breaks a video

- Most videos are doomed to have very few views

- The new ability of filimmakers to monetize both videos and viral videos makes it even tougher to break through the noise

Granted, some of this isn’t as much on YouTube as it is on the video creator, especially the production aspects. Sound quality, as well as lighting, can be controlled by the producer. Because of YouTube’s viral nature, the benefits clearly outweigh the potential potholes. For those of you wondering whether or not video content is the right avenue of marketing for you to travel down, here are some other ideas to consider:

- Are you looking for fifteen minutes of fame, a lasting brand, or to drive a specific action (cause/purchase)?

- Does the video hit the mark? will the viewers get what you’re tring to do?

- Do you have an obsession for crispness and quality?

If so, it’s something to consider, plus, the viral nature of videos makes it almost too tempting to pass up. Just remember, go for quality. When shooting for the viral approach with videos, the risk and reward needs to be considered because of all social media efforts, viral video is the hardest to pull off. That being said, if done well, videos can be the most effective viral content on the web.

Terpin also provided a checklist for viral success, one that contains some good direction:

- Short, fast-paced: two minutes is the gold standard

- Videos should be disruptive: funny, shocking, surprising, adorable

- Celebrities help, including web celebs

- Editing must be crisp; many good tools abound (including new cloud-based service, WeVideo)

- Sound quality is paramount. Nothing should distract from the message

- Key question: would you pass this to a friend?

Because virality success is based almost solely on the sharing aspect the web now rotates around, if you wouldn’t share it with your friend, it’s doubtful the video has the legs to crossover into the land of viral success. Keep in mind, however, not all videos have to be viral to be considered quality content.

While there are many other smart posts about creating compelling infographics to attract attention, links and traffic, the information on promoting that type of content seems a bit light. If you’ve invested in creating great infographic content and need advice on how to promote, here are a few ideas:

1. Involve credible sources in the data collection and then encourage those sources to help you promote the resulting graphic.

2. Create a blog post for the infographic and support promotion through the blog’s social channels (Facebook, Twitter, Email, social news & bookmarking sites)

3. Segment the infographic into screen shots which can be used in blog posts and shared on image hosting sites like Flickr with links back to the main page hosting the full infographic. A week or two after publishing and promoting the infographic, upload the full image and unique description to Flickr with a link back to the original web page.

4. Schedule tweets of specific data points mentioned in the infographic over time with a link back to the full infographic. 10 data points/statistics = 10 tweets. A similar, but more conservative approach can work with Facebook as well.

5. Submit the infographic to aggregators and directories. Here is a short list:

• http://dailyinfographic.com/
• http://www.coolinfographics.com/
• http://www.infographicsshowcase.com/
• http://submitinfographics.com/
• http://www.infographicsarchive.com/
• http://www.visual.ly/ (not live yet)

6. Promote the infographic with an article/news release that includes a link to the full infographic and distribute through a news distribution service like our client PRWeb.

7. Highlight the infographic in an email promotion to your in-house prospect and/or customer list. Include a segment of the graphic and a link for readers to see the full image on your website or blog.

8. Pitch relevant industry bloggers and media on the story behind the data included in the infographic. Focus on relevant, personalized emails and offer previews or pre-release opportunities for more influential sources.

9. Share the infographic with influential users of social news & bookmarking sites: StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, or Digg. Or enlist a connected social media marketing service to do it for you.

10. Create a screencast video version of the infographic and promote through YouTube and other video hosting services.

11. Deconstruct the infographic into a PowerPoint and PDF document and share on Slideshare, Scribd, Docstoc and other document hosting services.

Additional tips that can help promotion include: Make sure the file name includes relevant keywords as well as the text on the web page used to describe the infographic. Social sharing buttons on the page that hosts the infographic should be easy to see and use. Include a text area form element with code that users can copy to embed the infographic (with link back to your site) on their own website or blog.

Obviously there are many other ways to promote and re-purpose great content. I have to say, at TopRank Marketing, we’ve had many opportunities to develop our content marketing and promotion skills as well as content re-purposing. It’s an essential part of an efficient marketing program.

If you’ve been successful at marketing content through infographics, what promotion tactics worked best? What additional ways do you think infographics could be useful on their own or as part of a coordinated content marketing effort?

Profile of a twitter user Infographic courtesy by GDS Infographics, on Flickr

Originally published at TopRank Online Marketing Blog

However, it is Facebook and Digg that are driving the most repeat readers according to a study conducted by online ad network Chitika. Traffic is great, but traffic that returns is even better.

The study was based on 33 million unique users across Chitika’s publisher network in September. It compared the number of visitors coming from major traffic sources Digg, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter, to the number of times those visitors came back to the referred site. Visitors that went to a site four or more times in one week were considered loyal users.

By a wide margin, Facebook led the pack in providing loyal traffic. 20% of all visitors from Facebook visited the site four or more times per week. Digg was second with slightly over 16%. Digg was followed by search engines: Yahoo, Google, then Bing with 15.89%, 11.84%, and 11.74% respectively. Finally, Twitter came in at 11.08%.

"While Google naturally wins in sheer numbers, if a website owner can drive a thousand people to their site via Google, or they can drive the same number via Facebook, Facebook seems to be the way to go for creating a loyal reader," says Chitika.

The sheer popularity of Facebook and the time spent on the site must play crucial roles in driving repeat traffic. When a user frequently checks for status updates, they are likely to see new posts made from Facebook Pages they are subscribed to. This shows that creating a Facebook page can have a great effect on content publishers.

Twitter has historically been harder for users to manage and keep up with. That may change, however, once the Lists feature reaches the masses.

Is your content easily tweetable? Talk about your strategy with WebProNews readers.

We’re still waiting on Twitter to incorporate the retweet feature onto Twitter.com. Once that happens, retweeting is almost certainly going to go up significantly. According to the rough sketch Twitter provided a while back, there will be a retweet option by the reply option on all individual tweets.

Retweeting is an incredibly useful tool for tweet promotion, which ultimately means for content promotion. If you are producing content, you want people to retweet it and spread it virally around the Twitterverse. This can lead to some big-time traffic. There are other business benefits to retweets as well.

Shéa Bennett, who writes the blog Twittercism, has come up with an obvious, but no so obvious equation for retweet optimization. The concept itself is obvious, the equation itself – not as much. The concept is this: consider Twitter’s 140-character limit, consider your user name, and consider how many characters you need to leave free.

"When sharing links and content, I always ensure I leave a minimum of 12 characters at the end of each and every tweet," says Bennett. "This is a great habit to adopt. Otherwise, those wanting to retweet you are forced to edit your submissions so that they can give the proper credit. Because f this extra work, many times, they simply won’t bother retweeting you at all."

Originally, Bennett’s equation was:

Your Number = length of username + five characters

That was based on a retweet looking something like this:

RT_@Sheamus_The original tweet goes in here…

The five characters in the equation come from the "R," the "T," the "@," and the two spaces (represented above by underscores).

12 is Bennett’s number. At least it was. He had to change it to 15, because "RT" isn’t the only way people retweet. Sometimes they use "via" with parentheses around "via @username". Upon realization of this, Bennett added  3 to the equation.

Bennett’s equation is now:

Your Number = length of username + eight characters

It is an interesting system to go by, and perhaps a helpful equation, but the larger point of the equation is the real takeaway. If you want to increase your chances of getting retweets, you should be sure you’re leaving room for readers to do it easily. It’s a usability thing. It’s a simple concept that could end up greatly increasing your traffic. Don’t forget to consider any links as added characters.

What do you think is the appropriate amount of space to leave in a tweet? Share your thoughts.

Real-time search, while still in its infancy (if not in utero), is on the rise, and people are searching for up-to-the-minute, what’s happening right-now results for many of their every day queries. Real-time search isn’t a replacement for Google, its a compliment. That’s why Google knows it needs to gravitate in its direction and offer as fresh of results as possible, particularly when relevant.

Google already has a "sorted by date" feature (under "recent results") in its list of search options that users can use to customize their search experience. The jury is still out on how frequently these search options are and will be used, but that option’s there, and chances are that it will get better at indexing fresh content. Chances are also that more and more people will realize that option is available. It hasn’t been around that long yet.

People aren’t just searching on Google and the traditional search engines. They’re searching on social networks too. You know about Twitter’s real-time search, and Facebook recently rolled it out too. Facebook also acquired FriendFeed, which utilizes pretty much every other social network out there.

I’ve already written about why social media is only going to become more important to search, but it’s not just about search. It’s about the way people obtain, absorb, and relay information. They’re doing it on Twitter. They’re doing it on Facebook. They’re doing it on MySpace, and they’re doing it on plenty of other networks (and believe it or not, they’re still doing it through email too).

These are the reasons your content should be as shareable as possible. If you want more people to see it, word of mouth is just as important as search. Social media is the word of mouth of the web.

Include buttons and icons that make your content easy to share on social networks. "Post to Facebook," "Retweet," "Digg," etc. are all buttons that can put your content a click away from going viral. Obviously the content has to be up to par for this to work.

This can work in your favor on down the road as well as the present. Even if an article is a month or a year old, if it is still relevant, someone may happen across it and tweet it or share it some other way. This will not only place your content within the streams of that person’s followers/friends, but also on the radar of any related real-time searches taking place.

Real-time search isn’t just about what’s happening right now. It’s also about what people are talking about right now. It’s up to you to provide content that people will still be talking about later. Giving easy access to sharing features will only ease the way.

How important to you think real-time search is to the future of online marketing? Share your thoughts.

Disclaimer: If you are not a Twitterer, you may be unfamiliar with the concept of retweeting. Basically, when someone updates their status on Twitter, that is called a tweet. When someone likes that status and wants to share it with others, they will at "RT" (for ReTweet) and the user’s name typically and post the same update. This is usually done with Tweets containing links, so naturally it provides a good, viral means of link exposure.

Tweetmeme has been around for a while, offering a service to content providers, where they can add a button onto an article page that lets a reader easily tweet a link to that article on Twitter. It then counts these tweets, which become retweets, just like similar buttons you’ve probably seen for Digg. The more retweets that are registered on that button, the more interesting the content looks at first glance. The reason for this is that theoretically, if a user sees the article has 2,000 tweets, as opposed to 2, they can assume that a lot of people found the article interesting or informative, and will be more likely to continue reading. It’s kind of like the concept behind comments. Articles that display a large amount of comments are likely to catch readers’ eyes for the same reason. The Huffington Post discussed this concept in a recent interview with WebProNews:

More WebProNews Videos

This week, a company called Mesiab Labs launched a service that is practically identical to Tweetmeme, at Retweet.com. Obviously, this company is hoping to cash in on the popular concept, while injecting a powerful brand to go along with it. The timing of this is interesting because Twitter recently announced its own retweeting plans in an initiative called " Project Retweet," which will presumably see a retweet button at Twitter.com (many consider this long overdue), and retweet functionality right in the Twitter API, opening up a lot more retweeting possibilities in third-party Twitter apps.

Sketch for Project Retweet

 But back to why retweeting is useful to businesses. The attention grabbing effect of the retweet button on a piece of content is just one aspect. Another is of course, the promotion the content provider sees from a substantial amount of retweets. They’re viral by nature, and in the best-case scenario, they can drive a ton of traffic to the content.

Famed blogger Robert Scoble started an interesting discussion on FriendFeed about what is better between the retweet and the "like" feature on either Facebook or FriendFeed itself. While I’m not going to get into all of the reasons why one is better than the other, Scoble and other participants in the conversation made a number of good points bout the pros and cons of retweets. Let’s look at some of those.

Pros

- Retweets are viral

- Retweets show up as top-level items in FriendFeed

- As opposed to a Facebook "like," a retweet is shared with everyone

- Retweets typically give credit to sources

- While giving credit to sources, retweets can lead to relationships

- Susbstantial amounts of retweets can say a lot about the quality of content

- Retweets can inspire further conversation

- Retweets can be good for branding

- Retweets can easily be shared across multiple networks, like Twitter, Friend, Facebook, etc.

- Retweets can provide followers with additional value in quality content

Cons

- It’s hard to provide a list of the things you’ve retweeted, as Scoble mentions. He mentions how people can see your "likes" on FriendFeed

- Retweeting creates what many people consider to be "noise" on Twitter

- Twitter’s 140 character limit

- Some people consider retweeting to be like copying other people’s work for your own gain, though this concept is heavily disputed

Conclusion

A recent study from Pear Analytics found that about 8.70% of the tweets it researched were retweets. In some of the more web-oriented circles, this probably even seems quite low. Without a doubt though, Twitterers are retweeting tweets like there’s no tomorrow. Obviously businesses can see value in this, especially if they provide some kind of content that they would like to see shared.

As always, it comes down to providing quality content – the old "content is king" cliché. Even as the web has evolved, that simple fact remains true. If you provide something interesting, people will share it.

Scoble’s whole "Retweet vs. Like" concept is an interesting one in itself. We have certainly seen Facebook make numerous changes to its interface that seem to move the network closer to the realm of Twitter. You have to wonder if Facebook will eventually incorporate some kind of retweet-like functionality itself.

What are your thoughts on retweeting? Do you see value in it or is it just noise? Tell us what you think.

Original Article: First Twitter ignited the URL-shortening service fire, and now a similar phenomenon appears to be happening with "retweeting" services. Retweet.com is reportedly set to launch today.

First of all, if you are not a Twitterer, you may be unfamiliar with the concept of retweeting. Basically, when someone updates their status on Twitter, that is called a tweet. When someone likes that status and wants to share it with others, they will at "RT" (for ReTweet) and the user’s name typically and post the same update. This is usually done with Tweets containing links, so naturally it provides a good, viral means of link exposure.

So far, a service called Tweetmeme has pretty much ruled this area of content sharing. What it does is supply content providers with a button that users can easily click to share that content on Twitter. The button then provides an ongoing count of how many times an article has been retweeted. You can see one at the top of this very WebProNews article.

Retweet.com is now swooping in to try and capture this market dominated by Tweetmeme. In fact, Mesiab Labs, who is launching Retweet.com even called out Tweetmeme by name. Not only does Retweet.com make for a powerfully branded domain for such a service, but the company is also launching with a $10,000 contest to inspire people to use its service.

The really interesting part of this story to me though, is the timing of this launch. Just last week, Twitter itself announced an initiative called "Project Retweet," in which the company plans to bring the concept of retweeting right to Twitter.com and the Twitter API. This means that people using Twitter on the web should be able to easily retweet something from their stream, and apps all over the web will start incorporating retweeting into their interfaces.

At this point, it’s hard to say how relevant services like Tweetmeme and Retweet.com will remain. Considering that they offer services for content publishers themselves, they will probably still have a place. They may even be helped by Project Retweet just because it will put the concept of retweeting even more into the spotlight.

And don’t be surprised if you start seeing a lot more of these retweeting services popping up in the near future. Everybody and their grandma will likely be offering one by the end of the year. It will be very much like the URL-shortener. Some will have different spins, and may entice different groups of users, but Tweetmeme has an established presence going for it, and Retweet.com has that powerful brand name. These two should have the upper hands.

According to Mashable, Retweet.com should be going live around 12pm Eastern Time today.

An interesting post at Performancing asks, "Is Retweet The Next Digg This?" That’s a good question. A while back, Twitter was even reported to surpass Digg in traffic for the first time since its launch.

"Twitter has taken on a life of its own. in the early days, their was no way to respond to other people until users came up with the idea to use the @ symbol to designate a reply," writes Performancing’s Jeff Chandler. "Now adays, the sharing of information on Twitter has created what is known as a Retweet. This is when someone republishes a message someone else wrote and is used as a means of sharing useful information. Depending on who picks up the message and retweets it, the information can be viewed by thousands of people."

Could some of the tips often used to get more Digg love also be applied to Twitter? I have noticed one similarity. Diggers have always loved to digg stories about Digg. Likewise, Twitterers love to retweet stories about Twitter. Something to think about. Luckily there are still so many questions about how to use Twitter (in general, let alone for marketing purposes) that content producers have an unlimited supply of potential article/blog post (or even tweet) topics.

Another thing that can probably survive the translation from Digg to Twitter is the Telegraph strategy. Many people do this. I call it that because Hitwise studied Telegraph which has been a very popular site on Digg. Telegraph encourages users to Digg their content. Encouraging the Tweeting of your content will likely help your cause. Once your content is Tweeted, if it’s good enough, it will get retweets.

Although it’s always nice to have other people tweet links to your content and have other people retweet those tweets (sometimes I feel like I’m not even writing in the English language anymore), having your own followers is a good way to gain more tweets and retweets too.

Rich Brooks has a good list of what not to do to have a successful following on Twitter. Among his list are:

- Not using your real name

- Not telling people where you’re from

- Not including your URL

- Leaving our bio blank

- Not uploading a photo of yourself or your logo

- Following 2,000 people before posting a single tweet

- Rapidly following and unfollowing people just to get their attention

Finding Twitterers with similar interests and in similar niches to communicate with can also be a good way to get some extra retweets. You’d be more inclined to share something you were interested from someone else right? Chances are others feel the same way. Our own Twellow service is a great way to find likeminded Twitterers. Searching in Twitter itself for topics you cover might find you some new friends as well, who could potentially retweet what you are writing about.

There of course plenty of other ways besides retweets that Twitter can benefit your business. There are more ways to use Twitter search. There are ways to build real links. Large brands and small ones are finding new and unique ways of utilizing the communication tool that is Twitter to attract traffic, conversions, customers, and loyalty.

Got tips for getting retweets? Share.

Invesp scored an interview with this person (who wishes to remain anonymous; for the purpose of this article, let’s call them "Digg Throat"), and provides quite an interesting look into the behind-the-scenes world of Digg marketing and social media marketing in general. 

"I have worked for many popular blogs and I know most top users do," explains Digg Throat. "As of now I am involved with three blogs/companies that I regularly help with social media promotion, especially on Digg. To put it in short : my status and reach within the community allows me to help businesses leverage their opportunities by reaching a different crowd and a large crowd for that matter."

Digg Throat has been charging up to $700 per article for his/her promotion, and if a particular item reaches Digg’s home page, he/she gets another $500. Now that’s some easy money. Too bad it’s frowned upon by Digg, and Digg users alike. However, paid promotion is just a fact of Digg. It’s not a surprise, and users who have a real problem with it, will likely just find another site to read. Besides, is this really that much different than paying PR staff to push your message?

What is Digg to do though?

"Digg should strongly consider placing clearly labeled advertisements within the news stories," says TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington. "Even as paid ads they’ll get a ton of traffic and Digg can charge accordingly. TechMeme, a tiny site in comparison, has done this successfully for some time. If Digg can’t stop its users from making a little money on the side, they may as well get in on the game."

Something like this could work for Digg. It could incorporate spots into ad campaigns with existing clients like YouTube allegedly does with its promoted videos. Digg users may not be too enthusiastic about such a scenario though.

Something tells me Digg is going to be doing some investigating. They ought to be able to at least narrow down the number of possible suspects for Digg Throat’s identity. He/she may have wished to remain anonymous, but may have still given enough information away for Digg to figure out who they are. This may not do much to combat that problem of what some would refer to as "Digg Spam", but I’m sure they would like to at least get closer to the bottom of it.

There, now that we’ve got that brilliant grasp of the obvious out of the way let’s move on to what you can do to actually create them.  Before we launch into the nitty-gritty of link building, no beginners guide would be complete without a brief explanation as to why links are important and the different elements of them.  Being a beginners guide this won’t be an entirely complete list but it will be enough to get you going on the right path.  Understanding what you’re trying to do will help you do it better and more importantly, understanding the “why” of the situation will help you stretch your tactics outside of this and other articles on link building.

Why Are Links Important?

To put it simply: a link is a vote.  Every link pointing to your site from another website tells the search engines that the other site finds your resource valuable and thus, the engines read this as a vote for your site.  So it must be about getting tons of links and you’re done right?  Wrong.  This is incorrect as …

Not All Votes Are Created Equal

Unlike your own vote in an election, some votes are worth more than others and some votes are worth SIGNIFICANTLY more than yours (unless of course you’re a content writer for the Google.com domain in which case you obviously have the top vote).  The basic factors that affect a link’s value to your website are:

The site strength – the strength of the site that is pointing to yours is a significant (and historically abused) factor in the valuation of links.  In the absence of other easily-visible criteria let’s look at PageRank as a key valuation of a site’s strength.  If a site with a PageRank 8 links to your site, this vote is worth significantly more than a link from a PageRank 3 site.  This is because a PageRank 8 site is, in Google’s eyes, a more important site than the PageRank 3 site.

Relevance – the relevance of a site linking to you is, if anything, more important than a site’s strength. If you run a bed a breakfast in Utah a link from a PageRank 3 bed and breakfast will be worth more than a link from a PageRank 5 web design site.  This area is a bit grey in that it relies on the engine’s ability to determine what is relevant and what is not however we’ve seen evidence that this area is strong at this stage in the game and is only becoming more important over time.

Anchor text – the actual text used to link to your site is extremely important.  I’ve seen extremely strong sites get beaten out by weak ones simply due to the poor use of anchor test.  If you’re building links to your site be sure to include your keywords in the text that links back and, if possible, the exact phrase you are trying to rank for.  At the same time, you can’t make all your anchor text exactly the same – how can that possibly look natural?

Position – the position of a link on a page and the number of other links on that page impacts the value of a link.  A link in the footer of a page is given less weight than a link near the top, a link in the content of a page is given more weight than a link in a list of links and a link on a page with 50 other links is given less weight than a link on a page with only a few other links.  If we think about it – this makes sense.  All of these things indicate whether the site with the outbound links actually intends for one of their visitors to click the link or not.  From an engine’s perspective – the more it appears that a site wants a link to be clicked on, the higher the weight that link (or vote) is given.

Admittedly there are a number of other factors but this is a beginners guide.  Following the considerations above will insure that as you make each link decision – you’re odds of making the right choices will be significantly higher than if you ignore them.  Ignoring them may not get you penalized or banned but it will make your task far more time consuming as you secure less valuable links and thus need to build far more than following he right methods.

So far we’ve covered briefly the why of link building, now let’s get into the real-life, here’s-how-to-do-it side of things.  Below I’m going to cover three of my favorite link building tactics.  These are tactics that apply to virtually every scenario.  The number of ways to build links is only limited by your imagination however and this should not be viewed as a comprehensive list.  This is, after all, a beginners guide and I’m trying to list the tactics that apply to virtually every scenario.

Side Note: Reciprocal Link Building

I’m not going to count this as one of my favorite and so it won’t count as one of the three noted above and I’ll only touch on it briefly.  There have been a number of assertions that reciprocal link building is dead.  This is simply not the case.  I have seen and competed against sites that were very successful with reciprocal links as their primary link source.

The problem with reciprocal links isn’t so much in their value which does seem to be a bit lower than non-reciprocal links however often more easily attained.  No, my problem with reciprocal links is in the management.  Unethical webmasters’ removing links after you’ve put the link up to them, sites expiring and not being renewed, sites getting penalties of their own due to their bad tactics are all inconveniences the reciprocal link manager must deal with.

As an SEO company, a huge issue we faced was leaving our clients with this task after a campaign was over if they decided not to go on a maintenance package.  Non-reciprocal links may be a bit harder to attain in some cases however that issue is much easier to overcome than the sum of all these issues.

And now on to the top three …

Articles

If you’re paying attention as you read this you’ll probably have guessed that I’m a fan of article writing as a link building method.  If you look to the “about the author” section you’ll notice a link to the Beanstalk site (and if you don’t, well … let me know as somebody’s stealing it without permission).  While I genuinely enjoy writing and sharing my experiences with others – the purpose of getting the article distributed is primarily as a link building tactic, secondarily as a great source of qualified traffic and thirdly for my own enjoyment.

You are an expert in your field.  Who knows more about your business than you?  So share.  Writing an article may not be easy but it is rewarding.  If you can’t think of a topic, think of what you get asked.  If you’re asked common questions repeatedly then chances are, it’s a good topic for an article.  I often get asked about link building, and you’re reading the result.

Once the article is completed you need to get it syndicated.  Using an article submission service is a simple way to get your article out to a large number of publishers quickly.  On top of this you’d do well to seek out specific sites in your field using one or all of the major search engines to find highly relevant sites that accept articles and submit to them.

And oh, don’t forget an “about the author” section.

Directory Submissions

Directory submissions are likely the most painful of the link building tactics you’ll employ. Why?  Because it’s tedious and time-consuming work.

To be done right directory submissions must be done manually, the titles and descriptions must be tailored to the specifications of the directory in question and often, you’ll have to decide if a review fee is worth it.

While there are a good many directories that accept free submissions there are also a large number that’s require a review fee.  The fee can range from a  few dollars to a few hundred.  If you see that a directory has a low PageRank, is general in it’s nature (i.e. it isn’t about your specific field) then it likely isn’t worth more than a couple dollars if that.  If the site is strong, and strongly related to your site then it’s obviously worth more.

There is no hard-and-fast set of rules for how much a listing is worth.  I’d recommend to start your hunt for directories (don’t forget the topic and/or region specific ones), submit to all the free ones and make a list of all the ones that require a fee.  After you’ve gotten a solid number in you “needs to be paid list” you can get a general idea as to what’s out there and what you can get and for how much.  This will enable you to make solid choices knowing what all your options are.

Forum Posting

I just know I’m going to get a couple comments and/or emails for listing this as a link building tactic but if it’s done right there’s nothing wrong with it.  Forum and blog posting got a bad reputation as a link building tactic when it came under huge abuse by unethical webmasters spamming forums with useless garbage just for a link.  They even went so far (and still do) as sending out spiders to automatically submit posts.  To this end, I have to agree that it’s a bad tactic however …

If you’re seeking out forums related to your site, reading the threads and responding with solid advice or with questions and not just firing off some sales-pitch then you’re doing what you’re supposed to be.  Another perk to this is that, like articles, if you do this right you’re gong to see traffic as well and what more can you ask from a link building tactic than traffic as well as links.

Conclusion

Above we’ve covered the basics of link building.  As I’ve noted repeatedly, once you’re done reading this and applying some of what you’ve read you’d do well to read other articles, forums and blogs.  This isn’t a complete breakdown of everything link-related (that would be a full book) but it will keep you out of trouble and save you countless hours of wasted time getting poor links that haven’t held value since 2003.