This morning I felt like dreaming about the future fruits of my web labor, so I spent some time on luxist. One of the recent posts is about a new company that brokers private flights called evojets. It seems like an interesting enough business, although probably a really crowded niche, but what’s up with their web presence?
Stupid mistake no. 1–they’re promoting their company without a full site up. It should not take more than a week from a company to get something up so that just makes you look bad in my opinion.
Stupid mistake no. 2–look at the very last line on their site. It says, “Website design and logo design by logoworks.” This company is planning on catering to the super rich and they bought the Super Duper Platinum Package from logoworks?!
Maybe I should call them up and offer to submit their site to millions of search engines ;-)!
Stuff like this drives me nuts. This company is planning on becoming a big deal to pretty influential people and they’re sucking it up in the web dept.
I know I suck at blogging but oh well. I’ll give it one last go at consistency. Maybe I can do something decent here!
I’m on a journey to be Seth Godin’s Favorite Intern. I’m trying to be chosen for an extremely competitive internship opportunity with Seth Godin this summer. It would be amazing. Follow me as I try on my site SethsFavoriteIntern.com
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Link Building Secrets Revealed guide compiled by Pole Position Marketing. The idea of creating a link building guide is nice in principle (although may be just a bit worn out). I was kind of excited to open the .pdf and read what juicy secrets the SElebrities had to offer. I have to say it’s not only a little disappointing, there’s some sketchy stuff in there! I’m not one to be afraid of “creative” marketing efforts, but come on! I’m scared if these are the secrets of our industry. Of course, nobody is going to reveal the good stuff so I guess they just settled on telling us their sketchy methods.
The guide has three pages devoted to deceiving sites to get links for a porn site! Ethics aside, does Pole Position really want to associate themselves, even casually, with NSFW content? Whatever, to each his own. It’s billed as a joke but it’s super black hat in my opinion. The SEO expert created a fictional professor at the University of Calcutta and gave him a profession and name relating to the porn site they were promoting. They deliberately made the site look like the university website and went about getting links for the “professor’s” personal page (which meanwhile linked to the porn sites they were promoting).
I just talked about building secondary sites the other day and I have no problem with creating resources and linking to my own content–but in this case it’s outright deception. The SEO talked about getting links from Wikipedia and various other authority sites using the fake professor as a front and from stealing content from a real prof. Hopefully this site really was an experiment, as offensive as it may be, and wasn’t really used to promote his pr0n sites.
The first section by Patrick Altoft also struck me as pretty shady. He suggests using cloaking to tailor your link profile to each individual search engine. Call me an idealist, but I don’t think there are too many links that can really hurt you in Google. I believe that you do have to tailor your links to different engines but I don’t think it’s something that has to be done like this. From my experience, if you want to rank high for “red widgets”, get some links from the first few pages of the SERPs from each search engine. Mix that with your normal methods and your chances of ranking are much higher.
Not all of the experts sucked. I especially enjoyed Hamlet Batista’s explanation of the influence of crawl rate and indexing on the value of a link. That’s VERY valuable stuff and doesn’t get the face time that it really deserves. Jim Boykin presented a novel conept–actually getting clicks from your “ads”! Imagine that. Finally, Eric Ward’s creative use of Google Alerts can get you thinking creatively on how to get fresh, topical links for your site.
I’d recommend checking out the guide because there’s definitely some good idea. Be sure to remember that a method isn’t necessarily safe or smart just because an expert endorses it.
I don’t really have the readership to get a bunch of comments, but I’m curious, what kind of sites do you use to support your main sites? Where I come from we call these sites “secondary sites.” I’m a fan of creating blogs and buying old websites. Do you care about actually adding value or just faking value to get links.
As a good internet citizen I suppose I should care about adding some value, but personally I don’t give a crap as long as my site’s not terribly overt link spam. That attitude is changing for me though. As the web continues to grow more and more competitive it’s important that these sites really do add value, not only to be “good” to everybody on the net but to be sure you stay above the radar for spam and can actually get links naturally.
Your thoughts? Do you even build sites to support your main projects or do you think that’s spammy in and of itself?
I guess I shouldn’t like Jason Calacanis much, because I really believe in SEO, but he’s pretty spot on with a keynote he gave at Affiliate Summit. I love when he pokes fun at affiliates for touting their 6 figure checks and says something along the lines of “Add two or three zeros and then you can hang in Silicon Valley.”
Like anybody, I’d love to have some 6-figure checks but it really shouldn’t be the focus. Don’t build BS scraper sites, MFA blogs, or any other crap like that. Focus on building a real business that utilizes your search marketing skills and maybe someday you can hang with Calacanis and his buddies in the Valley.
P.S. — He said in the speech that his ego alert (read Google Alert) would pop up if someone blogged about him and he’d happily leave a comment. Let’s see if that happens, I’d be impressed.
Due to some personal circumstances last year I stopped blogging before I really started. Well, I’m back. I hope to post a few times a week. I’ll probably focus on cool linkbait I see, linkbuilding methods, building authority, and all that jazz. I have an idea for a “Linkbuilder’s Zen” page that I plan on compiling to help SEOs invigorate a linkbuilding campaign that’s getting dry. Watch for it.
Yesterday was Day 1 of my self imposed domain authority challenge. I’d have to say it was a success. I spent 3 hours, just as I’d hoped to, and found 3 solid prospects. Two of these links should definitely happen and one is a bit more on the fence.
If I can have 2 more days like yesterday this week then I’d say this little experiment is going to be really profitable for us. Today’s tip is this: don’t be afraid to make some phone calls. I tend to beat this to death but it’s how I tracked down all of the prospects yesterday.
Making telephone calls is definitely a pain. If you’re going after .edu’s then it’s guaranteed you will spend a half hour on the phone just to get to the webmaster or somebody with some authority. But, in my opinion, this is time well spent in building your status as an authority in your industry and building a higher barrier of entry/moat around your niche to protest your SERPs.
Recently I’ve been working a lot to find, build, and finagle “authority” links to create more trust for our main domains. As you all know, the right authority links can mean BIG money for your sites. The sites I’m working on are very established in their markets but we’re a very proactive team and we spend a lot of money to make sure the SERPs don’t turn on us. This week we signed an agreement to get on a pretty major media site and we’re currently investigating a few more similar possibilities.
Why should you care?
Well, I’m self imposing a little domain trust project. I’m calling it the “One Week Authority Challenge,” (stupid name) although hopefully it turns into an ongoing, organized thing. My plan is this: spend at least 3 hours per day for the next 5 business days email, calling, and searching out relevant links.
I’m not going to be buying links from skeezy .edu blogs off DP or any spammer stuff. I will be seeking out high quality, relevant links just as I would any other day of the week, except solely .edu and .gov websites. I’ll update every day about my progress and hopefully I can pass on some wisdom about how you can build some trust for your sites. Although I likely won’t give away the urls of where I’m finding these links, I’ll let you know how I found the page and what (if anything) it cost us.
Follow my progress by subscribing to my RSS feed.
These posts get me seriously hot and bothered. I decided that the best way to kick off my personal blog would be to give you a little idea about who I am and what I think. (Ya, I’m using “you” in my writing, whatcha goin’ do ’bout it?) I’m laying out a little smörgåsbord of my favorite inspirational blog posts. Don’t let that scare you! Trust me, these are strictly business. No fluffy, follow your heart, just dream it and you can do it, BS posts. I’m a fan of no nonsense, legit info. So if that’s your cup of tea, sip away.
Sleepy Tuesday morning? Get your blood pumping with one of my favorite ever blog posts. Andy talks about how to build an affiliate site you can sell for a cool mil. The only thing I would say is this: don’t limit your ideas to affiliate sites. Although the model is attractive there’s probably some great niches that you can exploit by developing your own products.
I know what you’re thinking: being a millionaire is so 1970. I’m right there with ya. (Although I would settle [settle=kill] for a mil right now.) If you set your target a little higher, a bil, you’ll be fighting Provost in a race to be the first internet billionaire. This post get’s my blood pumping because Brian really looks at the big picture. Seos and Domainers are the new media mavericks. Who is going to be the Carnegie of the web? I think that still remains to be seen.
Neil Patel write on getting covered by the offline media. It’s one of those cliche simple but not easy kind of things. I like Neil’s ideas on leveraging your unique aspects (mine and Neil’s being age) to get publicity and position yourself as an authority. You might be saying, “I don’t want to be a consultant so what does offline press matter?” Put yourself out there like Neil and surely you’ll be bombarded with opportunities and connections stretching far beyond the typical consulting gig. Someday you might need investors or partners on your big projects and a fat profile surely won’t hurt the cause.
That’s enough to give you an idea about who I am and where I’m at online. Just to clear this up from the start–I’m not linking to the big names because I want to be one or because I feel the need to suck up to them. There’s a reason these people are the A-list (ya, it exists) and it’s because they get it. I don’t mind reading about people making a few grand a month blogging with payperpost or similar methods, but my goal is a business, a company, something that can grow, scale, and evolve. These guys see where the internet can take them and hopefully I can figure things out and get myself there as well.
