Getting Inbound Links

Inbound links are very important for Google, and presumably every other search engine on the planet… though to be honest, I’ve focused solely on Google for about the last 4 years. If I’m well represented in Google I seem to do just fine in Yahoo, and now Bing.

I’ve been experimenting with creating articles at EzineArticles.com for the last couple of months and am possibly seeing good results already. If I can believe their stats, they’re sending me some decent clicks over to my site(s) where I’ve linked to.

Apparently Google likes the site because it’s well moderated. Junk articles don’t (usually) get through, though I’ve seen some horribly written articles the majority are decent enough quality.

What is Ezine Articles? You write articles laced with keywords about whatever topic your website or page on your website is about. You can link back to your own site twice from the “Author box” in the last paragraph. Free inbound links… for the price of writing an article. I like the idea, though at first I balked at why in the world I would write quality content for another website.

Google trusts this site to the tune of a PageRank 6. They have thousands of articles and authors – some of which ONLY write there and do very well.

If my recent gains in pagerank numbers are signs of the success of this inbound links technique, I’m all for it and will be writing another 20-50 articles there this year.

Anyone had good success with it yet?

Here’s my feed which will give you some of the articles I’ve written there. You can click one and go see the full article and how I’ve setup my links back to my own sites.

I’ll let you know more as I nail down whether or not this technique is responsible for my recent gains…

Here’s my feed:

3,993,221 Page Views in 30 Months

Over last 30 months my main 6 sites have had 3,993,221 page views.

I’ve written over 1,700 blog posts and another 2200 pages and articles on traditional websites.

Over on my YouTube account – the main account anyway, I’ve had 1,900,000+ views. At our Thai Food account – almost half a million.

We started a lot of projects over the last two years. Quite frankly I’m interested in many different areas and no one area is more interesting than any of the others. Though there are 6 main sites, I’ve started over 30 websites in the last 3 years. Now I have a good idea what is working and what isn’t working and know better where to focus.

Sometimes you have to start many projects to see – what is going to work. Other times, you’re interested in just one thing – maybe two, and you knock those out because you have the passion to focus there and really kill it.

Where will I be mainly in 2010?

I’m looking at two areas: video and ebooks. I love to do both and I’m wondering if I should go ahead and tie them together and make a run at it. Ebooks by themselves can be boring – no doubt. Dry topics are boring. Video is THE wave of the future and now – and I think tying ebooks together with video is going to be time well spent.

Why?

Apple’s itablet – if/when it materializes is probably going to be moving this direction. Apple likely doesn’t want just an ereader device. It wants a device that does it all. It wants a device that works for the magazine industry as well as ebooks and video. Some are saying it will tie it all together to bring video into the ebook. This is the space I want to be in. I want to create fun to read ebooks that are unique written and video content that my affiliates can sell for me.

The hardest piece of the puzzle for internet success is finding the traffic to look at what you’re selling. It’s ungodly difficult to create a site and either ramp it up in Google and social media sites, or just pay for traffic straight out and hope you are able to make sales.

It’s better by a factor of 100+ to just create your own content – whatever it is, and go out and find websites that have traffic and don’t know what to do with it – or, that fits your niche well and is a good match for the products and services you have to sell.

Where will you be in 2010?

Mobile Browsers and Mobile Ecommerce

If you’re still sitting on the fence regarding enabling your business website for viewing by mobile browsers like iPhone, Blackberry, and Android phones this might sway you – well, it may knock you over the fence…

Ebay expects to do 400 million dollars in transactions over JUST the iPhone in 2009.

Are people using their iphones to buy? Oh yeah… in a big way.

Opera browser – the opera ‘mini’ which is a really nice mobile browser has seen great increases in use – currently they have 40 million mobile users. These users viewed 17 billion web pages with Opera mini. Not bad eh? This article talks about their growth: Opera Mini use

A very simple way to enable your website for iPhone and Android devices is, when running WordPress – add the WPTouch plugin. Here’s what the official WP page says about the plugin:

The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to your iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini mobile, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm visitors without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme.

What happens is that the mobile version of your site is instantly served up fresh to anyone on those mobile browsers mentioned. There is even a link on the front page to ask if the user wants to revert back to the original full non-mobile version.

Mobile is part of the immediate future. Is it the entire future? Probably not, people will still sit in front of a big screen at home or at work, but, mobile is already part of the huge share of ecommerce happening across the web. Four hundred million at eBay JUST on the iPhone? What will it be in 5 years – 200 million?

Jump in right now – both feet!

Real Time Search – A Game Changer

Microsoft’s Bing and Google just reached separate deals with Twitter for rights to index the Twitter data as it occurs… in real-time.

This is a game changer on a couple of levels.

1. People are going to tweet just to get into Google’s search engine results pages (SERP’s). It’s a game changer for companies that are looking to get into the Google and Bing search results pages. I don’t see the results in Bing yet, though some have said they are showing up for them. Google has yet to integrate Tweets into their results – but it will be interesting to see how they go about it.

Tweeting might have just become important to me again, depending on what the results show, and whether they are prominently placed. Links in Twitter will probably pick up some sort of value in Google’s eyes based on the number of times the link gets passed around – retweeted.

2. Less and less space is being used for organic search results in Google especially. Some companies are going to get pushed down, out of the sweet spot. SEO is becoming ridiculously hard to max out because there are no longer 5 or 10 slots that matter. There are just a couple.

I think small businesses – 1-10 employees are being hammered. It’s becoming more difficult to break into any online business that relies on the search engines. Companies must have budgets to hire people to do videos, images, and now tweets.

I think Google is favoring big business. Big business rules online, just as it did offline. It can’t be any other way, right?

If the Twitter results are really prominent displayed in Google results, whole businesses will develop to take advantage of this chance to get high placement in Google’s SERP’s. Heck, I might jump into that space if the getting looks good.

Will they rank the Twitter data higher than YouTube videos? Higher than image results?

Interesting to see what comes of this – the game is always changing!

Internet Marketing’s A-List, the “Good Guys”

I used to not follow any internet marketers online – I didn’t need to, or thought I didn’t. Up until about 2004 I studied everything on my own and had immense hands-on experience with different companies around the USA I worked for as an internet marketing consultant. I was pretty cozy with what I knew versus what everyone else knew.

Then I started to see people talking about things that were more specialized, more in-depth than what I was doing. I realized – I’m not on top of the game and the only way to get back to the top and keep up with everything is to follow what some others are doing too. As areas of expertise get more specialized – in internet marketing or whatever your business are happens to be, you’ll need to start learning on a daily basis from everyone else that’s into what you’re into or you’ll quickly be left behind.

I don’t want to be left behind so I set about trying to figure out – who are the internet marketers that are making sense, and who are the ones I trust enough to listen to?

It’s a very tough question. It’s sometimes hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, the meat from the muck.

The following group of people are those that I either trust or am starting to trust. Their message is usually solid and they have good hands-on experience. They are selling things – no doubt, they couldn’t exist without marketing something – but, they’re also helping people get started.

Jonathan Volk – You know, when someone says they are Christian on their business site it gives you the idea almost immediately that you can trust the person. Sure there are posers, Jonathan doesn’t seem to be one. No, I’m not Christian, but I understand that most of those that are adhere to some basic fraudless practices… they have a certain morality that probably jives with mine. Jonathan has some great PPC ideas and shares a lot of them freely on his site. He seems to be a very genuine person out to help others succeed.

Shoemoney – Jeremy is often times all about the hype, but over the last couple years seems to be moderating it and is coming across more like someone at the top willing to help those that are trying desperately to get there. His knowledge of PPC is probably unmatched. He frequently “gives away the game” and provides great information for free. His current major promotion is Shoemoney Tools and his free 12 week internet marketing course which you really should sign up for – it’s free and, though basic – might be just what you need to get started.

Yaro Starak – from entrepreneurs-journey.com. Yaro is an Aussie that comes across as having a sincere desire to help others succeed and is enjoying some level of success himself in recent years. I listen to what he says and take it as gospel truth. I can’t see Yaro lying to save his life.

Frank Kern – I’m still not sure about Frank. His laid back attitude is either 100% genuine… or not. He has some phenomenal information he lets go for free, and his programs are priced about 4x as much as I’d ever want to pay (Mass Control), but he’s enjoying some outrageous success from his programs. If you have the $, Frank is one guy you want to follow.

Gary Vaynerchuck – is a motivational speaker that has some good points of view and lets them be known. He’s frequently hired to present at conferences and such. You can tell Gary is coming from the heart and isn’t going to screw you around. Gary has enjoyed immense success as a branding expert for his family’s wine business – but is also knowledgeable in many other areas and is an avid social media marketer-enthusiast. He’s a workaholic and to me, seems very genuine.

Darren Rowse – I look at Darren as the grandaddy of blogging. He says all the right things and is never controversial at all – which, leads me to believe you can trust the guy though he’s not giving you all sides to himself – he’s giving the world what it needs – amazing articles – hundreds upon hundreds of them filled with solid information that isn’t questionable. The guy is a blogging machine and I trust whatever he says.

Vern Lovic – I’m somewhat of a mix of all these internet marketers. For many years I’ve not shared online what I do for a living – internet marketing. I was blogging at Aim for Awesome and 15 other sites but had nothing online about internet marketing.  Recently I started this site, Inc. Answers because I wasn’t finding anyone online that was presenting SEO – SEM – IM the way I think it should be presented.

I have a decade of experience with web development, SEO, and internet marketing topics of all sorts.  I’m a deep generalist, meaning – I know something about nearly everything online – but, I’m not totally geared toward any one area or technique for making money online. I prefer to know a moderate amount about everything – not everything about 1 small topic. I do make an exception for SEO and do my best to stay current with everything going on there. It’s a fascinating area for me and where my heart is really at.

Though I’m not Christian I have a strong inner-morality that urges me to do the right thing. I don’t attempt to sell by hype. I present what I know and tell you the benefits of using it – and hope you come around to trying it. I don’t have any ultra-expensive programs I’m marketing. I prefer to target people that are just starting out and that need to know the big picture about internet marketing – and how they can actually get started with some small success that might build into something great later. The fees I charge for my online training courses are reasonable and affordable to most people. Many of my courses are completely free.

I offer a realistic view of online success. In most cases it will take a year of effort as a general minimum if you’re starting from scratch. Or, it will take a lot of cash to have a website built for you and optimized for search engines and other traffic building systems so you can start a meaningful income from your online projects. That’s the reality of it. If you think you can do it in a week or a month – give it a try. Other internet marketers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars off people that think there’s a short-cut and that will pay for it – just in case it works.

Most of the time it doesn’t work. Stick to the advice and suggestions of this group of internet marketing experts mentioned above. Work your tail off and you’ll probably find some success.

Everyone can do this – it is not DNA engineering… it’s a+b+c !

Good luck and much success!

(photo credit: Flickr.com user, AdamSelwood)

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