Social network (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We have been working on the ways that a business, say a do-it-yourselfer, can create backlinks for their blog URLs. Some of these backlink businesses that call out to you from the internet offer fantastic values for  free all the way to very expensive. What to do?

I suggest that you look at the free businesses because there is some question about how ethical a process is if you can only get it done at great cost. Many of the companies I have looked at offer their service for free unless you want to save time and then they will do the work for you for a fee. The questions to ask are how much time you have to spend, how much your time is worth and how proficient are you at doing these things alone? I am not going to mention the names of any businesses because there are so many on the web. If you are interested, leave me a comment below.

The backlink builder I am going to talk about today is the latest one I found. The previous two I talked about used social network sites either published by you or by their other clients through their business. This next one attacks the way to create backlinks from a different perspective.

Instead of using social networks to publish your blogs, this company owns many actual blog sites, over 100 if I am not mistaken. They have actual names and URLs for each site. They publish a portion of the article given by the client to each site. Their free service allows the client to post once a day and allows their paid clients to post three times a day. I checked out these sites and the business has their clients’ blog segments on them and you can get to the client’s site from there. This is legit.

The posting process includes the URL, a title which needs to be spun at least 3 times, and the body which is a few sentences from the article, also preferably spun. The tags need to be added as well. The company I am currently using offers a spinning service that you pay for yearly to aid in the process. The spinning process if you do it yourself can be tedious, even for a few sentences. It’s your choice, however. Another thing you give them is what type of article you have and they have a created digest of articles in each given type.

The article is then sent to a certain number of websites over a certain number of days to keep from flooding the websites and calling bad attention to the article.

Have you ever used a company like this? What was your result?

 

Jaco Grobbelaar is the owner of BroadVision Marketing. BroadVision Marketing works with business owners to put in place inbound and outbound marketing strategies that consistently secure new clients. The BroadVision Marketing Training Center is located in Petaluma, CA and primarily serves companies in the San Francisco Bay area.

Jaco can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.766.9778 or connect with Jaco on Facebook – www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing – and LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.

Related articles

• Getting Started with Your Backlinking Campaign (ronmedlin.com)
• Website Promotions You Can Do Yourself Without Professional Help (patcrizackonpromotion.wordpress.com)

This is an icon for Stumbleupon, a social networking website. This is part of Open Icon Library's webpage icon package. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have spent considerable time creating and writing about backlinks because I have seen that the different methods I have tried have done wonders for our (admittedly imperfect) Alexa numbers.

There are lots of different companies on the web offering ways to create backlinks using your blog URLs. I am going to tell you about two kinds today and not use any names. If you want to know which ones I used, please leave me a comment below.

This is for all you do-it-yourselfers out there.

First, a word about white hat techniques: All the sites have both free and paid services. The fact that you can do this for free is what makes it a white hat technique. If you want to do less of the actual work, you have to pay someone to do it for you.

• One way I have already shown you has to do with social networking sites. When I first signed up for this, I had to come up with email accounts that referenced the client I was signing up for. (This is an important concept because it will show up later.)  Some of the supposed 50 plus network sites included Connotea, Digg, Posterous and Stumbleupon. The business I was using supplied the accounts and I worked on the set-up from three to four hours signing up for these accounts, double opting in when necessary, and putting a username and password that I also had to create for each on the main page of the business. Then when I had an article, I went to the business site, gave them the blog URL and hit a button to share with all the social networks.  They sent the URL to the various social network sites.

• The second business concern I use is a little different. They started out with fewer social networking sites and a person could either do all the work again or perhaps use the information from the first site.  Otherwise, you can pay to have the business set up the accounts, using their own email accounts and usernames and passwords, which are not ones you would use. When you are ready to publish a URL, you need to tell the site a little more about the URL.  It wants to be given the URL, the title of the article and a little from the article, including the tags. Then it prefers that you spin the title and the article so that when the business places the URL in different networks, it will be similar, but not the same. The added value to this site is that they use their other clients, both free and paid, to disperse the articles. The client can only share 5 and your URL goes on to that client’s social networks.

Have you used anything like either of these? What has been your result?

Jaco Grobbelaar is the owner of BroadVision Marketing. BroadVision Marketing works with business owners to put in place inbound and outbound marketing strategies that consistently secure new clients. The BroadVision Marketing Training Center is located in Petaluma, CA and primarily serves companies in the San Francisco Bay area.

Jaco can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.766.9778 or connect with Jaco on Facebook – www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing – and LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.

Backlinks (Photo credit: ivanpw)

Wikipedia defines a backlink as: “In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node.”  It goes on to say: “The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (for example, this is used by Google to determine the PageRank of a webpage).”

The importance of the page has to do with where it appears when someone searches for a keyword, a city, a business or whatever they need information about. The best place for a webpage is as close to the top of the first page as possible. The way is gets there is mainly by the number of times a search engine, say Google, sees the URL. If it only sees the URL once, chances are that the website will be playing in the left field.

The best way to get the URL seen many, many times is for it to show up in quality spots. Nick Bokhonok said his personal (and quite successful) link building experience and the methods used by other SEO experts, helped him to create this quality backlinks checklist:

• Relevancy – quality backlinks should come from a page with the same topic.
• Diversity – all your quality backlinks shouldn’t come from one site; the more backlinks you receive from different sites — with different IP s– the better your reputation will be in the eyes of search engines.
• Anchor text diversity – quality backlinks should have different anchor text (also known as hyperlinked text), otherwise your link building looks unnatural to search engines.
• Backlinks age the longer the backlink is alive on your site, the more SEO value it has and the higher the value of this backlink.
• General value of  a page – the SEO value of the page that is giving you quality backlinks plays a vital role; the SEO value is much beyond Google PageRank of the page, among other vital factors for the SEO value of the page it is possible to mention the age of the page, what type of content it has, how many outgoing links it is giving, etc.
• Adequacy of your page – you must have the words (for which you are building quality backlinks) on your page to which you are building quality backlinks, otherwise it will look inadequate in the eyes of search engines.

Our next blog post is going to talk about how to get some of these backlinks.

Jaco Grobbelaar is the owner of BroadVision Marketing. BroadVision Marketing works with business owners to put in place inbound and outbound marketing strategies that consistently secure new clients. The BroadVision Marketing Training Center is located in Petaluma, CA and primarily serves companies in the San Francisco Bay area.

Jaco can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.766.9778 or connect with Jaco on Facebook – www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing – and LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.

Related articles

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Some rights reserved by Armchair Builder

What does your blog have to do with social media? Only everything. You blog is the piece of you that goes everywhere to prove that you still exist and to help you be found.

Your blog is the most important part of social media that there is. It is the foundation for all else.

In past blog posts we have talked about headlines, content, consistency, comment sections; and, more recently, the fact that your blog shows proof that you exist and that it how the search engines and customers find you.

You can add each new blog post to all the other social media platforms you have set up. Let’s talk about the first three.

• At a bare minimum you will have two Facebook sites—the one that is all about you personally and your business or Fan page. You will want to be sure that your blog goes to both of these important sites because they each will have different sets of people who will received the information based on who has friended you. You need to be actively adding friends to both sites. The reason why is that your blog information goes to your friends’ sites and your friends can share things with their friends. The more friends, the more potential sharing.

• Your next initial site is also a set of two—you probably have two Twitter sites, a personal one and one for your business. You want to tweet information about your blog with your shortened URL (as well as other links you  like) on these at least 10 times a day. Do be sure and say something about the blog because the shortened URL doesn’t say anything about what you wrote about.

• Your final initial social media site is your LinkedIn profile. Don’t think because you are not job-seeking, you have no need of LinkedIn. Join four or five groups with a large number of members and you can share your blog post to all those people at once. This is a good way to create many backlinks.

So we see that your blog is the item that you send to your Facebook Fan Page, to Twitter, and LinkedIn. Your blog is what people like on their Facebook pages and share with their friends on Twitter and read about and possibly click on from LinkedIn. The URL of your blog leads people to your website or gives you the backlinks that the search engines look at. Your blog truly is the foundation of all other social media.

How well-tended are you keeping your blog? Is it in good shape to send to other media platforms?

aco Grobbelaar is the owner of BroadVision Marketing. BroadVision Marketing works with business owners to put in place inbound and outbound marketing strategies that consistently secure new clients. The BroadVision Marketing Training Center is located in Petaluma, CA and primarily serves companies in the San Francisco Bay area.

Jaco can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.766.9778 or connect with Jaco on Facebook – www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing – and LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.

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The last blog I wrote we were talking about a simple system to tell if you are moving into a better ranking. We decided to use the Alexa number system, which for all its faults does provide a simple measurement of motion.

We discussed the optimum way a website goes to the head of the search engine class by being passed along by fans. We also acknowledged that unfortunately the competition is fierce. So there are numerous other ways to get your word out there without relying on actual word of mouth.

So let’s start with that one. This is a free or paid subscription called OnlyWire. It’s free if you only have your own business to work with.

First of all, OnlyWire is a time vampire. It will take you three or four hours to set up. What you are setting up are a series of networking sites that will publish your blog. These sites include the popular StumbleUpon, Yelp and others. Once you set up the system, you have to initiate the submission of each blog manually and more or less of the ones you set up will take your URL.

This takes time when you post a blog. It can take even more if you seek to correct every error. I estimate that it takes about 15 minutes to do for each blog, because I don’t deal in time periods less than that.  So if you blog three times a week, you are looking at almost another hour of time doing your social media.

Oh yes, I promised you that you could see that your competition is doing this. You will see the words Bookmark & Share at the bottom of the page like the example above. Not every blogger uses OnlyWire because it is clunky, but it does improve your rank. I have seen the difference on our Alexa scores.

Next time, we will look at the mother lode way to improve your score. Meanwhile, have you tried OnlyWire or some other networking system? How did it work for you?

Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing, helps business owners and business professionals put marketing strategies in place that consistently secure new clients. He can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.799.1238. You can “Like” him at www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing or connect with him on www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.

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A Search Box

Keywords—you know you can buy lists of them or buy help sorting out what yours are—but what are keywords really, what‘s the deal with them,  and how can you figure out which ones to use?

Defining keywords, keywords define search

People use keywords all the time. When you put what you are searching for in Google or the other search engines, you are using keywords. Search engines go through enormous data bases and send you results by listing sites that apply to the words you “googled”.

These words are called search terms or keywords.  Here’s where it starts to get interesting. If you use a single search term or keyword, you are most likely going to get all sorts of information that is not relevant to what you wanted to know. So you add another word or two in order to tune up the search. The results come back much more what you had in mind.

What’s the deal, getting the deal you want

Keywords help you successfully find what you want with the help of search engines. Imagine trying to find anything on the internet without search engines and keywords. And this is a free service. Now imagine that you have a client looking for you, your service or product. He or she can use search engines like they are a library card catalog and find you despite stacks and stacks of books.

Selecting relevant keywords for selections

So you know that keywords are important both for you to find something and for someone to find you. How do you decide which keywords to put on your site? Pretend you are your own client. What search terms would you use to find that business you seeking? Put the keyword into the google box and try it. Did your business come up on page one or at all?

Look at your blog and sales pages and look at the words and key phrases about your business, service or product. Make a list of the words that you find. This is the basis of a way of optimizing your webpages to rank better on search engines. Be as specific with your keywords as you can be. Remember that experiment I suggested at the beginning of this article? You don’t want to stick with one word keywords, phrases are better.

Keywords-testing 1,2,3

So you have identified you keywords and have submitted them to search engines.  Where are all the clients you expected to run to your business? First of all, it takes weeks for search engines to process submissions. Also some of them rank not just your keywords, but also use other factors like site popularity (we talked earlier this week about one way to know your site popularity—Alexa numbers).

A different way to get popularity is by improving the number of sites that link to your site. One way to do that is to join commenting tribes. These include people who reciprocate links.  An added benefit to joining tribes is that when you link to their site, your website is noted. So you get a link when someone comes to your site and you get a link when you go to someone’s site.

Another thing to think about is that searchers might not even be googling the terms that you decided were your keywords. You need to be aware of this so you can choose better keywords to attract the search engines.

Here is a free resource you can use to learn what people are looking for when they use search engines. CEBN’s FREE Global Keywords Search Engine URL is http://www.cbn.com/metatags.htm will allow you to research keywords to learn how many times they are used. Plus you can search single words to see the different combinations of words they use with that word when they google.

This information can help you work on your keywords so that they are in line with what searchers are looking for. You want people to come to your site who want to be there, in other words targeted traffic. So the more exact your keywords are, the more likely you are to receive visitors to your site who want to see what you have to offer.

Some other services include Word Market URL: http://www.softwaresolutions,net/free.htm, which provides a free software program that checks what people are looking for on the search engines. The only drawback is that you have to be online for it to run and it can also generate a lot of material.

WordSpot URL: http://www.wordspot.com/ will email you a free report every week of the top 200 search terms. So will Keyword Market Share URL: http://www.mall.net.com/se report/index.html. Both these services also offer paid services to help you get more specific.

Keywords unlocked

The key to keywords is that if you use the right keywords and optimized webpages submitted to search engines, this can bring you free targeted traffic directly to your site. You don’t want to overlook this way to receive traffic.

This article is loosely based on Keywords-What Are They, How To Use Them, And Why They Are Important by Kevin Sinclair, CPA, of Be Successful! Business &Personal Success Resources- http://www.ksinclair.com.

How do you use keywords? Please answer in the box below.

Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing, helps business owners and business professionals put marketing strategies in place that consistently secure new clients. He can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.799.1238. You can “Like” him at www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing or connect with him on www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.

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Image by Getty Images via @daylife

No doubt you are using Facebook as part of your business’ social media marketing strategy. You have a possibility of reaching some of the 750 million members. That’s a goodly number of people. Chances are your customers and potential customers are among them and are checking you out.

Is your strategy a correct one? Have you dropped into some bad Facebook marketing practices? I have a list of some of these. If you find that you are doing some of these you want to get them out of your strategy now.

Where is your business page? If you have a profile, it is for a person, not a business. You need to create a Facebook Page. You can even do it from your profile if you want to. A page is made for companies, brands, groups, organizations and is the right place to generate fans.

Now you have your page and a long unidentifiable not remember-able URL. After you have 25 fan Likes to this page, you can create a vanity URL and a username you can share and remember. But be careful, you only get one chance to make your vanity URL. Facebook won’t let you change it. So think it through carefully. Take your time.

Are you afraid of fans posting on your wall? Why? The whole point of social media is to be social, which means people holding conversations. Make sure that comments are enabled on your page so your fans can post and tag your company in their posts. When they do that, they will be spreading your page for you. You will get new visitors and fans. Don’t be afraid of negative feedback or constructive criticism. Don’t delete these because here is your chance to respond showing your respect for their opinions and appreciating feedback.

Don’t use the page for sales. That is not what people want to hear and they won’t want to Like it.

Is your content valuable? Is it high quality? Are people going to want to comment? You might want to post content that requires a call-to-action or a download.

How varied are your posts? If you just post links to your blog, try adding a video, asking questions related to your field, or even ask people to suggest ways to make your page better.  Who wouldn’t want to be a part of the process as opposed to just being a fan?

Watch your spelling and grammar. Nothing drives me crazy as fast as using the word “someone” with “they” although that seems to be more accepted nowadays, but don’t leave something that is misspelled. Fix it. I have already found several on this blog and I am not happy about that.

Tabs are good, but millions of tabs are millions too many. No one likes to have too many choices. Keep your readers focused by only having tabs that tell them information and provide valuable content.

If someone writes on your page in an obvious attempt to sell their product, you can consider that spam and delete the comment. If what they say doesn’t add any value to your page while promoting themselves, delete. If you don’t do this, people will see that you are not regularly checking your site.

Do remember to regularly monitor your page. Make that a to-do in your strategy. Checking every day is good.

Don’t ignore your page. It will grow stagnant and why would anyone look at a stagnant page?

What else do you think should be eliminated from a Facebook social media marketing strategy? Please put your comments in the box below.

Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing, helps business owners and business professionals put marketing strategies in place that consistently secure new clients. He can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.799.1238. You can “Like” him at www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing or connect with him on  www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.

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Facebook website

Do you want your Facebook fans visiting your website?

While Facebook is a great way to keep up with friends and family, it is also a great way to drive traffic to your business website.

Facebook is a good place to communicate with your fans, but for most businesses your website is where potential clients become actual ones. So how do you get your fans from Facebook over to your website?

One way is to send people to your website, but there are people who would rather see content on Facebook than to move off Facebook. Here are three ways to gently drive Facebook readers to your website without damaging your presence on Facebook.

1. Make use of tabs

Tabs can be set as a default landing tab for people who have not yet Liked your fan page. This way you create their first impression of your page to meet your goals on and off Facebook.

As you make these tabs, consider how to give users value on Facebook without having to turn Facebook into your website. When you see that it is useful, add links that will drive people to your website.

2. Share article and blog posts

Post your website blog posts to your wall, you group walls and your fan page wall. Don’t assume that the same people will see all the new content from your website or your fan page. There might be some overlapping, but remember there are others who might only see your information on Facebook. When you promote your articles on Facebook, you are gaining visibility to you website because of what you share, what people comment on and those who Like your fan page.

You might even have a fan page wall tap and page on Facebook dedicated to your blog like Amnesty International does. On their blog page, they have a Like button and post shorts that lead to their blog site for the full report.

3. Teaser Content

This is different from providing readers with the post headline, picture and intro that we mentioned in the previous example. In this instance you give out only a teaser statement or question to get the reader’s curiosity aroused. This is a bit of a backdoor approach and you shouldn’t do this all the time.

It is sort of like using a Tweet where you ask a question and use a shortened URL so the reader doesn’t guess what the answer to the question is. Their interest piqued, they may make the leap to learn the answer. However  be careful using shortened URLs as some people are leery of these, having wound up where they would never, ever go.

Using these suggestions can make you feel overwhelmed. However, as long as you know which channels  work for your specific objectives, you can get extra benefit from Facebook marketing without losing your investment on your website.

Have you tried any of these? What worked for you and what didn’t? Do you have any more strategies? Please leave your comments in our comment box.

Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing, helps business owners and business professionals put marketing strategies in place that consistently secure new clients. He can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.799.1238. You can “Like” him at www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing or connect with him on  www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.

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A giant QR Code

Guest Blogger Tim Zack

Toy with QR Code

As QR codes become more common you are going to see them used in many creative ways.  I just started looking for them, using them and I am fascinated.

Here is a list of some of the ways you might want to use them for your business.

1. Free Stuff—Everyone loves getting things for free. If you place a QR
2. code on promotional merchandise, you can create brand touch points and reach a broader audience.
3. Direct Mail—There are companies that can create, print and track QR codes for direct mail campaigns. Now instead of boring old email, with a single click readers can go to your unique website, personalized landing pages, videos or surveys.
4. Holding an Event?—Tradeshows, conferences, luncheons or launch parties can be enhanced by QR Codes, which are changing company interaction with customers, how they advertise and brand products.
5. Add a QR Code to Your Business Card—Create a digital printed business card where the people you meet can easily import your information directly into their smart phones. QR codes can be used to direct scanners to your online website, resume, Facebook/Twitter Page. This will help new contact connect with you faster than ever before.
6. Store-Front Windows—With the rise in the popularity of window decals, businesses are using codes to offer street goers coupons, product details, video and other creative offers.
7. Marketing Materials—You can add a QR Code to your brochures, fliers, whitepapers, and other materials to direct readers to product demos, photos, social media pages or point them to a mobile friendly landing page to promote a new campaign.
8. Food—QR Codes are being used on food packaging to send people to places for nutritional information, to make informed decisions or provide coupons for future purchases.
9. Pay by Phone—You’ve seen it on television. Retailers are using QR Codes to have customers  pay from their smart phones. Phones are being used in place of a physical credit card in some locations and can be used to create gift cards in others.

Be sure that you don’t just do this one time and think that you have arrived. You need to update your promotions weekly or figure out some creative use for them in your business often enough that people won’t get bored and quit visiting the site.  Also you need to keep your mobile landing page fresh as well.  As more people make use of the QR Code to learn information while they are away from their computer, you want to be at the forefront of this cool new frontier.

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