Aaron Wall claimed, in Strategic Content Based Link Building, that you could gain $10,000 worth of links with two days of work. That’s a lot of hyperbole, which goes back to how I didn’t make 3K in a week. My 3K post and my criticism in the comments on Aaron’s post is at the heart of this post’s idea: (more…)

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Curious why you should subscribe? Here's 20 reasons why. On a related note, if you need SEO services, here's where to get more information.

When you and a busload of friends have had several long hours of championship partying in the club where you gave 110%, and you’re still so pumped for overtime that you go over the top for the win - you’re a Hall of Fame member of the Pro Partying Association. (more…)

Big ideas and food for thought:
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One of my favourite things to do when browsing the web is take screenshots of interesting things I notice, particularly in the SERPs, but also on other sites. It’s an easier way of taking notes and learning from others. Featured below are some sites you know, like DoshDosh, Treatment Search, Sphinn and others.

There’s also the genuinely stupid Stupid.com, some much more intelligent Sphinn spammers who’ve carefully observed what tips us off to spam, and more. In the interest of load times, I’ve linked to some pictures rather than post them here. Enjoy! (more…)

You’re likely to see some of these in future posts here and aroud the various lovely places that take my stories. So check out as many of them as you have time for, cuz there are some real sweet ones in here.

Diorex doesn’t blog anymore, so Smaxor republished some of his classics. (more…)

I’m in a crap situation, and I need to learn to say no. First, because saying yes is eating into my own time and second because I’m embarassed to admit that I voted for friends’ submissions that were average and not really deserving of votes.

Shana retaught me to say no, so many thanks to her! And my friend Sean Maguire (of 360 Sell) recently served me a raw dish of ‘your page sucks‘ and in fairness - I agree to a large extent! (Just not about the aspects that matter to Google, which is what that post is about.) Kudos to Sean for being a straight talker!

Besides that, while we’re on the topic, I want to make the point to some SEO friends of mine who frequently message me on MSN about digging their stuff. I’ve done it before and will probably do it again, but you’re going to have to up the ante. I’m ashamed to say that some of those pieces I voted for took you all of 10 minutes to write and 5 more to edit. Give me a break!

On the same note, to those people who constantly send me stuff on SU and hardly return the attention, kindly take me off your lists. It’s reeeeally annoying and I’ve begun thumbing down those posts of yours that feature Adsense above the fold and content below. Is that your goal?

p.s. If you were wondering why I didn’t post much this week, check out this interview with Tyler.

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Social media is one of the most difficult things to justify in terms of ROI because current analytics aren’t well suited to measure its data. Outside of linkbait, whose value can be measured by analogy to the link-buying market, there are no standard metrics for tracking the result of social media activity. This ties into my question on the proper measure and value of attention equity: How do you measure it and what is it worth to you? Here’s my proposal for social media analytics and tracking. (more…)

Ever see that classic gag of a couple of people standing around staring upwards at nothing and pointing in the same direction? A crowd grows around them, and gets gradually bigger. The point is just to see how many people they can attract into their crowd of starers (more…)

Here’s a refreshing interview with Kat French, well known in the SEOmoz and Sphinn community and certainly a person to keep an eye out for in search marketing. We cover online community moderation, the strength of social media and of personal networks, and much more. (more…)

I was chatting with Ann (she of the SEO Smarts) the other day about measuring social media efforts. What follows are a few ideas on how measure that, as well as a related metric that might help you identify linkerati who’ve visited your blog. If you like this post, I encourage you to subscribe. My other material is just like this.

1) Longtail searches to new deeplinks. Frequently, I’ll read something, find it interesting enough to link, but won’t necessarily bookmark it. Or perhaps I’m feeling lazy and it’s easier to search Google than my bookmarks. Whatever the case, traffic referrals that show longtail queries with hyper-specific intent are often a presage to getting a link. People look for something they already saw before they’re about to link.

By taking note of these searches and the IPs they’re coming from, then checking backlinks to that page in the subsequent days/weeks, you can likely find out who the IP belongs to. In the future, you can show that person your best content in the aims of getting more links, show them a “welcome you awesome linkerati” message and so on. I’m sure you guys can find other worthwhile uses for IDing visitors in this way - and if you do, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

2) Number of unique visits by a given person (based on IP, ISP, geolocation, screen size, browser, resolution) prior to subscribing (RSS or email). It took me reading lots of Skelliewag’s guest posts around before I subscribed to his feed. The reason is that people usually need to be convinced of the consistent quality of a blog’s content before subscribing.

To measure this, you would use some click-tracking in combination with analytics.

On a related note, the plugin that shows new visitors a ‘you’re new, why don’t you subscribe’ message is likely not that effective for most people. That’s because the default setting is three visits, and imho, it takes more than three before someone is convinced enough to subscribe. I had to see about a dozen of Skellie’s posts before getting the feed! Then again, I tend to be a skeptic and thus a late-adopter, so for the average folk it’s likely to be a half-dozen - 10 times.

Another related point is considering the # of pageviews per visit, and especially the frequency of return visits (sometimes termed the loyalty of your visitors). As analytics expert (and recent email correspondent :D!) Avinash Kaushik can tell you, the “stickiness” of your content and its pull aren’t such great success metrics. However, they do measure how much of your content people consume. Usually, people will consume lots of it if it’s really good. Coincidentally, they also subscribe if it’s really good…

3) Frequency of Sphinn frontpaging/StumbleUpon orgies. (This latter colourful term is courtesy of my friend X). This relates to the speed of daily traffic and feed growth. SSS did 0 - 700 in only a few months. That was achieved, afaik,with near daily frontpaging for a month or more! And again, obviously, this was because he pumps out some seriously killer content.

This can be pretty good as a predictor of traffic and future subscriptions, assuming you keep it up.

Incidentally, I’m not sure this is entirely original, as Neil Patel has mentioned that you need to hit digg’s frontpage several times in a week to have maximal impact. While I think he was talking about it in a link-building context, he may also have meant it regarding subscribers, but I can’t find the reference unfortunately - please do post it in the comments if you have it. I’ll update this post and give some linky-love to whoever finds and posts it first, with whatever anchor text you want (just no pills, porn or poker)!

Come back tomorrow for my Top 20 Reasons to Brave RSSands. (aka: Won’t you please subscribe? Pretty please? With a cherry on top? I’ve got good - some might even say influential - stuff, really and truly! )