Webinar Notes Linking Mark Ling

& Website Promotion Link-Getting Secrets Mark L ing inter v iews Jason Jel l

Affilorama Webinar

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Mark Ling: Hello, everybody. You're listening to Mark Ling. In today's webinar, you're going to be

learning about website promotion and link building secrets. I've got with me a special guest called Jason

Jell, and Jason is a search engine optimization master. He's really good at getting high search engine

rankings. He's going to be teaching you a lot of fantastic information here today. First of all, Jason,

welcome along. And would you mind giving people just a little bit of background information about

yourself before getting stuck in with all the great content that you've got to share.

Jason Jell: Yeah, absolutely. I have what you call kind of a unique background. Definitely not the

traditional sense for a lot of the people that you are probably used to hearing. I actually came up on a

science background. I went to college for bio, and so I was in school for bio. I thought I wanted to be a

doctor, and then I started thinking of what actually goes into being a doctor. And I said, 'Wow, this isn't

really what I want to do at all.' So I went into research. I went into graduate school, actually got my Ph.D.

in pharmacology. During the time, I came to realize that a Ph.D. in pharmacology actually doesn't really

pay very much ironically. So if you get your doctorate, you cap out at like $45,000 a year if you want to

work in a lab and actually do the kind of research that makes a difference to people.

So I quickly scattered around, and I spent quite a bit of time in forums, coming up, learning, like a lot of

other people probably on this call, learning SEO, learning SEM, until I got to a point where I was very

proficient at it. In doing so, I landed quite a few pretty good sized consulting jobs. I started working for

Brad Callen. A lot of you may know or be familiar with Brad Callen. I've worked with him for probably

about three or four years now doing a lot of his training. I'm one of those kind of behind-the-scenes type

of guys, working for Brad for a while now.

As of right now, I work with Brad and I also do some consulting. Right now, one of the big jobs I'm on is

actually for a very, very large company, a $5 billion a year company, managing SEO and SEM. So it's

been a pretty interesting ride for me. Right now, you can say I'm probably not using any of my doctoral

degree in my daily life, but I'm definitely very happy with where I am right now. It was an interesting ride.

[pause] So, what I came in . . .

Mark: I . . . oh, sorry.

Jason:. . . to talk to you guys about today is . . . yeah, go ahead, Mark.

Mark: Oh, no, no, no. You paused, so I thought you were waiting for me to say something, and I was just

going to ask you if you would mind just carrying on with your presentation.

Jason: Yeah, absolutely. So what I wanted to talk to you guys today about was what we consider to be

our site promotion fundamentals. This is largely when we come in, we develop a new website. We're

actually going through the process of bringing it into the search engine, building up its rank. So this is a

very SEO-focused presentation. A lot of it’s link building, but it's also a lot about traffic because ultimately

link building ends up with traffic. So everything that you'll see here either is driven to gain links with the

intent of getting higher ranking in the search engines or to just get straight-out traffic with the intent of

getting more conversions. So that's why we call it 'Site Promotion Fundamentals.'

So as Mark mentioned a little bit ago, I did want to talk about some of the basics for some of the people

who may be a lot newer with these systems, and I wanted to talk a little about Google—how they measure

rank; how they assess rank. Google measures rank on a large number of ranking factors. Some say over

100. It's probably quite a bit more than 100 factors. Now, understanding these factors does help assure

that your pages will always rank well and get targeted traffic, which is a key factor in determining whether

or not you'll actually make money.

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WEBSITE PROMOTION AND LINK-GETTING SECRETS affilorama

Now what the beauty of this is, is that the Internet creates a level playing field for us because anyone can

create a website and anyone can rank for a term if you're willing to work at it. I know Brad's stories, my

stories, and stories of people just all across the web have shown that anybody can step in and get any

term if they put enough time and effort into it.

So the first thing that everybody always talks about is on-page factors, and I'm not going to dive into this

because I'm sure you've heard it ad nauseam. On-page factors, when I go into a consulting job, this is

something we do it once, we get it right, we never look at it again. But you'd be surprised at how many

times I'll walk into a situation and people won't understand what a title tag is or what an H1 tag is.

So if you want to know what on-page factors are and how to do them right, just look at Wikipedia. So I

pulled up a cache copy of the Swiss cheese page on Wikipedia, and it automatically highlights where all

the keywords are used—if they're in the title, if they're in the H1, if they're mixed in the content. These are

base level optimizations. These [tape interruption 05:28.7] and that could be dwindling too. So as long as

you have your titles right and as long as you have your H1s and your contents focused enough, you'll be

fine with on-page. So that's something that we really don't even think about that much anymore.

So if we don't think about that, what essentially drives rank? The Internet is essentially, as I like to

describe it, a popularity contest that you are trying to win. So if you're in there and you're hiding out and

your website's out there and nobody knows about it, you're never going to rank. But if you hang out with

other people, if you socialize with people, you participate in other networks, you will get rewarded.

Now the analogy that I like to use for this is: So I walk into a bar. I'm by myself. There's tons of popular

people, and I sit down at a stool. Nobody's going to come over and talk to me. But let's say I walk into a

bar with somebody like Brad Pitt right next to me or Jessica Alba right next to me. I'm immediately going

to get noticed, and I'm immediately going to get a lot more attention than I would if I hadn't associated

with somebody that's really credible, really famous, just somebody that's really, really well-known.

That's how the Internet works too. So if I go in and I associate myself with a really well-known, popular

web page, then it's going to make it a lot easier to get other web pages to notice me. It's going to make

Google notice me a lot faster. So I'll win that popularity contest, which essentially makes ranking that

much easier.

Now, the reality of Google is that Google, of course, cannot actually read your page. So it doesn't know

what your page is about. It's a computer algorithm. It's just a program. So the question is, of course, how

can Google tell who should rank number one. This is done through those recommendations through other

websites. These are known as the off-page factors.

So if you consider two websites. Something like Site A, it has a couple of links coming in pointing to it. It's

not necessarily going to be considered to be the best resource for whatever that topic is. But then if you

look at Site B, everybody that links to Site B talks about it as the best site for blue widgets, then Google's

going to look at Site B. It's going to look at all these other links pointing to it saying 'blue widgets,' and it's

going to automatically say that since all these people recommend this site as the resource for blue

widgets, I think it's a really good resource that I would recommend to the search results. So Google's

essentially following that popularity contest using links as the platform.



Now the other thing that's really important, you've probably already heard this before in some other

webinars from Mark, is keywords. And I can't stress keywords as a focus enough. I've done multiple,

multiple training source, training pieces, written guides, done webinars just like this just on keywords

alone. Google ranks content based on keywords. So you write content, you structure pages, and you

target based on those keywords. So successful SEO strategies are, of course, structured around these.

So if the website rank depends on links, then keyword-specific rank is dependent upon keyword-specific

links. So it's not enough anymore to just have links as Google is looking for things like link popularity, link

age, topic authority, reputation, and, of course, link anchor text. And that's where keyword-specific links

come in. Now the tactics that I describe here are all going to be focused around driving growth of

keyword-specific links, because in the simplest form, if you have more keyword-specific links than the

other guy that's already ranking number one, then your chances of unseating that person is actually very

good. So it's all based on, you know, all on anchor-type factors. So if you're really driving the number of

links that point back to your site on your keyword, you're really going to be in much better positions to

out-seat the people that are ranking right now.

So the most simplistic view of rank is the site with the most "and best," and that's an important factor of

course, links pointing to it using the proper keyword anchor text will stand the best chance of ranking. So

ranking, as I mentioned earlier, is 20-30% on-page, 70-80% off-page, which is those links. So your links

determine your ranking for your keywords, and this is ultimately where 90% of webmasters fail. To rank,

you need the right links and you need enough links that point back with the right terms. So if you're in bad

neighborhoods, if your total link value, you're linking in just very poor quality, low PR sites, low traffic sites,

non-indexed sites, this is where I see most people really kind of bombing out. I've done tons and tons of

site reviews, and the things that I always run into are you don't have enough links or you're not targeting

the right keywords, so even if you did rank, you wouldn't get traffic.

Unfortunately, I can't talk about all those things because I have a whole lot of linking tools that I want to

get through. And this is just kind of like a smattering of the types of things that I'm going to be talking

about here. Social bookmarking tools, online video, content-sharing networks, blogging, microblogging,

photosharing. Once you start to really kind of look out into the Internet and see where it's gone these

days, and the Internet has really kind of sprawled out. And it's developed these networks, these mininets

of content-sharing sites or user-submitted content sites. This has really allowed us a limitless pool of link

networks.

As I started to put this together, I was kind of running into roadblocks, saying that I have so much to talk

about here that I actually could not even put all of the information together that I wanted to discuss. So

you're getting, as much as I hate to say it, an abbreviated version of everything that you could potentially

be using as link building tools. But these are ones that I put together that I know that we use on a regular

basis, and I'll show you later on some of the end results that we get just by using tools like this.

Some of the ones that I wanted to talk about first are some really quick, easy links. I know you said, 'Get a

pen and paper.' My suggestion to you is just take a screen shot of these. What we use these for, and

these are metasites. Metasites are basically designed to go out there and collect information on web

statistics. So Statbrain, Alexa would be considered as metasites. These are collators which pull in data

and try to get a basic idea of how popular a website is or how much traffic a website gets. These are

actually some of the easiest links you can get. Now, there's about 10 or 11 on here. Like I said, take a

screen shot. I'll show you another slide in a second.



These are usually where I start. The reason I start with these is I want to get my website indexed, and

these are usually surefire ways to get pages indexed or get domains indexed, sorry, when I'm just starting

out a new website. There's lots of ways to do this. This one's always been very effective for me. So

basically, all you really need to do is get these links is take that URL, type in 'statbrain.com/' and then

type in whatever your domain is. And then in all these, you just replace 'your domain' with your actual

domain. So, here's another set of them that you can see here, and I showed you the Statbrain examples.

So you go to the website. It says 'enter . . .

Mark: Hold on just for a sec.

Jason: Sure.

Mark: Just go back to the last slide. For those of you that want to take a screen shot and aren't sure how

to take a screen shot, all you do is you press Print Screen on your computer. And then if you load up

Microsoft Word or maybe an image-viewing piece of software, you just press Control-V, that's Control and

V, or Apple-V if you're on an Apple, to paste, and that'll paste the screen shot. So you just press Print

Screen on your computer to capture it. OK, I'll let you carry on.

Jason: OK. So this is the first set of them. There's probably about 20 here total.

This is the second set of them. I'll leave this up for a minute as I talk to it.

But, again, the example that I gave was Statbrain.com. It's as simple as just going to the website. You can

either just type it in up here, and you'll go directly to the end point. Or you can go to each one of these,

and you can dump in your URL. Like right here, it says 'enter website.' I'll just type my website in right

here. I'll hit 'check.' And then if you can see, right there it says 'estimated number of visits for

website.com.' Well, I entered in website.com for this example. Now, this right here becomes a live link

back to my website. Google comes, crawls that page, and comes back and indexes my site. So your site

cannot be ranked, it cannot even be put into consideration for any kind of value from Google if it's not

indexed.

So I always use this as a jumping off point for me to get that first set of links, just to get my pages

indexed. And I know a lot of people do run into this problem. Of course, you have to make sure that your

site has a really, really good architecture and it can get in and crawl through all your pages. All that

means is from my home page, I've got to make sure that there are ways to get to every one of my pages

through links. Then Google won't have any trouble indexing me.

OK. So that was one. The next thing that we'll do is we'll still use classifieds. And as I start to work in this

business for a lot of years, some of these things that we talked about a long time ago and then we moved

on to things like Web 2.0, and I'll talk about those as well, but then they drop off the map and say, 'Well,

that doesn't work so much anymore. We don't use that anymore because we have this thing.' Now, the

difference between good website promotion strategies and website promotion strategies that may not

tend to be as effective is that good website promotion strategies use every single tactic available to them.

So you diversify your link profile. You get in as many potential domains linking back to you as possible.

And in doing so, this gives you a much more quality, or a higher quality link profile, and it makes it a lot

easier for you to rank.



So I would suggest diversifying your link portfolio as much as potentially possible. So as we talk about

some of the other methodologies, you may think to yourself, 'OK. Well, I'm just going to do directories, or

I'm just going to do articles.' I would suggest to you sprawling out into other avenues. Now, some of these

avenues are things like classifieds. Craigslist, USFreeads are two sites that we've used for years, and

these still work. Again, these are really good tools to get sites and links indexed. So this can work with

links, whereas the previous example of the quick link, the metasites, those generally only work with

domains. So if you have a stubborn link or a stubborn section that you just added to your website, you

need to get that indexed, then I would be using tools like classifieds to do that. These are super quick.

These are free, and they're very easy to do.

Now on a tactical level, here are the types of things that I do. On Craigslist, I'll go in and I'll pick out 10

regions. I'll go into the small business section, and I'll post a little ad about my website in the small

business section. In the USFreeAds site, I will use my keyword as anchor text in my classified ad. In

Oodle.com, I will use my site's URL as my listing URL. The Same with Epage. You can't have anchor text

in that, which is fine. You're still getting the linkback. So I'll just post my linkback in my ad.

So these are all avenues where I can get another . . . 10 for Craigslist, 11, 12, 13 free links. Probably takes

me about 20 minutes to do. These are anchor text-focused, and quite a few of them. And really, really

good means to go out and get pages indexed at a very quick rate. With some of these, you do have

rollovers so the link will fall out of the index over time. But it serves the purpose that I need it to serve at

that time, which is indexing. So these are ones that I highly suggest to people to use as tools in your

arsenal and pull them out when necessary. So that's classifieds.

Now directories. This is another one that I think a lot of people kind of have fallen off on because they

hear they get a bad rap. The biggest thing that I suggest with directories is really focusing in on local. So,

literally on a local level, look for things like Chamber of Commerce. Look for things like local universities.

Look for things like niche-specific directories. Surprisingly, there are quite a few directories for a ton of

things. One example that I did was I optimized a construction website not too long ago. I found probably

somewhere in the neighborhood of around 50 niche directories for this construction website just poking

around in Google, looking at backlink profiles for existing ranking websites. And I just plugged in,

dumped the site in there, and before I knew it, this site was ranking. A lot of times with niche directories in

particular, the authority that's given to that particular niche is driven by those directories because they're

so heavily crosslinked. So, whatever the main construction website was, it was always linked to this

directory. Then the second one would be linked to that directory. So you would see the top 10 would all

be linked to that directory.

Now Google looks at that directory now as an authority hub because all the top 10, all the important, vital

ranking websites for Google are associating with that site. That makes it a hub for Google for that topic,

especially because it's so tightly focused. So niche directories, I mean, I couldn't give these more of a

thumb's up. These are really, really useful tools. Even if they're paid, I would say go after them because

these can be some of your most powerful and easiest links to find.

Now, outside of niche directories, I do still automate directory submissions as part of an overall linking

strategy. Again, diversifying my link portfolio couldn't be more important, especially these days. So you

can look at ranking websites. So say you have a website, or say you have a keyword that you want to rank

for. Go ahead; look at the top 10 websites. You can use Yahoo, Site Explorer, look at the backlink profiles,

and look at the variety of domains that are in sites that rank versus sites that don't rank.



Honestly, when you start to look at the number of domains, the number of root domains that link back to

sites, the more powerful a site is, the more often you see there's 100 domains or 1,000 different domains

or 10,000 different domains pointing back to that site. So having that diversity makes you a lot more

powerful. Because if I have 100 links from Ezine articles, those 100 links aren't going to be as powerful as

having 100 links from a 100 different websites, even if I pull up all the PR for all those pages. Google just

isn't going to look at those two things the same way.

Now, this is a good tip just in case any of you haven't been aware of this. If you use Yahoo's directory, and

Yahoo's directory is still a good directory. It costs $300. So for a lot of people, they're like, 'Whoa, $300.

What am I going to pay $300 for one directory submission for?' I'm going to tell you that this is a really

good idea for you to do, especially if you have the money available to you. Now, Yahoo tells you to

resubmit every single year. Pay up another $300. My advice to you, and you didn't hear this from me, pay

it once, stop paying it, and I'm just guessing off the cuff that they won't pull your listing if you don't repay.

They're just not that advanced. They're not that sophisticated. So kick in once, pay your $300, and you

have an indefinite listing in Yahoo's directory.

I would also be considering paying for Business.com. And to be honest with you, those are the only two

general directories that I'll actually kick in any money for at all. The only ones I'll pay for outside of that are

niche directories. Now, DMOZ, if you haven't ever submitted to DMOZ, this is the Google directory, the

Open Directory Project. You just type in dmoz.org, I believe. I do submit to DMOZ. This is actually hard to

get into as a lot of you probably already know. I do tend to focus in on locals. Look for sections that do

have an editor, and then go for local, like whatever your locality is. If there's a section there, see if it's

updated and submit to that because those tend to get a lot more attention. So if you go to a directory and

you submit in to like the biggest, most popular directory out there, chances are your link will never get

posted. If you go to one of the lower level ones, like a local, then you'll definitely have a much better

chance of getting in.

Now the reason I say this is a DMOZ link isn't just a DMOZ link. There's a whole bunch of sites that scrape

DMOZ for links. So they'll just scrape the entire directory and repost it on their site. So if I get one DMOZ

link, I'm actually getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 or 30 total links because of all the sites that

harvest content from there. So it's a really good link to get.

So overall, I will tend to automate the directory strategy outside of hitting Yahoo and DMOZ and

Business.com, and I'll just do mass submissions. And I'll do this, again, as part of an overall linking

profile, not as my only tactic.

Now, if you're not already doing this particular tactic, and I'm on the blogging slide right now and talking

about blogging in particular, I would say that this is probably something that's doing you a big disservice.

Blogging is one of those things that's really come on in I'd say the past three, four years. And it's really

good for you because it means a couple of things. It means dynamic content. Dynamic content is really

one of those things that is very important for you in Google's eyes, because if your content's varying, if it's

being updated, it's being refreshed, then the chance of your site being crawled more often is a lot more

significant. So if I go in and I update my content, my blog, once a week, once every two weeks, then it's

going to really increase my crawl rate.



Now it's important that I have freshly cached pages because Google needs to know that this site is

updated so it can go through and reference back to it as often as possible. This is also the reason why

you want to set up your blog on your domain. People ask, 'Should I host it on WordPress? Should I host it

on Blogger?' It's OK to have those, but your main blog, the one that you're putting all your energy into, all

your time into, you need to have that on your domain. So have it set up at www.website.com\blog,

whatever it is. Because whatever link value that's getting, whenever people link to you, you want that to

come to your domain. You don't want it to go to WordPress or Blogger or some other source. Put your

energy for your real valuable content definitely on your domain because that's where you want the rank

value to get pushed.

Now, if you do host other blogs, so if you have a WordPress blog on WordPress.com, you have a Blogger

blog on their website, then use those but use them as link funnels. Now what I mean by that is, take your

content, take your articles, take whatever you may have. Go out and put it on those blogs and then link it

back into your site. So you're essentially creating a link funnel where you're creating content on a

third-party site. You're linking to your site, and you're driving that rank deep into your website. Now don't

just link to your group domain. Make sure your deep linking into your website so you're ranking through

your website, not just to a single point. So having a total rank across your domain definitely a lot more

valuable than having 90 percent of your rank at the root of your domain or your home page, which is a

mistake that a lot of people do as well.

The other thing that I would say is that you should interact with other bloggers. So with every given niche,

there's always going to be somebody that stands out. A great blogger, somebody who gets followed a lot.

It could be on Twitter. It could be on Facebook. It could be anywhere. But if I find that person, I'm going to

interact with that person. And I'm going to develop a relationship, and this is a quality relationship with

that person. It could be through comments. It could be through e-mails. It could be through me sharing

content with that person. But if I develop that relationship, I could get to a point where I can really

exchange content with them, and I can gain the value that that person has gotten from his followers or her

followers over time by sharing content with that person.

Now the comments aspect of it can be outsourced, and that's definitely a lot more scalable than what I

was just referring to. So for quality bloggers, I'm really going to put in that time to generate that

relationship. But for blogs that are just out there that are on topic, and they don't even have to be on

topic, if I want to go out there and I want to comment on blog after blog after blog, I do tend to outsource

that, and I have outsourced that in the past. But I will outsource it to somebody who I know is quality and

isn't necessarily going to go out and just spam. I want quality comments from somebody who reads the

story and actually puts a meaningful comment in the story itself. So as often as possible, we try to

comment on stories that are specific to our sites, but there are instances where we will comment on

stories that necessarily aren't specifically on the niche that we're focused on. And of course, we do post

backlinks to our website.

Everybody always asks when I talk about this, 'Well, they're all no-follow. Every blog that I've checked is

nofollow.' But you know what? I don't care. Nofollow doesn't mean no traffic. Nofollow just means does not

necessarily pass full Google rank to that page. So I could put links in a blog which could send me traffic,

especially if it's a popular blog. And traffic is traffic. Traffic is the same exact thing that I'm trying to get by

ranking my web page on the Internet or all these SEO tactics I'm talking about. So if I can get 100 visits

from a website and not have to rank a keyword, then that nofollow means absolutely nothing to me.



Now if you've ever used Wikipedia or if you've ever added content to Wikipedia, and I just did this, this

week. We had this really, really great piece of content. I put it on a really high profile page in Wikipedia as

an external link, and within a day I get 50 hits a day just from Wikipedia. And guess what? That's nofollow.

And that's really great targeted content. So nofollow does not mean anything when it comes to these

types of networks.

Now the other reason that blogging is of course important is because it makes you an authority in your

field. And this is kind of stepping a little bit outside of the SEO link-getting factors. But being an authority

in your field gravitates links towards you. So what people often do is that they'll go out there. They'll do

these tactics, but they'll do them, for lack of a better word, halfway. So if I go out and I kind of post

halfway decent content or if I go out there and I post an article that I paid $4.00 for from some website, it's

not going to give me any kind of authority, and it's not going to make me a resource in that niche that's

going to give me any kind of benefit. So going through posting quality content is going to make me an

authority in that field, and it is going to give me quite a few more links.

So that was blogging. I actually want to talk about social bookmarking, and I'm going to come back to

social bookmarking later because this is a really important part of my strategy. If you're not familiar with

social bookmarking, some people are, some people aren't. Basically they're services that allow users to

store favorite bookmarks on external sites. So you're basically saving your set of bookmarks in case your

computer crashes, or you're saving a set of all your favorite websites at an external source.

The reason I use this is because it increases my online presence. It allows me to get a presence in my

niche, and it brings exposure to your content. So if you see that there's this person who's in my niche and

he's sharing all these bookmarks that are in my niche but not mine, then maybe I'll go through, I'll make

sure that my website's added to the same category as his, and then I'll add all of those other websites. So

I'm building up a profile of similar websites. So when people come in, they see my profile. They see all the

sites that are in it. Maybe they'll add my site.

It does bring in lots of traffic. Surprisingly enough, social bookmarking alone can drive quite a bit of

traffic. And it does also pre-sell your visitors. It pre-sells your visitors in a sense that it stages your topic. It

stages the niche that you're in, and it gets them in the mindset of what to expect before they even get to

that website. So instead of saying, 'I don't know what this website is,' it'll be tagged as like 'snoring.' So

the whole bunch of sites that are on snoring and I have a site that's on snoring, then they go there.

They're already looking for information around this topic before they get there. Thousands of sites do this

now.

So social bookmarking isn't just a one-off, like Delicious, like you used to see before. Delicious is one of

the more popular ones. Some of these are Delicious, Multiply, BlinkList, StumbleUpon. These are ones

that are probably some of the more popular ones. The takeaway from this is, of course, if you're not there,

your competition is there. That means they're getting exposure. They're getting the rank, and they're

getting the links. So getting your content visible will get you more links, and it gets your content passed

around. So this social aspect of SEO has come into play because it makes your content a lot more

shareable amongst other users. And that's where social bookmarking definitely does help. But it also is a

very vital tool for me to get my content noticed which I'll talk about later.



Now the things that you want to bookmark, and this is an important thing to note as well. Of course, you're

going to bookmark your own websites. So bookmarking your own website is brainless. When you have

specials for products or services, bookmark that. So people have a tendency to just go and, 'I'm going to

bookmark my website, and I've done all my social bookmarking.' That's not the case. I bookmark deep

links. I'll bookmark almost everything to be honest with you. And as I go into this, you'll realize exactly

how far we take this tactic. Major posts from my blog, I'll bookmark these. If I have videos or files that you

generate, even if they're on YouTube, I'll bookmark that. If I have a Squidoo page or a hub page or a

content page on another site, I'll bookmark those. So I'm not necessarily using this tactic to promote my

website. I'm using this tactic to promote my content and my website. So even pages linking to my website

I will bookmark. The reason being is that I want that page that has a link to my site to be more valuable for

me. So I promote that page. It adds PR. It adds relevance. It adds Google, whatever you want to call it,

link juice to that website. That makes that link on their page more valuable and that pushes more value to

me. So I'm doing less work to make a link even better than it was before.

Now, how do you do social bookmarking without spamming? Of course, you do want to bookmark other

sites in your industry. So I'll go in. I'll find a niche. I'll follow other people's patterns of bookmarking, and

I'll kind of mimic that as well as interjecting my content. You do want to try to bookmark your best content.

That's a definite thing that you want to be aware of. You do always want to be adding value here. And if

your content that you're bookmarking isn't valuable, then you have to ask yourself, 'Why am I putting it out

there?'

One of the tools that I use for this is a free tool. You can go out there and find it. It's SocialPoster.com. It's

an automated posting service—79 sites all at once. You can do that as well with Social Marker, although it

doesn't work near as well as it used to. So I'll tend to use Social Poster a little bit more, even though it

doesn't bookmark as many sites as Social Marker used to. Very manual tasks. Not something that you're

going to be super excited about doing. And this is ultimately what does tend to separate the types of

people who can rank websites versus the type of people who have trouble ranking websites. It's that

they're willing to put the time and effort in to going through these processes that aren't necessarily the

most glamorous of tactics. But these are the processes that are necessary to get websites listed high in

the search engines. And the people that do get listed high, you can sure as hell bet that they're going

through all of these processes of bookmarking, of link-getting. Like what I've talked about up to this point.

Social bookmarking is not my favorite thing to do, but I can tell you I'm not going to drop it from my tactics

list because I know it works.

Now, online video is another one that continues to amaze me in terms of how powerful it can be. And I

made reference to Wikipedia earlier, and that's one of those kinds of things that's just a juggernaut. It's

been out there forever, and the amount of traffic that goes into Wikipedia is huge, but the amount of traffic

that goes out from Wikipedia to sites listed on it is also huge. I would say the same exact thing about

YouTube. The amount of traffic that goes into YouTube is massive. So the amount of traffic, the potential

that you have to pull out of it is just as large. I saw a stat somewhere that YouTube is now the largest,

sorry, the second largest search engine online right now. So having listings in YouTube gives you almost

as good of a presence as having listings in Google. And they're almost synonymous these days as far as

universal search goes. So you can own your keywords by ranking in YouTube alone, and I know people

who have done this. I'll talk about YouTube-specific tactics in a moment but, like any other page, if you

build links to your videos, it will improve the rank of your videos. Now, I'll touch on specifics around that in

a minute.



Now, it's important to also note that YouTube is not the only video distributor out there. There's a website,

it's a free website, called TubeMogul.com where you can go in and you can syndicate your videos to

other services out there. So Google video, whatever other video sources are out there, you can get your

videos listed in all of those pretty much automatically through this tool. It's a no-brainer for me. Mass

video distribution gets you more visibility. Those other networks, whereas they will not be YouTubes, they'll

still get traffic. So I'll use this type of tool to syndicate my videos out. It also has some pretty neat tracking

capabilities. So it's worth the time, and it doesn't take very much time.

Now, when we look at YouTube in particular, the ranking in YouTube videos is actually kind of simple. The

first thing that I would say to you is that when you go about making a YouTube video, and I'll talk about

how to simplify that process as well, you do want to target terms that have universal search. And this is

one of the things that I think a lot of people don't necessarily think about because you are kind of

reverse-engineering. Obviously not every single term is going to have universal search associated with it.

So I'll go through, I have my list of terms that I want to rank for. I'll Google them. If I see videos showing up

in the search for that term, I flag it as a potential term I want to generate video content against. So if I say

snoring is a term I want to rank for. Snoring has video results. Then that tells me I should make a snoring

video. Now the reason being is because I want to get my video listed in Google as a ranked video,

because that immediately gets me noticed in YouTube, and it also gets me another position in Google

ranks.

I have terms that I have in Google right now that I'll have my number one listing as my website. My

number two listing is either a page that has a linkback to my website or one of these Web 2.0 properties

or third-party properties like Twitter. Whatever it might be. And then I'll also own one of the image results

and one of the video results. And these are not for small-time terms. These are for hugely competitive

terms. Now, understanding what the landscape of universal search looks like in these instances really

gives you a leg up in understanding where to put your efforts. So don't develop a video just because you

think it's the right thing to do. Develop a video and target a term because there's a tactical response by

getting that visibility in search engines.

Now, with the most recent updates to YouTube, if you haven't been there, you haven't seen how they've

shifted things around. Well, they've pulled up the descriptions directly under the videos now. I don't know

if you can see my mouse or not, but where you can see it says 'Howcast' and it goes complete to task. It

says, 'take you where you need.' Whatever it says right at the end here. Right at the end of this little tiny

description is where they're cut off at this point. They're cut off at 122 characters. And this is kind of

important to note because if you get your link, or if you get your description to point back to your website

in 122 characters, then people don't have to expand this whole chunk of content here to actually see what

the link is back to your website. People overlook these things. Same with metatags. If your meta

description is way too long, then you know it gets cut off in the search results.

Think about this with YouTube too. So you're listing. Even if you start to get a lot of views, you have to think

that: How is that user experience for the people who are watching my video? Can they see my link

without actually expanding this? Because as you know with YouTube, you have a very, very short time

frame to catch somebody's attention. If you catch their attention, you need to increase the chances of

them getting back to your website. This is one of the real quick ways to do that. I think the changes that

YouTube has made have made this a lot easier too.

Now the other thing, and unfortunately I didn't show it here, if you click on that little number that, it says

37,000, the number of views. If you expand that out, you can kind of reverse-engineer YouTube too

because you can take a video that ranks for a term that you're interested in and you can click on it and it

tells you what terms drove traffic to that video from Google Search. So you can say, 'OK, people came

into this video through searching this term on YouTube or this term on Google.' Now, if you click on the

number of views for any video in YouTube, you can get that information automatically. So you're not even

having to drill through anything. It's right in front of your face. I use that information to help me determine

what to target as well. So that's where that does kind of become very important.



So with videos that do rank, you can have a very specific title/description combination that includes a

keyword that really is the trigger to rank in YouTube. So we tend to go through, and we'll copy tags of vids

that are ranking. And again, if you expand this out, the tags are listed here. We'll copy titles of vids that

are ranking. We'll really look at the profiles of videos that are currently ranking. We'll try it. We'll try a title.

We'll try a description. We'll put it out there for a little bit. If that doesn't work, we'll pull the video. We'll

post the exact same video again, change the titles, change the descriptions. And often times, just by

changing that up a few times, you can really find the perfect mix of title and description that garners

those really, really high view counts which you're looking for. So just kind of digging around a little bit,

YouTube ironically is the best way to figure out how to get the best rank in YouTube.

Also, as I mentioned, pointing links back to your YouTube videos. Google owns YouTube, so Google's

algorithm starts to play in to YouTube to some extent. So make sure that you're linking back to your video

with the keyword that you want to rank for. Same as a web page. Don't change it up too much. So when

you submit articles, when you go to directories, mix in links to your YouTube videos every once in a while.

Also, there are ways to tag your videos. You've probably seen this in YouTube by now. You see callouts.

You see big boxes showing up that point URLs back. You can even make those clickable. Make sure you

have calls to action in your YouTube video that bring people back. Some of the best videos say 'come

back for my free report' or 'come back to my site for this free piece of content.' Always make sure that

you're building something with an intent of how to get them back and how to make money from it.

Now, the last bullet that I have listed here, it just says 'Animoto.' If you're not familiar with that, what I

mentioned when I started this slide is if you don't have a video player, if you don't have Camtasia or

CamStudio, which are screen capture-type programs, that's usually how you can do this very quickly. Or

even a webcam, you can do this very quickly. This website, Animoto, you can actually build out a

slideshow with a set of images, put music behind it. You can have a video made in less than a minute. A

lot of people use that particular tool just to get videos up in YouTube as quickly as possible and start to try

to pull traffic from it. So if you don't have any kind of capacity to create video, I would go to that

Animoto.com website and have it created for you using their slideshow tool. They're actually pretty cool to

be honest with you. So if you have a niche that's very picture-heavy, it could be very successful. And

we've had instances of videos that were just pictures put in front of music that ended up being very high

view count videos.

OK, so what about sites like rating websites. Now these can be good link-getting websites, but they can

also be very good traffic-getting websites. They do get backlinks for hot topics. So people troll Digg, and

the amount of people that troll Digg is amazing. They troll it for content. And when they see something

that's interesting, what they'll do is they'll repost links to Digg content on their blog. So if they find

something that's cool, you'll see it referenced back, and number of links that people will pull from a good

Digg listing is actually very high. They'll repost the story on their site, and you'll get the backlink.

Digg isn't the only one of these. There's Propeller, Newsvine, Reddit, Dzone, which is Digg for web

developers. And they all work off of the same basic premise—put up a story, people rate it, and it's a

popularity contest once again.

I actually did a webinar on Digg not that long ago on how to dominate Digg, and it is one of the most

fascinating, interesting systems that you'll see on the Internet right now. On face value, Digg looks like

just any kind of basic website. But it is one of the most social interactive websites out there, and the

people that go into it are so dedicated. You can see the people who are very, very popular.

And if you know Digg at all, you'll know who MrBabyMan is. And this guy will come on there, and he will

literally Digg 6,000+ stories a day, which is amazing to me. So he will go in, not just view the stories, but

he'll Digg it and he'll comment on it, and the number of times that he does that is astronomical. If you

think about the amount of time necessary to do that, it's amazing to me. But the upside is that now, when

he comes in and he posts a story, he immediately gets that story on the front page, and almost nine times

out of ten, it's up there for a very long time. So that guy understands Digg, and that guy understands how

to make traffic come in from Digg.



So the first listing in how to dominate Digg is to really comment and gain a network of friends, and that's

what he did. He went in there and he became friends with people who were active users.

I just pulled a screenshot of somebody's profile, and if you look at any single moment where most of the

people who have popular listings in Digg make posts, you can see that their listing of friends have "active

now" in their lists. Now active now means they are literally on Digg at that very moment when that story is

posted.

Now what you'll also notice is that a lot of the very active Diggers who get popular stories don't have a lot

of friends, because this part of the network isn't that highly publicized. So building up any network of

friends, especially an active one, really, really increases your chances of getting a story popularized.

Now if you don't know this, the other aspect that's interesting about Digg is that when you put a story in,

you kind of would work under the assumption that it just goes in the front page in the queue and gets

dumped out. What ultimately happens is that your story goes into a queue environment for staging, and it

gets an initial pass in determining whether or not people think it's valuable enough.

So what often happens is that people will stage your story before it even gets to page one. If it doesn't

make it past that staging environment, then you won't even have the opportunity to get onto page one. So

the more active people are in your profile, the easier it will be to get top listings. So once you start to dive

into it, what you'll find out is, when you have a network of users who are very active in Digg on your

profile, you'll post up a story, the people who are your friends will see that story. Almost immediately, it'll

pull you out of that staging environment very rapidly and greatly increase your chances of getting that

front page listing.

Now if you know Digg, you'll see that not all front page listings are really, really good content. Some of it's

interesting, some of it's junk, but those people understand this environment and understand what's

necessary to get to page one.

So that brings me to second bullet is: Don't Digg your own website. So go on there, and you can try it.

Feel free to do it. Post a link to your website in Digg and see how many people respond to it. You'll get,

like, three views. You'll get a whole bunch of thumbs down, and it'll never go anywhere. That's because

you ultimately don't necessarily understand that network.

Now what I would say, and this is probably the best tip that I can give you for using Digg, is that you

should host your content on outlets that Digg always references. There's a website called di66.net. You

can go through and you can pull out some stats on Digg, basically Digg metrics.

This is the one that I pulled out, I'm calling out in particular. You can see what is the most popular source

for content that's posted on Digg. And by and large, YouTube.com is one of the number one posts, or one

of the number one content sources for Digg. So when people post up YouTube content, it greatly

increases the chances of that content being Dugg.

So what I would suggest to you is, don't Digg your website. Digg a video that you put up on YouTube, or

Digg an image that you host on this Imgur.com image hosting service or PhotoBucket or Flickr. The

reason being is that people are 100 percent more likely to Digg that type of content based off of actual

data than trying to Digg your own website. Because you don't see Joe's Crab Shack website or whatever

kind of website that you're running listed in the top domains that are referenced in Digg. You see content

sharing websites.

So use your content that's hosted in sources that Digg users like to get more publicity for your content. So

that's knowing your audience, and that's understanding that network. That is really how you dominate

Digg and getting front page listings, huge, huge traffic bumps and pretty good size bump in number of

links, too. So if you've got the time, this is definitely something that I would consider doing. It's actually a

really, really cool network.



Speaking of networks, that brings me over to social networking. So I'll let this one catch up. I see I'm

lagging a little bit here. What I will say about social networks is, you've probably heard more about social

networks than any other one of these. Social networks, as a whole, gets mixed in with social media, and it

all becomes kind of one big confusing mess. So I've referenced social networks as a very specific set of

sites or a very specific type of sites.

I use social networks for very specific purposes, too. I use them for brand management. Now for some of

these instances, this may not be something that we care about.

Like Brad for instance. Brad is a brand. BradCallen.com is a brand where you want to have ownership for,

and if you Google his name, he's very aware of this. He has a Facebook page, a MySpace page, a Twitter

page, a website, and he owns the search engine listings for his name, because he's aware that having

visibility in MySpace, in Facebook, in all the major platforms and social networks gives you the easy

capacity to rank for a brand especially. And it also helps you own the search engine.

So anybody who has a business that has a specific name that people may Google at any point in time,

social networking is vital to dominating page one for your name. So I would always use this for reputation

management and for owning the search engines.

Now it's also important to establish relationships and establish yourself as an expert. Now, this means that

you need to go in, you need to inform, contribute, educate people, but don't sell to those people. So

you're using social networking, and you're using groups in social networks. Facebook is a huge example

for this. Look in the groups, look for your niche, and get involved in groups that are highly public, highly

popularized in there, and make yourself a name. Make yourself well known in that group, because that's

how you can easily go in and start to manipulate social networks to your favor.

And these things are traffic tanks just as much as Digg or any of the other sources out there. But I use

them, like I said, for brand management and just as amazing traffic sources. This is where content

sharing is at its best. Make sure you're going with really good quality content.

Quality content, and I've said this . . . I was in a meeting earlier today where you get in instances where

you're working, you're in a consulting environment, and people are like, I need to rank number one for this

term. And I'm like, 'What do you have? What do you have to give? What are you bringing to the table for

people to help them rank?'

A lot of times it's nothing, but when somebody comes to me and they say, 'I spent all this time developing

this really awesome, quality piece of content.' Maybe it's a training series, maybe it's a video set that

really helps the end users for that niche. If I have that, links come to me. I don't have to chase links. I can

pick up the phone, and I can call 10 webmasters in that niche, and I can say, 'Guess what I got? Your end

users are going to love this. Post it on your website.' That is really how I can pull big traffic from things like

social networks, is when you really have value to offer.

Now, on a tactical level, you can use social networks. And you don't see Facebook listed here, because

Facebook is login only, does not index profiles in Google, so it is not a link-getting tool. It's a traffic tool. In

terms of link-getting, you can link in your MySpace About Me profile with anchor text. You can find related

groups and interact with friends.

Flickr. Image Traffic. This was one of the ones that didn't necessarily make the cut so to speak, just

because we have so much stuff here. I upload product shots, screen shots. I put links in descriptions. I

submit images to groups. Image Traffic is actually really huge, and image rank in and of itself is really

huge. I wish I had more time to talk about it, but I don't right now, so unfortunately maybe [tape

interruption 54:47.5].



Twitter, I'll post updates. I use Twitter as like a conduit. So if I'm using Facebook or if I'm using other

outlets, I'll feed in my content to Twitter. I'm not a huge proponent of Twitter, because I haven't seen a

great ROI on it up to this point. But I do use it as a traffic tool.

Hi5 same thing. Link in the "about me." Friendster, yeah it's still around. Link in the "about me." Those are

all networks where I use these things when I have time, as they're available to help diversify my link

profile.

OK, so that brings me to one that's really focused on anybody who has an Ecommerce type website. This

is a link-getting tool for mostly your type of end user. These are referral and review networks. These are

the types of websites where, if you have products, you want people to go in and rate them. Users will go

in, they'll set up accounts, and they'll recommend products or services to other users. Like Epinions

would be an example of one.

Very, very popular for fashion based industries. It's basically using reviews as pre-sell mechanisms. I'm

not going to go in detail on the "lamb handbags" one. I thought I might have time, but I don't want to do

that right now. Like I said, if you do have, especially if you have a fashion based industry product line, or

if you have an Ecommerce product line in general, I will use these types of websites to go out, try to get

reviews. I'll solicit reviews in some cases to build up my credibility and pump me up in those types of

networks to help me get noticed a lot faster.

Now the one that I really do like, and it's a really, really quality traffic source, can be outsourced. It's a

good link-getting tool, and it's a good all around authority building type tool, and that's Q&A sites. Q&A

sites are definitely excellent traffic sources. In some cases, push quality links. You're basically using

questions to help develop new product and marketing approaches.

So I'll go into something like Yahoo! Answers, which I'll talk about in a minute, and I'll post in on a regular

basis. I'll carve out time. I'll carve out a half hour or an hour to just answer questions. And I'll constantly

do this day after day after day, and I'll build up my authority in those types of networks. And Yahoo is

actually a really good example. If you build up a certain level of authority, you will be allowed to post links

back to other people, whereas in some of the other Q&A type networks, you may not be allowed to do

that. So in Yahoo! Answers, if I add enough value, Yahoo actually turns around and rewards me. So

Yahoo! Answers is a really, really good source of this.

If you're feeling a little racy, I guess you could say, you can actually go out, and you can buy somebody

else's Yahoo! Answers account who has already been accredited to the degree which will allow you to

post links back in your answers. Now, Yahoo! Answers, even if you don't get that link back, can be really

good traffic sources.

Now if you want links, Yedda is an example of one that you can go in, you can answer questions today,

and you can put anchored text in and these links do stick. I have Yedda links in my profiles that come

back from, I don't know, like a year or two ago.



The other thing that I forgot to mention in Yahoo! Answers, if you go into Yahoo! Answers and you put in a

really great answer, your answer will stick in the index pretty much forever. And you can post the link. It

may not be an anchor text link in your answer. If it's relevant, it'll stay there. If you post an answer and it

doesn't get chosen as the best answer, it will tend to fall out of the index. So going in with quality in

Yahoo! Answers is really important.

WikiAnswers, same kind of thing as Yahoo!. You can answer and put a weblink in. WikiHow, Wikipedia,

you can add in reference links to relevant pages. Wikipedia, of course, totally prowled, so don't try to

sneak stuff in, it'll get yanked out right away. But if you get something in that necessarily is really relevant,

great traffic source. And then Ehow, finding relevant topics and then going in and commenting on them.

I use these on quite a regular basis to be honest with you. I find that Q&A sources are one of the, I guess

you could say, one of the more limitless link sources that are out there. I've never run out of great places

to find links using those websites.

Mark: Just a quick question.

Jason: Sure.

Mark: Just a quick question. Do you usually ever create your own question in Yahoo! Answers and then

select yourself as the best answer?

Jason: I've seen it done. If you start walking into those kind of situations, then that's when you start

having to think about things like proxies. So I go in as one proxy and I answer. And then I'll switch proxies

so it looks like I'm coming from different IPs, and it kind of really complicates it. And to be honest with you,

I find that if I'm going in and I'm answering questions that I'm comfortable answering, because the

number of questions that are available to answer is so high that I can just pick and choose and say, 'I

totally know this one. I'm going to answer it.' Or I'll outsource it to somebody, and I'll give them the

instructions of, "Don't BS your answer. Go out and find a legitimate response to this question before you

answer it.' So, I tend to just favor that because I don't want to pay for proxies, and I don't want to spend

the time switching or anything.

Okay, so that brings me to, I guess you can say, the big dog of the presentation, which would be content

sharing. And this is where I'd say the meat of most link campaigns really falls. These are sites which will

allow you to create or upload content to their domain. This is going to cover quite a few different entities,

but it is going to really be the strongest part of most link campaigns and it has been for I don't even know

how many years. It greatly increases your online presence, greatly increases your brand or your name

share, and allows you to have multiple Google page 1 listings.

So, we have touched on some of these as we've gone through. We talked about things like Wikipedia.

Those are necessarily content sharing websites. But these particular ones, some of them will pass link

value. Some of them will pass just traffic value. But all of them are good places to get more visibility in

search. More visibility means more traffic. So, I am going to talk about some of the content sharing

websites, and then I am going to talk about some of the other places that you can use this content to get

more visibility for the same piece of content multiple times.



There is a little bit of a lag here. I'm sorry. I am just waiting for it to catch up.

Okay, so some of the better content sites to use, and you have probably seen these. These have been as

good or as bad as anybody can guess over the past couple of years. Like Squidoo and HubPages, you

know they have probably reached their peak. It doesn't mean that I will stop using them. But they're not

passing as much link weight as they used to pass. It's a lot harder to get stuff listed in them than it used

to be. But it doesn't mean that they're worthless end points. These content sharing websites are still

places that I will take article content and I will resubmit it. And that's why having good content becomes

very important to me, especially with like a Squidoo lens or a HubPage. I mean to keep those listed in

those sites these days and the amount of policing that there is there, you really need to go out there with

something that is quality. And in doing so, it is going to give you a lot more link value pointing back to

your website.

Now, some examples of how effective this type of thing is, I did two that I pulled out. The "wu yi tea,"

which I don't even know what that is, but apparently it was talked about on Oprah at one point in time. So

it made it an extremely popular search product. I actually pulled the search data for that term so I could

show you exactly how interesting this is to me at least. So somebody could come in, they could not have

a website. They could just go on a HubPage and they could rank for a term that is actually kind of a

competitive term relatively speaking in the search market. It is not necessarily something you can just go

in, dump a page in, and you can rank immediately. So, this particular term, the top listing is "The Truth

About Wu-Yi Tea." And it's a HubPage. So, it's a page that somebody set up for free, dumped some

content on, and guess what? It ranks number one for a term that gets 12,000 global searches a month,

7,000 searches in the U.S. alone. And that's a HubPage alone. So, they could have a second page, a

third page with their own website. But just going in and posting that quality content, pointing a few links

back to it, it's pumping up the value of that particular page and those get listed. Those have value in the

search engines because they are pulling from the overall strength of the HubPages domain.

It will be easier to rank content on HubPages than it is to rank on your own website. Same as the

Wikipedia principle. The domain wikipedia.org is so strong when long tail terms come up, it's so easy for

them to rank with no extra work. You are using the weight of HubPages and Squidoo to garner rank to

those pages. So if you have quality content and get it posted, just like this one, the Ab Lounger one, they

actually have the first two listings for a term that gets 12,000 searches a month. So these are long tail

terms that are basically owned by content sharing websites.

Now there's a lot of places where you can do this. I know you probably have lists of Web 2.0 sites. I'll talk

about some of the Web 2.0 sites here. I actually have a list coming up in a few slides of some of the ones

I use. But it's not just Squidoo. It's not just HubPages. So when you do get content, and I'm talking mostly

about articles, the most people will get content in the form of articles. They'll have articles written. They'll

write articles themselves. They'll generate content through whatever means necessary. When you have

that article content, what do you do with it? Now there is a lot of places where you can use this content.

So, let's talk a little bit about just working on the assumption that you're launching a site or you're getting

ready to start promoting something, here's the type of things that I do when I'm first starting out this whole

process. I usually start with somewhere around the neighborhood of 10 to 15 articles. These are really

good quality articles, something that I'd be happy to put in my hand, share with a friend of mine, read

right in front of me. So that means it's something that I don't necessarily outsource to a place where it's

going to cost me $4.00 for 400 words, and once I go back and read it, it's obvious that that person does

not speak native English. I mean I want something that I am very proud of to start working from here.



The first basic thing that I will do with these is perform article submissions in the same fashion that you

have probably already done article submissions forever. I'll also use these in some more innovative ways

that I'll talk about, such as converting them over to PDFs, PowerPoints. And I'll show you where you can

use those. And then, as I talked about with HubPages, utilizing these Web 2.0 properties to really get

more visibility for my content in as many different channels as I possibly can. So, this is how I do start to

really kind of gain as much ground as I can using my content. And this, as I mentioned earlier, carries the

bulk of the load for the most of my link-getting techniques.

So content is, as many of you probably have heard, probably know, king by and large. Now, what I mean

by that is that it gives you the best flexibility to get links, to interact with people, and to share this content

that is going to give you quality backlinks in other places. So article submissions is probably the one that

people are the most familiar with. And these are going to be old hat to a lot of you. So using tools like

Isnare, I do submit to Isnare still. It's still a good service. I tend to not consider Isnare to be my only outlet.

I'll submit to Isnare, but also manually submit to GoArticles, to Ezine Articles, and to Article City. Ezine

Articles probably being one of the bigger of the bunch. Isnare says that it submits to these, but I will

manually submit to them as well because I have never really seen them actually pull through.

I have articles, just in Ezine articles alone that get me somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six

hundred hits a month. These are very general articles that were written on a term that got very high

search volume. That page that Ezine Articles has, that has that content in it, doesn't even actually rank in

the top ten. So, those views come in from people who are searching in other outlets, who dig through the

search engines, who search directly in Ezine articles. So, not only was that a great link for me, but it's also

a great traffic source for me.

Now, obviously, the basis for the intent of article submissions is that you're syndicating your content out to

these directories where webmasters will come through, harvest that content and repost it on their own

websites. The link back to your website in and about the author box is largely where you'll gain the link

weight or the link value that Google's going to pass back to you. Of course, as we know, that process is

essentially broken at this point. We don't necessarily see a lot of people coming by and saying, "I need

fresh content. I'm gonna go to Ezine articles." So, that part of the story doesn't necessarily always

connect.

So, as a result you can't just use article submissions as your primary end point. I'll talk about some of the

other challenges around article submissions as I move forward, but the big thing to know is that that can't

be the only place you use this content. I will use this content in secondary web properties. Now, these are

things like Squidoo and HubPages, but they're also things like Zimbio, Gather and Associated content.

These are all content sites where you can go in, you can create an account, and you can add content.

So, the same articles that I will republish in Ezine Articles or Isnare, I will consider and suggest to you to

spin this content to make it more valuable.

So, what I mean by spin is you're altering your title, you're altering your description or your lead-in. You're

altering the actual content itself to appear unique to the search engines. So, a lot of times when you see

spun content, you'll see spun content in the form of, you know, substituting out adjectives or substituting

out whole paragraphs. You do have to have a pretty good spin, somewhere in the neighborhood of 50

percent or more in most cases to get that content past the search engines.

Now, the idea is that you're eliminating duplication of content in search to prevent that from actually

causing you a decrease in the amount of links that you can gain. Now, I want to dispel a myth here since

I'm talking about duplicate content, just to say that duplicate content does not exist. Duplicate content will

exist at a site level, and I can confirm this.



So, if I have a website and I have a hundred pages and ten of these pages say the exact same thing,

Google will manually go in and filter out nine of those pages because the content is essentially

duplicated. The main flag for that is the title is the same, and some of the content appears the same. So,

like, the descriptions could be exactly the same.

That's the first thing that's going to flag me for duplicate content according to Google, and that is on site,

that is not off site. So, when we're talking about off site, duplicate content is essentially a myth, and it's not

a myth because it doesn't occur. It's a myth because our interpretation of it is not correct.

The reality of duplicate content is that it's not duplication of content that prevents multiple listings. It's

competition that prevents multiple listings. So, in the same way that you're not going to have ten people

ranked for fat loss with the same exact term and in the same exact spot, you're not going to have ten

people ranked for your article because it's the same exact keyword, the same exact title and the same

exact focus. By design Google's algorithm will basically say, here's ten pieces of content. Which one is

the best suited to rank for this particular topic? And it's going to pick, not based on duplication but based

on total site value, total link profile to say, this one's the best and that one doesn’t matter as much.

That is not a duplicate content issue at all. It's a purely competitive issue. So, when we spin content, we're

averting the competition that comes with competing against another person that has the exact same title,

the exact same topic, the exact same content even. And I'm spinning my content. I'm making my titles

unique. I'm making my content unique, thereby bypassing the competition for my article showing up on

that other website or in this other Web 2.0 property.

I hope that's clear because that's a big, big myth that gets passed around a lot, and it's absolutely not

true. It's not duplication that flags you, it's competition. When you think about it, with the algorithm, it

makes perfect sense. That's exactly what you'd expect Google to do. The spinning helps you bypass

that, and I'll talk about spinning in a little bit as well.

The other one that a lot of people overlook, and this is actually a really good way to alleviate duplication of

content is PDF and PowerPoint submissions. So, there's actual directories on the web that just harvest in

PDF content or just harvest in PowerPoint content.

I will take my articles, and I'll convert them over to PDF. And I'll submit them to sites like Scribd and Free

IQ. And the beauty of PDF content is that Google will actually index a PDF. So, if I have links in a PDF,

they can potentially get indexed, pass value and PDFs themselves can rank. I've seen it happen. There's

actually a PDF specific sort option in Google. If you know how to go into the advanced search options,

you can filter out the PDF files.

For large corporations, oftentimes I do see PDF ranking for pretty substantial terms. So, in the same way

that if I have content like this that I want to rank, I will build links back to it because I want it to be more

valuable in search. I want to gain more positions.

The same exact thing with PowerPoint. I will convert my articles over. I'll dump them in Word, and I'll do a

slideshow with them. I tend to change them around a little bit to make them more interactive, but I will

utilize the value of a site, like Slideshare to try to piggyback off their page, rank, their site value, to get

more value for myself.

That's a resource there that I will use with existing content. That's something that I find a lot of people

don't necessarily use, but these are really, really good directories that are nearly as spanned as Ezine

articles or even Isnare. You'll notice that it's a lot easier for you to do that. With piggyback you get

additional value off of content that you've already been using whereas it's just been burning a hole in your

hard drive up to this point.



So, revisit some of that old content that you have lying around and say to yourself, "Can I use this in a

Web 2.0 property? Can I use it in Scribd? Can I use it in Slideshare or reuse it there?" These are big

places where I see a lot of people dropping the ball. They're kind of selling themselves short in how much

they use that content that they spend a lot of time and energy on or money, for that matter.

This is the piece that I find is the missing piece for a lot of people. I kind of touched on it, but this part

actually, I think, puts it a little bit together. Where a lot of people do tend to drop the ball is they'll go

through and they'll do article submissions, they'll do YouTube submissions, they'll do Web 2.0 properties,

but after that point, that stuff is just left alone. For valuable things like videos or a HubPage or a Squidoo

lens, I will build links to those properties because I want those properties to rank.

I have multiple tactics associated with these things. So, for the low hanging fruit ones, like a Zimbio or

something that I know isn't necessarily going to rank, I may not be building links to it with the intent that

it's going to rank. I may put it out there. I know it's going to pass some rank over to my websites, but I

don't expect it to really take a search engine position. But for something like video or something like a

large property where I do expect it to compete against larger websites, I will build links to that.

When I'm going through this process, and I've hit on a multitude of different steps. I talked about

craigslist, classified ads, YouTube, blogging, blog commenting. I will keep track of wherever I submit

links. I will have an Excel sheet open. When I put a link up on a blog, so I actually just put a blog

comment up, or if I submit a link in Yahoo! Answers in one of the Q & As, I will copy that URL and I'll put it

into a spreadsheet

I'll keep track of every single place that I have gotten a link, and when I go through and I have this list, I

have all the profiles that I've ever set up, all the articles I've ever submitted, all the comments I've ever

done. I will take every single one of those URLs, and I will put them into a bookmarker like Social Marker

or Social Poster. And I will social bookmark them.

I'm beefing up my link profile manually. This is a very, very manual task. It takes a lot of time, but you

know what, if my link profile is worth 'X' today and I do this, tomorrow my link profile will be X + 10, or X +

20 or 30. I'm greatly enhancing the power of my link profile just by doing this particular tactic.

So, just submitting your content is not enough. Believe it or not, that's actually stage one of the process of

promoting my content. It doesn't necessarily just end there. When my content's out there, I have this

massive list of all the places that I've ever actually generated a link. Whatever that might be, whatever the

tactic associated with that is, I keep track of that and I keep very detailed Excel charts to say, "Here's the

link. Here's when I bookmarked it." And then I move on to the next one.

The other thing that I also keep track of is RSS. So when we're talking about my YouTube channel, as an

example, when I submit five videos to my YouTube channel, I'll pull the RSS feed for it, and then I'll submit

my RSS feed through an RSS submission tool. There's a ton of them out there. Just go grab one, I mean,

there are hordes of these out there. They all pretty much do the same thing.

You're now using RSS directories to help promote your content. I'll also keep track of any additional RSS

feed that contains a link back to my website. Now, keep in mind when I'm saying this, I’m saying every

RSS feed. So, if I have a blog that has a link to my website, I will pull the RSS feed for that blog, and I will

put it through a RSS submission tool. Again, I'm beefing up the value of the links that were created in my

profile.

Now, I will do the same exact thing with the Ping tool. So, every single link that's on my spreadsheet, I will

Ping that link. Now, a lot of you are probably sitting on the phone saying, "Whoa, that's a lot of work." But,

I'll tell you what. If I go through this process . . . now, I haven't even talked about, at least, five or, maybe,

even ten of the other link-getting tactics that we do on a regular basis. If I go through this process with the

ones that I have listed in this slide deck, you will get huge traffic for terms that you didn't think you even

had the capacity to rank for.



Those last three pieces, the social bookmarking, the RSS promotion and the Pinging are pieces that

people don't necessarily usually do, but they're pieces that will add a whole bunch of value. They're a lot

of work, but ranking is a lot of work. And the people who do rank right now have put the work in. You need

to unseat them. I will do this, especially for competitive terms. I will go to this extent to try to unseat a

competitor, and this works. I can guarantee you it works, and I have proof that it works, actually.

The takeaways are when you're looking at things like this, you really need to understand that this is a lot of

work. This is quite a few pieces that are moving around, but keep in mind when you start to think back

into your head of what we talked about. We talked about YouTube. I showed you three ways to do that.

We talked about content generation. You can write your own content. We talked about free classified

sites. We talked about Web 2.0 properties. We talked about blogging, blog commenting.

When you start to recap what I've discussed into your head, ask yourself how much of this is actually

going to cost you any money. I don't even think I've even presented anything that costs you anything but

time up to this point. So, anybody who's sitting there, thinking, like, "I can't make money online," or "I

haven't gotten to a point where I've been successful online," I've just talked for the past hour and change

through a set of tactics that you can implement tomorrow, no additional money, only time which I can

absolutely guarantee will generate you more traffic than you've gotten using any other tactic up to this

point. This generates a ton of traffic, and all you really need to do is to monetize that traffic. That's another

webinar. I can't even go into those details, but this is link-getting, traffic generation at its purest.

Your results on big sites like HubPages and YouTube, like I said, will do much better with links pointing to

them. Try and keep content in each channel as unique as possible, so that's where the spinning piece

comes in. Like I said, this is just some of the methods that we use.

So, all the tools that are available to us, like I mentioned in the beginning of the webinar, I'll use as many

as I possibly can get my hands on. I diversify my link profile, and I do this because I know it's going to get

me a whole bunch of new domains. The real question is, and I’m sure a lot of people are asking

yourselves this, is do how we as a group take these types of tactics to the next level?

Now, the next level of this is actually pretty impressive, to be honest with you. I mean, it's something that

we've been working for and working towards for quite a few years now. We've used these tactics, and

we've seen certain things, like Web 2.0 properties throw up nofollow links whereas yesterday they'd be

generating a ton of traffic for us and a ton of link weight for us. And today, they throw up a nofollow link.

These things are going to continue to happen. Google is going to continue to devalue certain things, like

article directories, in terms of value. We said to ourselves, "We need a better method to do this." So, we

went through, and we developed this tool where we started to beta test. And when we beta test, we put

out a new site, and we really start to ramp up this tool.

And we went from, on a site that was brand-new, you can see it was in November, late November '09. We

went from 257 backlinks to 30,000 backlinks in a little over three months. That is an astonishing number,

and those are just huge, huge numbers of backlinks. If you go through that whole process that I just went

through in terms of link-getting tools, I don't even know that we can get to that point with everything that

I've discussed alone.

In addition, those backlinks created actual value for us. We moved from position 50 plus to number one

on Broadmatch for a term which is hugely competitive, and when I say hugely competitive, we're talking

three, four case searches a day here. At that point, we were somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,558

visits a day within three months of launch.



So, kind of put those ideas, those concepts into your head and think again about what it would take to get

to that point with the tactics that we've discussed. Again, huge numbers of backlinks, obviously, as we

talked about, Google weights those very heavily. The guy who has the most links, with the most keyword

anchor text usage, is going to going to get the best rank.

We know rank equals traffic. So, how do we do this? We did this with article marketing, believe it or not.

But, it's not your traditional article marketing that we used. Traditional article marketing has quite a few

challenges associated with it, very limited visibility. So, you're going to just article directories, and as we

talked about, article directories in and of themselves are a dying breed.

You submit to Ezine articles. You'll get traffic from Ezine articles, but there isn't going to be webmasters

picking up those articles like we once hoped. If you look at the profile of submissions for Isnare, how

many of those websites are PR0? Or if they were a PR3 or 4 a year ago or two years ago, Google is

devaluing these sites over time. To an extent, it's exactly what they're doing with directories. These are

content depots which Google once valued very heavily. No longer is that the case.

So, there's massive duplication of your results. Massive duplication, as I discussed, is massive

competition and people trying to rank through your content. What that tells you is that once where you

had a piece of content that you put out there and you could rank it very easily across multiple domains,

now it's getting a lot harder to carry as many links for a single piece of content.

I had a piece of content that would go out there. I know I would get 1,000 links for it. Remember the days

when you could submit article content, you could get 1,000 links from a single piece of article content.

That's absolutely not the case anymore.

Now, the other thing is that we're losing control of this content. This is one that I put together. I don't even

know how many years ago. You can check the domain. I don't even own that domain anymore, but it was

an article I wrote on credit card expenses. This guy scraped Ezine articles from my content, reposted it

on his website. He ranks Number 2 for it. He's been Number 1 for this term, credit card expenses, for I

don't even know how long, with my article.

You look at the article, and he's pulled all the links from my article out. Every single person on this phone

call has probably been in that situation where their article has been scraped. Their links have either been

swapped out for another domain or totally stripped. So, the time and the effort that you put into all of

these processes that I talked about give you no benefit at all.

This was something that we were running into more and more, and it's something that we basically

needed to stop. We asked ourselves the questions, "What can we do here? What methods do we have to

bypass these systems?" Article marketing is article marketing. It's been there forever. How do we improve

upon the base system that's been used for years and years?

So, maintaining current article techniques are basically going to get us nowhere, and we knew that. And

as the years go on, this is just going to get worse and worse. We needed to expand our submission

locations to new places. We needed to diversify our content to new domains. These had to be quality

domains. It couldn't be content farms like we were using right now.

We needed our article marketing to be more scalable, something that we could do on a regular basis.

And we needed to be able to use and get more value out of the content that we had. So, in doing so and

walking through this entire process, going through this practice together and understanding that we just

weren't getting as far as we used to, we developed a tool which we call SEOLinkVine.



Some of you may or may not be familiar with this tool, but if you're not familiar with it, let me tell you a little

bit about it. Basically, what we did was we said to ourselves, "If we can't get value from article networks

now, what if we created a network of sites? What if we created a network of real websites for content

sharing and link-getting?"

Instead of me saying I'm going to submit to this website that has 10,000 articles in it already, I'm saying to

myself, "I'm going to submit to this good quality content website that's run by somebody like you or

myself. And that website's going to post a link back to me."

Very, very different story as far as Google is concerned. That website is a total value site compared to the

others. Now, we're talking about in context anchor text links. We're not talking about an about the author

box. We're not talking about footer links. We're talking about quality anchor text links in the body of the

content, the kind that Google looks for. Their algorithm is actually driven to find these types of links. This is

what we set up.

The other thing that's super cool about this process is that we fully automated the submission process.

And the process is ongoing, making it scalable. If you go to Isnare right now and you submit your article,

it goes out to, say it goes out to 1,000 websites. I don't even know if that's the case. If it goes to those

1,000 websites, what happens to it then? You're done with it. You don't have another shot at it.

When we developed SEOLinkVine, we asked ourselves, "Well, what happens if our network grows? What

happens if more sites get added?" What we did was we programmed a process in where as new sites

come on board, you get more opportunities for continued submissions.

Now, in addition to that, not only did we create an ongoing growth network which automatically

syndicates the new sites as they're added, we created one of the best article spinners on the market

today. If you've used an article spinner before, you know that you go in, you click spin article and it spits

out a whole bunch of crap. A lot of times the spun version isn't necessarily readable. It's not something

that's easy to do either. You have to go in. You have to put in tags.

Well, the article spinner that we built is very, super user friendly. It's something that you can go in. You can

swap out using our Thesaurus. It's automatically one click. You can pick which terms associated with your

article are the best ones to substitute in. You can automatically sub in new titles, new sections of content

without having to understand any kind of code. Spin it and you get spun versions of your article very, very

rapidly.

Now, where you had one article before using a tool like Isnare, now you have four versions of your article

that are automatically done. This can happen in literally less than five minutes. You can spin one article to

four versions of your article, and the beauty of this is that SEOLinkVine will submit every single version of

your article to all the possible outlets in the content site network.

You're greatly increasing the number of legitimate backlinks that you can receive. So, article marketing

now, you were just getting that one crack at it, putting it out there and whoever picked it up, picked it up,

whoever listed it, listed it. And then, the sites that did list it were competing against each other to pass link

value back to you.

Now, with SEOLinkVine you have multiple unique versions of your content that's submitted to much better

quality websites in our network, and those websites are listing better quality links, in context links. So, now

for every article, I'm getting multiple unique versions, automated submissions to content sites, constant

resubmission to new websites and in context links. These are links that stick. These are links that are

going to be the type that Google goes out and looks for and puts the most weight on.



Now, the other beauty thing about this network is not only is it going to be one of your best link-getting

tools. I can attest from my own experience and the data that I showed you earlier, 30,000 links we pulled

from these types of networks.

SEOLinkVine is going to be one of the most valuable tools out there. Not only is it one of the best

link-getting tools, it's also a tool for almost endless content availability. Instead of using a source like

Ezine Articles, you can put sites in this network that will grow automatically.

As people add in quality content to the network, your site that you add to the network automatically

captures new content for end users which you can choose to monetize as you like. I can add sites just

like you can add sites which will automatically grow in value over time as more users get added and more

people submit more content. So, I can use Ad Sense. I can use Affiliate Offers with sites that will

automatically grow.

So, that is SEOLinkVine, and as I said, this is probably one of the most innovative tools that I've seen

come out of Brad's office in I don't know how long, and I've been with him for a while now, seeing things

like SEO Elite, Keyword Elite, Affiliate Elite, very innovative tools which is what Brad is known for. And

they've really changed the way that we actually approach link building.

I think, as I dropped off, you already saw this. Hopefully, there's still spots left, but I can say that we have

put together some special pricing plus a really, really amazing bonus packages just for you guys alone.

This is limited to the first 30 users who actually go and check out SEOLinkVine. I would highly suggest

that you jump over to seolinkvbonus.com to see what we have to offer.

With that being said, I will kick it back to you, Mark, and see if we have any other questions or anything.

Mark: Sure. I'm just going to let people know just a little bit about the bonuses, just really quickly. I

talked to Brad, and he offered me one bonus. Then, I went back to him and I asked him if he could do a

little bit more. Then, I went back to him and asked if he could do more, and this is the most that he could

provide. He's told me to limit the bonus to 30 users because he has to set up separate registration codes

for each user for the software that he's giving you as bonuses.

They normally sell for . . . one of them is an article submitter software that will allow you to submit to over

200 article directories with one click. So, instead of paying something like Isnare, instead of paying them

a monthly fee, you simply have this software and every time you want to get links from regular article

sites, although it may not be as effective as SEOLinkVine, it still has some effect. You just press a few

buttons, and you get your article submitted.

You also get his directory submitted gold software that allows you to get a whole lot of links from different

directories. Once again, instead of paying a monthly fee to some of the sites that will submit to different

directories, you'll be able to do it in a semi-manual fashion, but he automates all the areas that it possibly

can. You're able to do it, using the push of a button using the software there.



You also get his press release Ebook which reveals the technique that took Brad Callen, one of his

websites which was brand new, to the Number 1 site on Yahoo and Google in less than 24 hours. So,

you're going to learn how he does it using the power of press releases.

You're also going to get SEOMindSet by Brad Callen, which is his in-depth course, step-by-step. I think

it's around about 127 pages, and it teaches you step-by-step how to get a high search engine ranking

using all of the strategies that Brad Callen uses, and this happens to be Jason's partner in this particular

project, by the way, that Brad Callen uses to get high search engine rankings. He's one of the world's

most renowned search engine optimization experts. It's full of priceless search engine optimization

knowledge. So, if you thought that this webinar contains great value, you'll learn even more in this

particular book. It's very well written. And then beyond that . . .

Jason: I worked on that book. I can't believe he's giving that away.

Mark: Yes, that's pretty good value, really. And on top of that, I've thrown in a couple of great bonuses of

my own. I've actually spent months hounding different pay per click millionaires who attended various live

conferences that were attended by super affiliates, and I got these particular affiliates to reveal their

secrets to me via audio and video-based interviews.

They're not any old audio interviews. I didn't make these interviews . . . put it this way. They build on each

other. I didn't just assume each individual interview was just going to be targeted at newbies. That's not to

say that the first 15 minutes or so of each interview doesn't cover a lot of newbie strategies, but the thing

is I really wanted to just get a whole lot of info for myself that I would use. Like the golden information, like

what made them make over a million dollars a year from Pay-Per-Click. I managed to uncover secrets that

you just don't hear anywhere else. So, there's a lot of great strategies driving paid traffic to your websites.

I have included "PPC Millionaire Confessions", volume one and volume two also as bonuses as well.

These are available for the next 30 people that join, so it won't be available for too long, but I strongly

recommend that you guys check this out. OK, guys. Thanks again for all of you for being here, and we'll

see you next time. Bye, guys.



Webinar Notes Linking Mark Ling

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