Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
32 Ways to get links to your Website
But first here are two basic rules.
Rule 1: Create lots of relevant (and often fresh content) on your web page which has a high saturation of key words that the user or surfer “googles”. If you want to be found under “Business coach
Also is “Business coach
Rule 2: Build high quality and relative links to your site. The more sites with similar content that link to a page – the more votes it gets and therefore over time the higher it climbs. Link building is the most difficult part of SEO. It requires patience. Sometimes you will not see a result for a phrase you are optimizing on for 6 months.
However here is a list of ways that you can build links.
1. Build a "101 list". These get linked to all the time, and often become "authority documents". People can't resist linking to these.
2. Create 10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here] articles. Again, these are exceptionally easy to link to.
3. Create extensive resource lists for a specific topic. When I say resource list … things like the 10 best books on Advertising etc.
4. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category.
5. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.
6. Syndicate an article at EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.
7. Submit an article to industry news site.
8. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it newsworthy and compelling. Email it to journalists and bloggers. For good measure submit it to news wires like:
http://www.prweb.com
http://www.prleap.com
http://i-newswire.com
http://www.webwire.com
http://www.pressbox.co.uk
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com
http://www.clickpress.com
http://www.przoom.com
http://www.pr.com
http://www.marketwire.com
http://www.prnewswire.com
http://www.businesswire.com
9. Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.
10. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free.
11. This tip is an oldie but goodie: submit your site to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions.
12. Submit your site to paid directories. Another oldie. Just remember that quality matters.
13. Join the Better Business Bureau.
14. Put a Google Map up which links to your site.
15. Get a link from your local chamber of commerce.
16. Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources.
17. List your site at the local library's Web site.
18. See if your clients or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.
19. Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other\'s business cards. Have strategic alliance partners … put a link on their site.
20. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to relevant resources.
21. It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry expert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your site.
22. Submit a story to Digg that links to an article on your site. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your page.
23. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your site, link at your site, and/or buy your products.
24. Review relevant products on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct customer enquiries and secondary links.
25. Create product lists on Amazon.com that review top products and also mention your background (
26. Review related sites on Alexa to draw in related traffic streams.
27. Review products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions to help build your authority.
28. If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable, and be specific where possible.
29. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.
30. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.
31. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.
32. If you create a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog directories.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Why You Need to Fail Peter Bregman
"Peter, I'd like you to stay for a minute after class." Calvin teaches my favorite body conditioning class at the gym.
"What'd I do?" I asked him.
"It's what you didn't do."
"What didn't I do?"
"Fail."
"You kept me after class for not failing?"
"This," he began to mimic my casual weight lifting style, using weights that were obviously too light, "is not going to get you anywhere. A muscle only grows if you work it till it fails. You need to use more challenging weights. You need to fail."
Calvin's onto something.
Every time I ask a room of executives to list the top five moments their career took a leap forward — not just a step, but a leap — failure is always on the list. For some it was the loss of a job. For others it was a project gone bad. And for others still it was the failure of a larger system, like an economic downturn, that required them to step up.
Yet most of us spend a tremendous effort trying to avoid even the possibility of failure.
According to Dr. Carol Dweck, professor at
It turns out the answer is deceptively simple. It's all in your head.
If you believe that your talents are inborn or fixed, then you will try to avoid failure at all costs because failure is proof of your limitation. People with a fixed mindset like to solve the same problems over and over again. It reinforces their sense of competence.
Children with fixed mindsets would rather redo an easy jigsaw puzzle than try a harder one. Students with fixed mindsets would rather not learn new languages. CEOs with fixed mindsets will surround themselves with people who agree with them. They feel smart when they get it right.
But if you believe your talent grows with persistence and effort, then you seek failure as an opportunity to improve. People with a growth mindset feel smart when they're learning, not when they're flawless.
Michael Jordan, arguably the world's best basketball player, has a growth mindset. Most successful people do. In high school he was cut from the basketball team but that obviously didn't discourage him: "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game wining shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
If you have a growth mindset, then you use your failures to improve. If you have a fixed mindset, you may never fail, but neither do you learn or grow.
In business, we have to be discriminating about when we choose to challenge ourselves. In high risk, high leverage situations, it's better to stay within your current capability. In lower risk situations, where the consequences of failure are less, better to push the envelope. The important point is to know that pushing the envelope, that failing, is how you learn and grow and succeed. It's your opportunity.
Here's the good news: you can change your success by changing your mindset. When Dweck trained children to view themselves as capable of growing their intelligence, they worked harder, more persistently, and with greater success on math problems they had previously abandoned as unsolvable.
A growth mindset is the secret to maximizing potential. Want to grow your staff? Give them tasks above their ability. They don't think they could do it? Tell them you expect them to work at it for a while, struggle with it. That it will take more time than the tasks they're used to doing. That you expect they'll make some mistakes along the way. But you know they could do it.
Want to increase your own performance? Set high goals where you have a 50-70% chance of success. According to Psychologist and Harvard researcher the late David McClelland, that's the sweet spot for high achievers. Then, when you fail half the time, figure out what you should do differently and try again. That's practice. And according to recent studies, 10,000 hours of that kind of practice will make you an expert in anything. No matter where you start.
The next class I did with Calvin, I doubled the weight I was using. Yeah, that's right. Unfortunately, that gave me tendonitis in my elbow, which I'm nursing with rest and ice. Sometimes you can even fail when you're trying to fail.
Hey, I'm learning.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Great Post from Seth Godin"s Blog
Taking the leap
The best businesses and the best projects are a quantum leap above the competition. This gulf represents competitive insulation, because others can't figure out how to get up there with you.
Amazon, for example, has a leap between it and other online retailers. Sure, you might be able to mimic part of what they've got, but the gulf is so huge, it's hard to imagine displacing them any time soon.
Nike has spent billions on advertising, sponsorship, manufacturing, technology and distribution. It's a quantum leap between them and some start-up that wants to compete.
I think going for the leap is essential for creating a business for the ages, and I want to speculate that there are three ways to make it:
- BUY IT--you can raise a lot of money or spend a lot of the company's R&D or marketing money and just buy yourself a huge head start and this provides insulation. (This is my least favorite, because spending like a drunken sailor often leads to other drunken behaviors, including remorse the next day).
- SNEAK UP THE CURVE--you can quietly develop your business fairly cheaply and then, by the time the competition notices you, it's too late. Build a Bear Workshop is a great example of this. One store at a time they built a brand, a cash flow and a nationwide footprint that makes it awfully difficult for others to compete. McDonald's did the same thing.
- THE NETWORK EFFECT--some markets are ready for one (and usually only one) intermediary to show up and be the default winner. Twitter and Comdex and Alexander Graham Bell are great examples of this.
There are probably some others (like make a genius innovation in your basement and then patent it) but these three are good ones to start with.
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