Online there seems to be something of an obsession with Google and with SEO. Yes, SEO is a very useful tool if you are hoping to get some attention for your site and a great way to increase traffic – but it shouldn’t be the be all and end all of your business – mostly because if you’re thinking that way then you’re exposing yourself and making yourself highly vulnerable and you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. It only takes Google to suddenly change their algorithm, or to suddenly change their policies and de-index you (both of which they have been known to do) and you will be left with no traffic, no revenue… no business.

How to Win Back Your Independence

So how can you make a site successful without necessarily needing to be number one on Google? Well the most effective way to do that is to stop relying on volume to make your site a hit. Let’s be honest – most of us have a website that offers something fairly mediocre for free and then relies on people clicking ads while they’re looking around to make us money. No wonder we need millions of hits a day to make any money.

Imagine another way. Imagine that your site is all geared toward promoting a service or product that you’re selling – which could just be an e-book or could just be an online course. You can sell this for $5 a pop, or $500 – it’s really up to you and how much you can make people believe in what you have to offer them. But then, all you will need to make some serious money is for someone to stumble on your site and be won over by your sales pitch and to place an order. If that happens five times a day and you’re selling something for $30… well then you’re making a living from your website. And if you only get 500 visitors that’s fine – as long as you can convert 1% of those people into buyers.

Suddenly then you will note as well that you don’t even necessarily need all those ads on your site (they distract from what you’re selling) and you certainly don’t need hundreds of people there who don’t really want to be there. Rather you just want people there who are interested in buying – and that changes your whole marketing strategy.

New Marketing

Now instead of forcing people through Google, you are going to instead going to start targeting people on a much more real and one to one basis. Yes you can use Google AdWords or even Facebook ads if you like, but here’s my advice – include the price in the advert. This way you’ll wean out a lot of would-be-clickers who wouldn’t be willing to spend any money which will help you to save money bearing in mind that you’re paying per click.

But even better is to target people through your e-mail marketing where you can talk a lot more in-depth about your book. Or target them one on one and give them a business card. Or advertise in magazines.

Google who?

Jeet is a passionate technical writer and works at directoryroll.com as a cloud server administrator. He likes to share his views on Cloud Servers to get the best outputs.

Before implementing effective link building strategies it's important to make sure that your sites are optimized for the keywords you are targeting and the on-site SEO is properly implemented.  There should be a lot of keyword relevant content on your site and the home page should provide a lot of relevance for the keywords you are targeting. In reality, ranking is not just about effective link building strategies, it's also about the relevance of your site to its keywords. Remember that you are dealing with an algorithm in Google, a bot that automatically crawls sites and then decides if the site should rank for the keywords its targeting, it's never enough to just build links with proper anchor text or to have your keywords in the title tag of the page, the on site content must match as well.

The goal of any link building strategy is to become an authority in your niche, that is how Google views the quality links going to your sites, votes for your authority.
But you cannot be an authority if your websites are not loaded with authoritative content and so those high quality links will never come.

Junk Links = Junk Content.... that is how Google sees it!
and in reality that is a fact, high quality sites will not link to junk. So when your content is not top notch you will only be able to get crappy links.

Effective link building strategies in 2011 and beyond are all about Quality over Quantity. For example, while webmasters used to be able to use mass directory links to rank various keywords, those days are gone, and directory links are pretty much useless. Google has gotten really good at detecting and disqualifying links that are manually built, and even penalizing sites that go too far in their link building, so be careful  especially with new sites. Premium link building involves more consideration and a more careful process. What worked last year or two years is no longer viable because Google has gotten smarter and is in essence waging a war on crappy links!

Effective Link Building Strategies For Premium Link Building

1. The most effective link building strategy in premium link building is to make sure your link profiles look natural! All webmasters and bloggers with do manual link building, this is just a fact, but there is link building that is efficient and then there is the kind that's reckless and consequently can be destructive, ie: doing 3 guests posts on relevant blogs vs. 5000 profile links via automated software like Sick Submitter.

2. Don't be greedy in link building and don't rush to rank, long term ranking takes time, patience and quality links, NOT 10,000 profile links. The Google algorithm has gotten smarter, build links slowly and look to quality and not quantity.

3. One of the best link building strategies that I can offer you is that it's better to get 2 premium links than 500 crappy links.

4. Write high quality content and promote it to get natural links as much as possible, this is the best of premium link building that has longevity and guarantees long term success. Commenting on related Comment Luv Blogs is a safe and easy way to give your content exposure, which brings traffic, which brings links when other bloggers like what they read.

5. Google has confirmed that they will be using their own social site ratings, Google +1, as part of the ranking algorithm for SERP rankings, so make sure your content lives up to getting a +1 rating. The best WordPress Google +1 plugin is here.

6. Get links for ALL the pages on your site, NOT just the home page. Many people get all their links to the home page only, another red flag. In reality, you can rank the home page without a bunch of links because as you get links to your inner pages it naturally helps with the ranking of all the pages on your site, including the home page.

7. Build links slowly for new sites. Start with just a few and then let it age for a month or so before getting more and keep adding quality content.

8. Avoid crappy low quality links and especially when your site is new. Try to build a solid link profile with strong links, like contextual links from related sites as much as possible before getting crappy links, like a lot of articles, blog comments, irrelevant site links...etc. New sites do not have any trustworthy quality signals, such as quality links  and that is that's when low quality links can hurt the most.

9. Do reciprocal links correctly. Reciprocal links happen online and in in of themselves they are not bad, I have many here, posts I have written and linked within my posts to a blogger's content that I loved and then they linked to something I wrote, that's fine and happens naturally online all the time, but having pages of reciprocal links is a link scheme and totally useless and dangerous in 2011 link building.

10. The same as above goes for placing hundreds of reciprocal links on blogrolls, another big red flag that screams low quality, spammy link schemes or paid links for both the linker and the linkee!

11. Some of the most premium links and especially for new sites are Press Releases and since those spread around the Internet, that could bring traffic that will love your content and link to you, check out List of 41 Press Releases and How To Write Press Releases.

12. NEVER EVER use link pages, those are those web pages usually named something really stupidly obvious, like domain.com/links or worse yet domain.com/link-partners and the page is full of nothing but reciprocal links to other sites that have your site on their "links page". This is not only no where near premium link building, it's an obvious link scheme only meant to manipulate search engines into rankings. They are worthless, completely outdated and dangerous because it screams link scheme and can you sent to the Google black hole! If you have a links page, DELETE IT NOW!!!

13. Effective link building strategies include links from a diverse set of IP's.

14. Low quality directories are bad news, and especially those that advertise "Improve Your Rankings" "SEO Friendly", "Paid Link Gets DoFollow and Higher Placement", all bad news, useless links that carry no weight or any valuable link juice and can be especially negative for new sites with no trust rank.

15. Vary your anchor texts, vary, vary vary and vary again. Natural link profiles do not have the same exact keyword phrases for their anchors that site owners are targeting for each link, people do not link out that perfectly naturally. Basically each page, especially home page, should have no more than a 25% occurrence of the same anchor.  If every link in your profile has the exact same anchor for each page, then you can be sure to raise red flags and get a quick penalty from Google, like the -50, which lands every singe page of your site on Page 5 or lower, and there they will stay for months and years. Use the URL as the anchor, use click here, this site, add other words to the anchor to go along with the main keywords.

16. Don't do link bombs (yes, 1000 links in one day is a bomb, even 500, even 300).

17. Build links slowly - Quality over Quantity (did I say that all ready?)

18. Make friends with bloggers in your niche and network.

19. One of the best link building strategies is to link out to others. Create "Best Of" "Top 100" type posts referencing other's people work and sites in your niche, when you give other people links you get links back. Linking out is good, contrary to some myths out there, you don't have to hoard your link juice, and worry about losing traffic (if you're worried you probably don't have much anyway), and no linking out to good sites and content won't hurt your rankings, it actually helps, learn more at Linking Out From Your Website.

20. Track rankings to see the effectiveness of your link building strategies. Depending on the competitiveness of your keywords, you can sometimes rank with very few links.

21. Track your link building and anchors over time, Majestic SEO is free and works great.

22. Get both nofollow and dofollow links. Learn more at NoFollow vs Dofollow Links - Why You Need Both.

23. Checking out and duplicating competitor's links is a great link building strategy. Use Open Site Explorer and then try to get the same.

24. Contextual links are best - These are links that are within a related piece of text. Even better when the entire site is in a related niche.

25. Don't waste time on useless links that link directly to your money sites (Forum profile links, ie: Angela's links, directories, crappy article sites, ie: content farms)

26. Use social media. Make friends, connections, reach out to other bloggers and network, this often creates community which results in premium link building opportunities that come naturally. Learn more with Best Social Media Apps To Boost Your Brand.

27. Don't get stuck on getting links only from blogs, try to get links from static sites and various platforms. Learn more at Links From Static Website.

28. Write content that is link worthy, this is the absolute best way to get a natural link profile. Make sure to get that content noticed by using various social sites, Facebook, Twitter, and social sites specific to your niche. Here are 22 Social Sites To Promote Internet Marketing, Blogging, Make Money Online, SEO Related Content.

29. Guest posting is premium link building at its best. You would be surprised how many authority, "high end" blogs and sites accept guest posts, Mashable does, and many others as well. Usually you can find the link in their footer. Check out My Blog Guest, a community for guest blogging. Also, search in Google:

• Your Niche Guest Post
• Your Niche Write For Us
• Your Niche Submit Content
• Your Niche Submit Article
• Your Niche Submit Blog Post

30. STAY AWAY from Themes sponsorships. This is a link scheme where you pay to get links to your sites placed in WordPress theme footers, and users of those themes cannot remove the links, which can result in thousands of useless and harmful toge links and  Google has penalized sites time and time again for doing this, it's an obvious link scheme, useless and harmful to your sites.

31. Getting footer links in general is NOT premium link building. They are old news and scream PAID links!

32. Do not solicit hundreds of blogroll links (unless they are freely given of course).

33. Avoid home page, footer, blogroll, contextual or any kind of links on irrelevant sites. When Google sees a link to Weight Loss on a Laptop site that's a red flag for paid link.

34. Another solid link building strategy is to run a good contest with great prizes. Most readers will link to spread the word.

35. Be careful using link wheels. Link wheel link building strategies can be effective when done properly, which most people don't know how, and so then they become dangerous because they can be easily detected and viewed as link farms, which is against Google TOS.

36. Internal link building within your own site is an essential link building strategy. Placing links to your own content on relevant posts and with relevant anchor text goes a long way for SEO. Learn more at Internal Link Building for On Site SEO.

37. Build Links To Your Links - 2nd and 3rd tier links are very effective for getting a powerful flow of juice to your money or primary sites. Build links to your articles, and social media links, get links for the content that links to you. Example: You get a link on a blog in a post + Write an article on GoArticles and Ezine Articles linking to that post + Submit that article to social media links.  This is where many find profile links to be effective, they use them to boost links to their sites, instead of linking directly to their money or primary sites.

38. Retweet other bloggers work, they notice that you notice and that creates networking that can go beyond Twitter.

39. Ask for links! This is not something I spend a lot of time doing, but probably should, it's tedious work, but many top SEO's spend their days doing this type of premium link building. Most emails I get for this, and I get many each day are useless, because theses people send generic crap reciprocal link page requests, but sometimes some good ones come through and usually these emails contain some good content the webmaster has written and feels the a link on my site to that content is useful and relevant to my readers, so if you have linkable content that's one approach. Learn more about using this link building strategy at: Best Ways To Outreach Link Building.

40. Get an interview from someone important in your niche. This will usually earn you a backlink to that interview on their sites and others.

41. If you are going to comment on dofollow blogs make sure and check out the comment section for blogger moderation of comments. If you see a bunch of casino, sex or viagra author comment links that are being followed, don't leave your link there, that's a bad neighborhood!

42. Link baits are still great link building strategies, learn more here.

43. YouTube is a great source of traffic (and the link in the profile is dofollow), but more important than that link is the fact that YouTube and other video submissions sites are loaded with viewers. You can get a lot of exposure, traffic back to your sites and if your content is top notch - backlinks!!!!!!

44. AVOID 3 way link exchanges, and especially with low quality sites. This is another old school link scheme that can cause issues with Google because if you do a lot of these then a link farm schema can be easily detected. I get lots of email requests for these and it's always shady because the webmaster offers some crappy sites for exchange. Usually these are sites created just for this purpose, they have no real value, they are not updated or promoted correctly so the link itself  is pretty useless, the last email listed a site that had 215 blogroll links all ready, all irrelevant by the way. What a scam, you give them a link on your high end site and they give you a link on crap?!??!

45.  Be careful if you're buying links. It's not worth the penalty, especially avoid buying links at Digital Point Forums, many sites there are so obviously selling links and Google will detect them sooner than later.

46. Convert your best articles to PDF format and submit to the bestPDF directories like Scribd and Docstoc. This let's you show off your work, and can get traffic which can lead to more links.

47. The final link building strategy for premium link building is that link relevance is more important than link quantity! Yes, it's better to get 5 links on relevant sites than 50 links from irrelevant sites.

More Link Building Strategies and Premium Link Building Guides of Interest

• Link Building In A Google Panda World
• Effective Link Builders
• Link Building Q & A With Experts
• 4 Types of Authority Links And How To Get Them
• SEO Checklist for New Websites
• Getting Links From Broken Links
• Understanding Link Based Spam Analysis Techniques (really technical)

Please comment and share with us the link building strategies you use and those that I have missed...

Press releases are a great way to promote websites, blogs, spread the word about an e-commerce site or any web business. Writing press releases that are effective and DO NOT sound like advertising or a sales page is key when it comes to those press releases being spread throughout the web on legitimate and credible sites. A press release is a really viral method of website promotion, where various sources, like press sites, news sites, bloggers, journalists, web announcement sources, search engines and others can pick up the releases and therefore spread the word about your web space all over the net, giving you a lot of buzz, links back to your sites and mass promotion.

The leader in press release distribution is PRWeb, they accept  releases and provide mass web distribution to news sites, search engines, various press sites, bloggers, PR bloggers and other places, their packages start at $80, if you can afford it, it's really worthwhile and right now they are offering $50 Off First Purchase for the SEO Package and also a general 10% off your first news release. If you really cannot swing the money you should not spend it because you can still submit your press releases manually to various free press release sites listed below.

Writing Press Releases

The key to success with press releases is how they are written. Since most good press release sites are very picky about the format of and how a release is written it's crucial to understand how to properly construct them. The worst thing you can do is make the copy sound like a sales page or an advertising piece for your website, that IS NOT the purpose of this, the release needs to be newsworthy, that is really the key. A well-written piece, like this one on Isaac Dabah, will have a fairly neutral, unbiased tone and present a number of detailed facts about the news item. PR Web has the best guide on how to write press releases, (click the whitepaper icon to download) along with a long list of how-to's and tips for press releases and news releases.

I also found another gem, Press Release O-Matic, this awesome free tool takes you through all the required sections of the press release with a wizard like interface section by section, you fill in the info asked for and then generate a full release in HTML and plain format, check it out at  Press Release O-Matic.

If you do not want to mess around with the writing and the learning you can have the press releases written for you, 99 Cent Articles - Modern Products writes really professional press releases and they are very well written. They also have write/distribute packages as well.

Just remember that the better and more correctly the press release is written the more other sites and people are are likely to pick them up and reprint them for mass promotion.

Submitting Press Releases

There are two options for submitting releases, manual site by site submission that is free or paying a service where you submit the release once and they submit it to various sources on their list. Each paid service will have a list of their own places and people where they will submit your release to, some of the paid services have thousands of destinations on their list. Below is a list of free sites to which you can submit your release manually, and then a list of the paid sites that will distribute your release to various places for a fee, like PRWeb mentioned above.

41 Free Press Release Submission Sites
Below is a list of 41 free press release sites sorted by page rank where you can submit your releases. This is the manual method, more time consuming, but it's free, so if you cannot afford to pay a service like PRWeb or the other paid services I listed below then you can do it yourself for free.

Press Release Sites That Charge A Fee

Remember that you do not need to submit to every one of these, with PRWeb for example, you submit one release and they distribute for you to many different places, like news sites, bloggers, journalists and various other relevant web services.

If you guys have any tips for writing or submitting press releases please share in the comments!

Keyword research is one of the, if not THE central aspects of making money online, blogging and e-commerce. Without proper keywords targeted traffic will not find your site in any of the search engines and you will lose out on subscribers, buyers and any other type of traffic you may be targeting. It's a fact that proper niche research and niche research, keyword research and then keyword analysis are the essential steps in having a successful online venture. Good keywords bring traffic and traffic brings money.

There are two parts to keyword research for any one website
1. The main niche research for the main keywords of the site that is done only once when initially creating and launching a new website.
2. Ongoing research for keywords that is conducted on an ongoing basis for internal pages for content that is constantly added to a site. This guide will focus on the main niche niche research and site wide keywords.

The purpose of this guide is to look at the search for keyword phrases as it pertains to making money online, and the best way to make money online is with affiliate marketing, where some commission is made by promoting particular products. Often times people can also launch review type blogs, where they just post about various products and make money with Adsense ads or other type of advertising that is peppered around their content.

Whether you want to build affiliate marketing sites or blogs, and make money with eBay products by using the very easy PHPBay wordpress plugin, or make money with Amazon with the excellent EasyAzon WordPress Plugin, or maybe you want to build a product comparison website with the CompariPress plugin, it starts with proper keyword and niche research.

3 Steps to Keyword Research, Niche Research and Keyword Analysis
There are 3 steps to finding the best keywords, niche research, locating the optimal keywords within the main niche and keyword analysis, here is a detailed look at these 3 steps.

1. Niche Research - Finding Main Niche Ideas and Markets

Overall, to start with you are looking for main niche ideas, for example, laptops, computers, televisions, kitchen appliances, weight loss, credit, mortgage...etc... words that are very general. There are millions of possibilities of things people are searching for. Below are some resources to find niche ideas.

Niche Research Resources

• My Simon - Top Searches
• Amazon Best Sellers
• Best Buy Top Rated Products
• Overstock Departments
• Ebay Pulse
• Bizrate Top Products
• Shopzilla Top Searches
• Yahoo Shopping Brands List
• Google Product Search
• Home Shopping Network Top Searches
• The Find
• Yearly Shopping Trends Report
• Clickbank Marketplace
• AOL Hot Searches

2. Keyword Research - Locating Optimal Keywords within the Main Niche

Most of the time the main niche keywords, such as those listed above, are way too competitive to even try to rank for. For example, the keyword laptop is really impossible to rank for, so we need to find more detailed phrases that people are searching for related to those products, such as cheap laptop computers, still competitive but much less so. So once you find those niches that are of interest to you it's time to use some keyword research tools to find the related longer phrases and keywords for those main niches. Basically you are looking for keywords that have high amounts of monthly or daily searches with the lowest amount of competition possible.

Good Free Keyword Tools for Keyword Research

Remember these tools are just estimates, but it's as good as it gets for getting an idea of the search volumes for various keywords.

• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Google Keyword Tool

If you have the money to spend I highly recommend you check out Micro Niche Finder, this is a premier keyword software suite that delivers a variety of useful features and comprehensive niche and keyword research.

3. Keyword Analysis - Crunch the Numbers

We want those phrases that have a good amount of search volume per month and also those that are low enough in competition to rank for.  There are 3 things that you are looking for when it comes to keyword analysis:

I follow these guidelines when doing keyword research

• At least 10,000 + searches for all keywords per month
• No more than 100,000 competing sites in SERPS when searching allintitle:"keywords"
• No more than 1 or 2 PR 3+ sites in first page of SERPS for particular keywords. A lot of high PR sites is an indicator that the keyword is very competitive and it will be very difficult if not impossible to rank.

Viral Marketing 101 - What Is Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a phenomenon. It works and works well. Why? Because it puts the power in the hands of the people. It doesn't rely on advertising executives, million dollar campaigns or celebrity endorsements. It is real, down-to-earth, grassroots marketing that, when it comes down to it, might be advertising in its purest form.

Viral marketing is one of the most effective ways of driving traffic to your website with little effort on your part. With viral marketing, you can send your marketing message to selected recipients who then pass on that message to others. Viral marketing is easy and affordable, so anyone can do it. Viral marketing, while driven by strategy and well-planned messaging, is only successful when its audience is captivated. A marketing campaign will only go “viral” if people like it and ultimately, share it with others. Therefore, they have the power. Not the marketer.

Online business owners and Internet marketers alike understand the important role viral marketing plays in the success of their businesses today via a solid social media marketing strategy. Social media networks have become just as much about business as they are about pleasure.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, (ultimate guide to using Pinterest for marketing) and other key players are essential elements in any social media marketing strategy now joining us in the boardroom, in sales meetings and are the hottest marketing venues for bloggers. Blogs are replacing news media in many ways, and we must adapt our marketing approach to become players in the new Internet marketing schema. Image Credit: http://www.rylanclayne.com/

Google +1 is essential now for rankings and for using social media fr viral marketing, learn more with 5 Tips For Using Google +1 For Business.  Blog Engage is a fantastic place to submit your content and network with bloggers that understand the importance of viral marketing and spreading the word.

How To Go Viral Using A Social Media Strategy

Say, for example, you are an Internet marketer with a blog that you want to promote using a social media marketing strategy. You create and sell valuable sales tools, including E-books, reports, videos and webinars and offer valuable content to readers on a specific niche. Not only should you have a list to which you apply your email marketing campaign, but in addition, you can share your offerings on social media marketing channels like, Facebook, Linkedin, tweeting about them on Twitter, YouTube and others, the possibilities are endless.

With a little bit of creativity and a true understanding of your target market, viral marketing has the ability to skyrocket your business to new heights when using a solid and consistent social media marketing strategy. Not only should you consider the favor of your current customer base, but approach your viral marketing campaign in such a way that encourages – and makes them want to – share your business with others. You could offer free products for every ten people your customers share your link with. The more you incentivize, the more likely people are to share with others. 

Think about it, if you were your own customer, what would entice you to share your products? What grabs your attention? Start there and see what works in social media marketing and viral marketing messages. The other great thing about viral marketing is, if one approach isn’t working, you lose nothing by switching gears. Just be careful to settle in to a consistent message, no matter what your approach might be.

Always remember that value is the key to success in viral marketing an social media marketing, people always want to spread something useful around and tell others because they want to share it and show their appreciation as well.

Viral Marketing Via A Social Media Marketing

If you have high quality products, services and content your marketing message will be passed on to many people via viral marketing. Viral is usually best when it is done via word of mouth, like any brick and mortar business. And online it is social media that provides a venue for people to share your content and refer new visitors and customers to your websites and blogs.

A single piece of content can get unlimited retweets from followers, which is really an incredible and free way to spread your content and increase the opportunities for more links and more exposure, and therefore more popularity and in turn higher rankings and more money, this is how viral marketing works via a solid social media marketing strategy.

Viral Content Ideas And Methods To Promote via Social Media Marketing

The key to success with viral marketing is to offer something of value, no matter what niche you are in order to get others to spread it around. The tips below will help you to engage in your viral marketing campaign and use  a social media strategy to set your online business on fire. Image Credit: http://www.mmtc-direct.com

• Always have a variety of social media buttons on your blog, use WP Socializer as previously stated to make this easy. Great plugin with a lot of versatility for easily adding social buttons in many different places on your blog.

• Titles matter - make sure the title of your content is engaging and sparks interest for people to want to go and take a look.

• Use a plugin like Twitter Tools that auto posts your new content to Twitter, this makes it easy, set it and forget it system. Also, check out 5 copywriting strategies to accelerate Twitter marketing.

• If you have a static website, make sure to attach a blog, this is essential for spreading content and making it go viral.

• Learn to build and create meaningful connections on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and not just numbers, quality matters, here.

• You can carry out your viral marketing campaign by creating e-books, reports or articles and distribute them to targeted recipients, giving them away for free. Any Internet marketer can do this; since it simply involves creating the product, pass it on and let other people pass it on further for you.

• Post great images with your content and use Pinterest to promote it.

• Offer high quality products and content that spread your marketing message. Write well-researched reports and e-books on your niche and add your URL on these reports. Many people like getting free reports and e-books. These e-books will provide very powerful information on your topic, and people who read them will visit your website. Further distribution of your reports and e-book will result in more traffic to your website as well as increased awareness of your business or brand.

• Get active on social sites that matter, Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn, Blog Engage and other relevant social sites in your niche. If your niche is related to online business, blogging and Internet marketing see this list of 23 social sites to promote Internet Marketing, blogging type content. Be social on social networks, do not just be self serving. Share others information and they in turn, will share yours. Viral marketing is a give and take and the more you give, the more you will get.

• Do not just self promote, reach out to other bloggers and retweet and like on Facebook their content as well.

• Link back to other sites and get your content noticed by influential bloggers.

• You can also offer a free service or product on your web site that spreads your message to an increasing number of people who hear about it. Send out news releases concerning the free service or product available on your site. This in turn will generate huge volumes of traffic to your website.

• Setting up an affiliate program that encourages links to your products can also be helpful. If you can afford it, provide attractive financial incentive for other sites to pass on your marketing message. You can also install a ‘Recommend it” referral system on your website so that other Internet marketers will pass on your website address to their lists. By having your own affiliates promoting your website, you drive a lot of traffic to your website.

• Write good quality articles and encourage other webmasters to post them for free as content on their sites. If you're an expert in a niche, write an article on that niche and give it away for free to complementary sites to post on their site as free content, so long as the article contains links to your site. Write high quality articles and distribute them online for free with reprinting rights. 

• Guest posting is a great way to go viral, and some very high traffic sites, like Mashable, accept guest posts, imagine the viral opportunities there.

Use the power of viral marketing and a solid and consistent social media strategy to spread your marketing message all over the Internet and drive high volumes of traffic to your website.

Social Media Marketing Tools

Here are resources that allow you to manage all your social media profiles and resources in one place, much easier than having to manage one by one and allows you to main stream your personal reputation management.

Hootsuite

Hellotxt

Nimble

Google Spam Team leader, Matt Cutts has announced at a search panel discussion with Search Engine Land at SXSW that a new search ranking penalty will begin in the coming weeks for websites that are over optimized with on site SEO in order to level the playing field for webmasters who offer value to searchers and are not so focused on, or maybe do not use the typical on site SEO tactics.

Here is the quote from the audio transcript from Matt Cutts, as posted at searchengineland.com

What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.

SEO Is Changing

While keyword stuffing, link exchanges (like those horrible link pages) and excessive SEO has been bad news for some time, this is the first time that Google has openly announced working on a specific penalty for this when done on legitimate sites.

Once again this is another signal that Google is waging war against SEO schemes, along with the recent deindexing of blog networks (sets of blogs specifically used for link building), most famous of which was Build My Rank that has been completely de indexed last week, the many penalties for spammy link profiles that Google has been giving out, like the -50 penalty, the -950 penalty and others.

Cleaning Up Over SEO'd Websites

• Is your site built primarily for search engines? Or for visitors? This is the first thing to analyze, and clean it up.
• Blogrolls filled with hundreds of links, while Matt Cutts did not mention this, I can almost guarantee that this will be an issue, over full blogrolls have long been known for link schemes and paid links. Also, consider if you have a bunch of unnatural blogrolls linking to you and maybe get the bloggers to remove them.
• Get rid of bolding of keywords all over posts, this is not only useless but can be considered over SEO'd optimization.
• Excessive footer links and keywords in footers are bad news. 
• Check your internal linking, while this is good, when done excessively just for rankings can be considered over SEO'd. Example: A link to the home page on every since post and page with your site's keywords, when you have a lot of pages on your sites this can be especially problematic.
• Some plugins out there post "search keywords that were used to find this site" on pages and posts, this is basically a list of related keywords to the post, and this is a classic example of keyword stuffing, yet these plugins are  widely used.
• Get rid of all links pages, these are so useless and for sure those webmasters that have links pages, some going as many as 4, 5, 8, 9 pages long are going to get hit with this over optimization of SEO penalty.
• The Google bot is smart enough to detect the topic and therefore the keywords you are targeting in your posts if you just use natural language, having a keyword density of 2% per page is more than enough. Often I find that just having the title with keywords and then writing naturally about the topic is more than enough to get that post placed correctly in SERPS. If you have keywords in every single sentence, then in H2 tags for every paragraph on every post and page and this reads unnaturally for visitors and the human eye, this can be considered over search engine optimization.

While this penalty sounds like it's going to focus on onsite SEO, link building can still be an issue, and so many make the mistake of using dangerous link schemes, link bombs and spammy links, as I discussed in my post 47 Premium Link building strategies for 2012, getting valuable backlinks and much more high quality link profiles is most important right now.

In general, the best rule of thumb is to ask the question: Does This Help Users? If the answer is no, the it's probably risky business.

The Google bot is getting smarter, and Google is targeting SEO schemes more and more, be smart and be sure that what you are doing is safe, or risk losing those sites in Google.

It's never too soon to start establishing your professional image. Whether you just graduated college or are still working on earning your degree, it's important to take full advantage of all of the many marketing opportunities available to ensure optimum exposure and a successful campaign. Marketing your professional image online is a great way to get noticed by potential employers and colleagues, which can make your transition into a career much easier. However, you'll want to make sure to properly strategize your campaign for the most effective outcome.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a fundamental component of any online marketing campaign because it helps to connect you with individuals in your industry by ranking your website higher in a search engine results list on a relevant subject. Contrary to popular belief, you can't simply spam your way up the results list by stuffing multiple keywords into the content of your website. In fact, Google recently announced the development of a new algorithm for its search engine, which is specially designed to detect websites that are abusing SEO to rank higher. This new and improved algorithm will more effectively match searchers with actually relevant—rather than superficially relevant—content.

Although stuffing keywords is not an effective SEO strategy, using keywords in general is an excellent way to drive traffic to your blog, official websites and social media websites. Google's AdWords is a great tool for determining which keywords in particular will draw the largest audience to your page. For example, the keywords "public relations specialist" generates 9,900 global monthly searches, while the plural "public relations specialists" generates only 5,400 global monthly searches according to Google AdWords. Understanding how people search keywords relevant to your industry will help you prioritize your use of the terms and increase your chances of being matched up with another professional in your industry.

Social Media Marketing

No marketing campaign is complete without taking full advantage of the various social media outlets available. As a professional, you don't have to be limited to LinkedIn and Facebook. An effective social media marketing campaign should include every social media platform available, including Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Google+, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, and more. Including each of these platforms in your marketing campaign will ensure maximum exposure to your target audience.

Each social media account you have should connect your subscribers to your other social media accounts. For example, your Blogger profile should have a link to your accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and all other relevant accounts you have to broaden your audience and give your visitors plenty of ways to get to know you better.

Since your main goal is to market your personal brand, you'll want to make sure that both your SEO and social media marketing campaigns exemplify your professional image. Make sure your educational background is listed prominently on each of your websites and be sure to illustrate how this background contributes to your expertise. For example, "studying public relations at an online college allowed me to develop skills in communication and advertising, while fostering my proficiency with various technological software." Marketing your personal brand can be tricky at first, but synergizing these two essential components guarantees a successful outcome and a quicker establishment of your professional image.

About the author: Jon Dawson blogs on behalf of American InterContinental University and lives in Indianapolis. He covers social media, technology, health, and legal trends.

Have you been blogging for half a year or more without any measurable success? You aren't alone. Most blogs don't end up going anywhere, because most people give up when they don't see anything happening. But if you don't see anything happening, it's not because blogging doesn't work. It's either because you haven't been at it long enough, or because you've been doing something wrong. We'll assume the latter. What could the problem be? Read on for the best blogging tips if your blog is failing and struggling.

Blogging Tips for Struggling Blogs

Are You Indexed?

Take some steps to make sure that your content is getting indexed by the search engines. If it isn't, you've got a major problem on your hands. If people can't find your site in Google at all, chances are low that you'll reach the kind of audience you need.

If you are a news site or freshness is an important factor, you've also got a problem if your content isn't being indexed within seven days. If people aren't finding your site until after the buzz around a particular topic has faded, you're missing out on a huge portion of your audience.

If your content isn't getting indexed, check to see if it has problems with duplicate content. Sometimes the link structure of the site and other issues can create multiple copies of the same text, which encourages Google to avoid indexing it, ie: duplicate content. Use experts in WordPress home page and archive pages to avoid this.

You may also want to make sure that your content is "public." Just go to your WP admin dashboard and go to Settings - Privacy - and make sure Allow Search Engines To Index is checked. Blog software such as WordPress doesn't allow your content to be indexed unless you change the settings.

Are You Implementing Social Media To Promote The Blog?

Networking is a vital piece of the puzzle. If you aren't receiving any traffic from Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, you may need to alter your strategy. Make sure that your content is easy to share, and that people will want to share it. Stay active on the social networks and regularly interact with people in your niche.

Develop a set of strong relationships with influential people in your niche. These may be popular personas, other bloggers, or just people with a lot of friends who love sharing interesting content in your niche. These relationships should be all about give and take, and success requires you to start with the giving. Learn more at viral marketing and social media marketing strategy.

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs

Your site should be optimized for discovery in the search engines. Be sure to include some posts on your site with a title centered around a popular keyword. Social also intersects with SEO because links to your site are a strong indication of relevance. Getting these links requires relationships with people in your niche. Once you get a few guest blog posts out on powerful blogs, you'll start to see some striking results.

Overall Blog Setup

Make sure that the blog is easy to use and pleasant to look at in all major browsers and mobile platforms. Ads may be an important part of your monetization but don't let them overpower your site. If people are only clicking on your ads by accident you'll get low conversions which will drag down your score and reduce your profit. Make sure that your on-site SEO is fleshed out. Include keywords in titles, in posts, and in links between posts. Don't design a site that will confuse the search engines.

Set Goals and Stay on Top of Them

One of the best things that you can do for yourself is set a schedule and stick to it. Devote a certain amount of time each week to brainstorming new ideas, building relationships, doing keyword research, writing guest posts, and writing articles.

Your schedule doesn't need to be overwhelming or extremely rigorous. It's more important that you're able to stick to your schedule than anything else. Eventually you'll start to realize which strategies are working best for you and your niche, and you can adjust your schedule accordingly. Rather than setting traffic goals or income goals, set tangible goals that you know you can accomplish. Set goals like numbers of articles written, amount of time brainstorming, number of emails sent, number of comments written, and number of social media messages sent.

These are realistic goals that you can meet every week, and they will guarantee steadily growing success if you stick to them.

About the Author: Jeff has been blogging since 2007 & contributing on many websites since that time. He is a professional internet marketing and blogging consultant. Jeff is also co-owner of  nPromote, SEO firm from Long Island.