As you are probably aware, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising
the search engine rankings and generating more traffic to both of our
websites.

Imagine this sent to my contact email for this site!

After getting an umpteenth email like this, I lost patience and decided to reply the lame link exchanger:

Hi,

Prior to spamming everyone out there with your link exchange requests take
some effort and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Does the site I am about to spam look like they practice link exchange?

2. Is the site at least somehow related to what I am trying to get them to
link to?

If the answer is “no” to both, think of what you’re searching in the
search engines and maybe you need to refine your queries to come up with
better potential link exchange partners.

You think they would at least understand what I am on about?

To run an effective Twitter campaign, you need to first of all decide what it is you want to run it for – is it increasing the brand awareness? is it getting traffic to your site? is it selling something? (and yes, obviously if some people buy a car over Twitter then somebody actually succeeds in selling this car). Think what people potentially interested in your services would tweet about – and no, if you are a service offering resume writing help to those who do not want to write their own resumes for whatever reason, searching for tweets containing the word “resume” will not bring you your potential customers but rather competitors offering the same services, so be careful what you target not to end up selling to your own competitors. Once you have defined and found your potential customers, start interacting with them without just bluntly pushing your product down their throats – this is something that just doesn’t work on Twitter. So find the right approach, find the opportunity and then become really useful for your potential customers.

On the other hand, do not be completely silent – just creating a Twitter account won’t do you anything. If you decided you need a Twitter presence, then be present – so that your customers can notice you.

(Already after coming up with the idea of this post, I noticed this great post by Lee Odden explaining how to plan a Twitter marketing strategy – this is a must read and an additional source of tips for a successful Twitter campaign.)

Most businesses probably won’t be able to afford a full time person running their Twitter marketing campaign – so automate, there are tools in place for this, but automate wisely. Do not just run things on autopilot, unless you’re a blackhat running hundreds of accounts (but even then, use your head when setting things up). Review everything that is done by tools, and do not forget that your followers will want to see a real person behind your Twitter account, not just a bot.

For some businesses social media may not work at all unless they are really creative (if the nature of your business is such that involves certain privacy concerns, addressing a problem people are not comfortable discussing publicly – plastic surgeons, male enhancement, etc.). For some businesses it may make sense looking for partners or affiliates, not clients. In either case, I (as well as my multiple clients) have seen proof that Twitter marketing works – but to see it work for you, you need to start thinking out of the box instead of just repeating what everybody else seems to be doing on Twitter. The better you identify your needs and needs of your target audience on Twitter, the higher are your chances for success.

There is an abundance of tips, articles, or even books written about Twitter. Do they all help? No. Why?

Problem is, very often Twitter marketing becomes a numbers game (which in most cases is a wrong measurement anyway).

Unfortunately most twitter ‘gurus’ teach how to increase the number of followers with no regard to relevancy – while this may work if you’re offering the products or services of most general interest suitable for almost everyone, it won’t work for anything more specific. How many vendors can insert their products into the following statement: ‘every twitter user needs …’? If you can not then the sheer numbers game is not for you.  Many people who used to make money with AdSense learned this lesson when they switched to affiliate marketing – if you want to convert your traffic make it targeted (same with Digg, and same with twitter – social media is no different).

Chasing the followers reduces relevancy – it causes a snowball effect. By chasing the follower numbers, you make yourself susceptible to increasing irrelevancy because other users whose primary goal is chasing the numbers have little regard to relevancy. The more people you follow and the more people follow you, the more noticeable you become – and automatically, you become a target to those irrelevant followers. Think of popular tweeters like Scoble or Chris Pirillo – sure many of their followers follow them because they are genuinely interested in what these users tweet about – but how many just follow them in hopes they would follow them back and hardly ever care about their tweets?

“Everything” results are pretty traditional for this query – they are just regular search results. Highlights: #1 is a spammed .edu with a redirect. #2 and 3 are online pharmacies with 37,000 and 48,000 backlinks each, most of which seem to be comment spam. #4 is a bit more interesting – an online pharmacy with top backlinks coming from a network (akin to the one Paul Madden described) built circa 2006. Overall, the prescription for ranking in the top 10 for “buy viagra” seems to be owning an aged (at least a couple years old) domain and spamming a few thousand automated links to it.

“Updates” seem to be all from Twitter. I really like the timeline feature – it lets you discover interesting tendencies in the SERPs. For example, it let me see that the most buy viagra Twitter spam this year occured on March 25 – I wonder why?

In “Images” there is a mixture of actual Viagra images (from online pharmacies and such) and SERP screenshots – watching the “buy viagra” SERPs is getting more and more fashionable it seems (interpreting them correctly is quite another story – but let’s leave discussing the people trying their hand at it for some other time). I wonder if the above screenshot will end up ranking there as well at some point?

“Videos” – surprise surprise – only 1,010 results! Seems like an opportunity, no?

In “Maps” some people are having quite a lot of fun with all kinds of Maps spam – but these SERPs are more saturated than Videos, with over 6,000 results.

“News” – oooo looks like Viagra spammers do not know yet how to plug their stuff into Google News Only 100 results at the moment.

In the “Blogs” SERPs there is more evidence of constantly updated parts of networks used for pushing the main sites up for Viagra queries

In “Discussions” there are a bucnh of spammed forums and question and answer sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Amazon’s Askville. My all time favorite one is a profile of  German speaking Viagra spammer in one of the forums with the user name of “Dr. Pfizer”.

Conclusion: Because so many alternative versions of the SERPs have become more available to the searchers it makes sense not to discount them any more. So, I predict that it’s only a matter of time until “buy viagra” SERPs in those alternative views becoem as competitive as the regular ones.

What’s new in this release:

• a reviewed list of directories with updated pageranks (of course!)
• I have added more discount codes for paid directories and now you get nice deals on a total of 6 directories – and I keep negotiating more all the time
• I have added a section on how to decide whether you need a link from a particular directory – and I’m currently working on a tool to automate this. The tool will be made available to those who purchase(d) the ebook for free.
• as always, I am listening to my readers’ suggestions – Jeffrey Behrendt of AvivaDirectory mentioned in his lovely review of my ebook that it would be helpful to list the best directories – which I do by including a cheat sheet of 15 powerful, established directories to help any webmaster quickly decide what to start with. Let me know if you are happy with it or if I should change anything about this list.

I got more suggestions from my readers than I could implement in this release – but rest assured, I keep working on improvements of my product. Your feedback, as usual, is much appreciated.

Reminding all my current customers to check their email for the update information – and if you haven’t yet purchased the Directory Marketing ebook feel free to do it now.

For such website owners, Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagans, veterans of the SEO industry, have started DIYSEO – a framework guiding them step by step through their site optimization and promotion process. For only $49/month, they walk their subscribers through all the steps required to achieve online success with their websites.

Who is this platform good for? Any small business owner launching a new site on a new domain, or those who’s had a website for a while but never got to doing anything with it. Unless your small business sells viagra, what Andy and Patrick teach you should be enough for you to rank in your niche – especially if you target local market.

Who will not find it enough and would still need dedicated professional attention to their site? If you are in a market with fierce competition, or had your site banned, or purchased a domain that previously had issues, DIYSEO may not be enough to sort it all out. However, there is no need to think that in such cases, you are doomed to spending all of your business’ profits on SEO consulting. Often, once you get professional advice of an SEO (like me) to sort your most serious issues, you can then go ahead and continue working on your site yourself – which is when DIYSEO will come handy again.

DIYSEO also offers a free trial so you can see for yourself if their approach is right for you before you commit to the monthly fees. You can sign up for it here

On the other hand, I have bitched about Paypal a bunch of times – and never got any reply. Meanwhile, Paypal does have even a bunch of Twitter accounts – a separate one for each country plus a few for specialized services. Twitter marketing (or even, Twitter reputation management) gone wrong, indeed. Also, my post about Technorati on here which also got tweeted never had any reaction from Technorati folks – although it could be pretty damaging for them. For the record, Technorati also has a Twitter account.

All of this gave me an idea of an experiment. I’d like to analyze how responsive this kind of large online companies are on Twitter by tweeting different stuff they may be interested in reacting to. Surely I will be primarily targeting the companies I deal with directly – so I could use a little help from my readers. Please suggest who else I should probe – or even take part in this experiment and report your results. In a couple months, I will do a follow up post and analyze my findings.

1. How to set up a Facebook fan page that works
2. 5 Things That Don’t Work on Facebook Pages (and 5 That Do)
3. Olive Garden on Facebook:How To Not Use Social Media
4. Does Your Facebook Page Have a Pulse?
5. Facebook Fan Page Marketing Tips
6. 5 Essential Apps for Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page
7. Facebook is probably a must for you if you are a French Internet marketer – in France, Facebook has an audience 213 times bigger than Twitter (this one is in French) – thanks for this one @NadirG
8. Facebook Preparing to Launch a New Toolbar
9. Is Facebook Prepping Up Something Against Google Analytics – and How to Add Google Analytics to Your Facebook Fan Page
10. If you’ve been living under a rock:
    Facebook Gives ‘Like’ More Love, ‘Fans’ the Boot
11. Facebook vs. Google: The Billion Dollar Battle to Be Your Default Social Profile
12. Now a bit more sinister: Facebook changes continue to chip away at privacy (and more on this issue here)
13. And even, oh shite, Dear Internet, Meet Facebook Status Optimizer (Boom, Mind Explodes):
    

    Facebook Status Optimizer (FSO) automatically posts status updates on your behalf that are algorithmically written to ensure your status updates beat the competition and appear at the top of your friend’s newsfeed

Enjoy and feel free to share if you have come across more interesting Facebook articles.

Yea, I know, it’s been a few weeks since the PR update already – so what took me so long? Several things.

First of all, I did a thorough review of the directory list. All the expired domains have been removed, and as usual, those that lost pagerank have been removed as well. Instead, I added a bunch of new directories – so now the list is over 6,000!

Secondly, it’s been a year since I released the first version of the book back in March 2009 – so I felt I just HAVE to come up with some nice surprise for my customers buying the book. I know many of you must have considered submitting your sites to paid directories (of which there are plenty also in the list that comes with the ebook) but been wondering how you could save on the costs of such a campaign. What I did was negotiate special member only discount codes with two nice paid directories – Aviva Directory and GreenStalk for a total of $45, for any number of site you would ever want to submit. So you pay $19.90 for the ebook – and get $45 in discount codes! Nice or what? Moreover, this update (as well as each update) comes free to existing customers.

Moreover, I will keep negotiating such deals further and provide new discount codes with each new update – so make sure you sign up for the newsletter as you purchase the ebook!

Directory Marketing Reborn ebook can be purchased any time by clicking over to the site, and the existing customers should check their email to see how they can get the update.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: My existing customers who have initially signed up with a gmail based email account may have had troubles receiving the email about this update as my server just had a hiccup processing sending mail to such email accounts – if that’s the case with you please contact me and I will sort you out.