photo credit: B Rosen

In 2011, the tectonic plates of the internet marketing landscape shifted.

The underlying fundamentals of many strategies, including SEO and social media have changed.

Marketing in 2012 is going to rely much more on customer connection than tactics.

Of course, having strong strategies is important. It’s just that many of the strategies and tactics that marketers have come to rely on no longer work.

Here are 5 such tactics. At one point in time, these tactics were cutting edge. Today, they’re completely outdated.

Avoid: Screaming Salesletters

In the early days of internet direct marketing, the mentality of online salesletters were an extension of the mentality of direct mail.

Big red headlines. Screaming benefits. Big, bold benefit statements.

The main goal was to catch a stranger’s attention, whether they were browsing a magazine or opening the mail.

Today however, internet marketing isn’t dominated by people who can scream the loudest. Instead, it’s built by people who know how to build trust and credibility.

Good copywriting is still important; but it’s much, much more important for marketers to be able to build trust in the long run.

Extremely loud salesletters can actually damage your brand and credibility. Marketers today are faced with the challenge of balancing high-conversion writing and writing that doesn’t alienate readers.

Avoid: Outbound Only Marketing

Gone are the days when you could get by on just outbound marketing.

Today, marketing really has to be two ways. Instead of just sending out status updates and emails, you should also actively cultivate reader participation.

Get people to comment on your updates. Reply to their comments. Get people to comment on your blog. Then reply to their comments.

Cultivate a two-way street of communication, instead of just putting out information on your end.

Avoid: Discarding External Communities

There are several linkbuilding tactics out there that depend on getting links from communities. Trying to get backlinks from these sites without respecting their communities is not only frowned upon by the communities, but is no longer an effective tactic.

For example, Wikipedia is a community run website. Marketers who try to bury their links in Wikipedia articles not only disrespect the community, but will have their links instantly removed.

The same is true for many other sites. HubPages for example has HubScore, which automatically NoFollows any links by authors that don’t already have high authority. Sites like Reddit and Digg have built in voting mechanisms that prevent abuse.

The bottom line is this: If you want backlinks from community based sites, then participate in and add value to the community.

Avoid: Low Quality Backlink Strategies

There’s a tendency online for marketers to focus on low quality backlinks rather than high quality backlinks.

Why?

Because it’s much, much easier to get 50 backlinks by submitting content to article directories than it is to get a real endorsement from a reputable site.

Unfortunately, Google knows that.

The value of low quality backlinks today are at an all time low. Many websites that relied on low quality backlinks lost their rankings in the Panda update.

That’s not to say they have no place at all. It just means that if you’re going to use low quality backlinks, make sure it’s just a small part of your strategy, not the main part.

Avoid: Focusing on Strangers

Many of the most talked about marketing strategies, like SEO or PPC, focus exclusively on how to get strangers to your website. How to get new traffic.

While this is certainly an important part of a marketing strategy, it’s actually much more important that you focus on existing readers and customers.

Someone who’s bought from you is 7 times more likely to buy from you than someone who’s never heard of you. Someone who’s visited your site already is also much easier to convince to return than it is to get a new visitor.

Don’t just focus on getting new traffic. If you don’t have a solid retention strategy already, now’s the time to create one.

Marketing in 2012 is very different than in 2011 or 2010. The internet is a fast changing vehicle. Stay on top of the latest changes in the industry and you’ll leave anyone who’s still playing by 2011 rules behind.

- Derek

photo credit: shlomp-a-plompa

While it’s true that content is king, bloggers very often underestimate the role SEO has in blogging success.

Even when they do SEO, a lot of bloggers only optimize their main page. In reality, each and every post needs SEO attention.

Doing so will help you rank not just for your home page, but for all your other pages as well.

Most successful bloggers will agree that the vast majority of blogging traffic doesn’t come from home page rankings. Instead, it comes from many blog posts.

Here’s how to SEO each and every blog post for the maximum amount of traffic.

The 50/50 Rule

As a rule of thumb, you should spend half your time writing and half your time on SEO and marketing. In other words, if it takes you an hour to write a blog post, you should also be willing to put an hour into promoting that blog post.

A well written blog post that doesn’t get any exposure is simply no good. On the other hand, exposure without quality content is worthless as well.

In order to succeed, you need to have both high quality content and a promotion strategy that will get your content in front of your target audience.

Use the 50/50 rule to make sure you’re putting enough time into marketing.

Basic On-Page Optimization

Your blog in general should be SEOed. You should have your permalinks set, your title tags reformatted so the site name is on the end, etc.

However, each individual post should also receive some on-page optimization.

Start with the internal links. Whenever you write a new post, try to point four or five internal links to it. Go back through your older posts, find related posts and put a “Related Post” or “You Might Also Like” link back to your new post.

Make sure you have a keyword you’re targeting and use it throughout the content. Include it in the title tag if you can, but don’t do it at the expense of content quality.

Make sure the keyword is in the permalink URL. Shorten the permalink URL so it’s not overly long, as it often is if it just ports your title into the URL.

Building Backlinks to New Posts

The most important thing you should do for SEO is to build backlinks to each and every post, individually.

Getting ranked for a specific longtail keyword is much easier than getting ranked for a broad keyword. By helping your posts get ranked, you vastly increase the chances of your posts ranking, even if it’s for lower volume keywords.

A few easy ways to get backlinks to posts include blog commenting, forum posting, Squidoo lenses and article marketing.

Building just a handful of backlinks is often all it takes to get your content to rank. Try to build 5 to 20 backlinks for each and every post on your website.

Using Metrics to Increase Traffic

As your site gets traffic, make it a habit to see which pages are getting ranked. Use your analytics package to see what pages are popular and what keywords people are typing in to get to those pages.

Once you’ve found a few keywords that are already working for you, put a little more effort into helping your pages rank even higher for them.

With these pages, you already know Google likes them. A bit of extra attention could be all it takes to go from #5 to #1.

Optimizing each and every blog post might seem like a lot of effort. However, that’s really how SEO for blogging works. The key lies in optimizing each and every post, rather than just the home page.

- Derek

photo credit: xshamethestrongx

Many of the best ways to generate traffic online involve publishing content. Even if you’re a marketing master, you still need to have high quality content to make many of the best marketing tactics work.

That’s where PLR content can help. Instead of having to write this content yourself or spend a lot of money on outsourcing, you can use PLR content instead.

What can you do with PLR content? You can use it to generate boatloads of traffic. Here are a few creative ways you can do so.

Use Them in Yahoo! Answers

Do a search on Yahoo! Answers for people asking questions related to your keyword. When you find a relevant question, post part of a PLR article (or the entire PLR article) as an answer.

This will almost definitely get you the “Best Answer” designation. With enough Yahoo! Answer votes, you’ll be able to link out of your answers with Do Follow links.

Turn Them Into Tweets

Instead of using PLR articles as articles, you can break them out into tweets.

This can save you a lot tweet-writing time. PLR articles will give you great content that you can send to your followers, without having to write it yourself.

Translate it into Another Language

Instead of using the content as is, which likely a dozen other people will do, why not translate it into another language instead?

If you take 50 PLR articles on dating tips and translate that into Spanish, you’ll almost definitely get quite a bit of traffic from Latin America and Spain.

There’s a lot of traffic in other countries that’s being ignored by the vast majority of the internet marketing community. Take your PLR and translate it and you might be surprised at how effective it is.

Create an Auto-Blog

Auto-blogging is a dangerous tactic for your main site. However, if you setup a different site on a different web host and use automatic rewriting software, you’ll be able to do a couple things.

First of all, you’ll probably get some traffic. Check your keyword logs to see what your site is ranking for. If you can get ranked using auto-spun content, that tells you that the competition is really bad. In other words, you can probably rank for those keywords with your main websites.

This is one way to use PLR & software to test out easy keywords before expending real time and resources into getting ranked.

You can also use PLR content to create auto-blogs that link to your website. This can pass a lot of link juice, but can also be seen as spamming – Use at your own risk.

Create a New Wiki Page

Use the PLR article to create a new wiki page. Try to find a small to medium sized wiki that specializes in your industry. Use Wikipedia only as a last resort, as their content police are quite difficult to bypass.

Post the PLR content, hopefully rewritten, on the wiki. Cite your website as a source. This will get you a high quality backlink with very little work.

These are just a few of the many ways you can use PLR content to bring more traffic to your website. Don’t just use it in the “standard” rewrite-and-post fashion. There are many, many ways you can turn PLR content in high quality traffic.

photo credit: chapoirier

Panda 2.0 and even what some webmasters call Panda 2.5 has been rolled out, changing the search engine landscape dramatically.

Websites like eHow and EzineArticles are suffering, while higher quality content sites are rising to the top.

In this landscape, many of the lower quality backlinking techniques that webmasters and bloggers have been using for a long time are now much, much less effective. These techniques include:

• Article Marketing
• Profile Links
• Blog Commenting
• Forum Links
• Forum Signature Links
• Squidoo, Hubpages, etc
• Two & Three Way Linking, Link Wheels

In short, most “easy” ways of getting backlinks no longer work nearly as well as they used to. So how does one build good backlinks that Google loves in the post-panda update world?

Private Link Networks

Private link networks are small groups of people who agree to link to other members in the link network, but otherwise seem completely unrelated to one another.

To picture how this works, imagine having 200 medium authority sites in a private forum. Each of these medium authority sites already has dozens, possibly hundreds of incoming links. They also have dozens of outgoing links.

Each of these webmaster just adds one or two outgoing links to other related websites in this private network. One or two other members then link back to this website in kind.

Because there are already so many links going in and out of these sites, and because the relationships between linker and linkee are seemingly undetectable, this method is still a very effective method of garnering links even after the Panda strike.

Getting into a private link network is tricky, because secrecy is part of what makes it work. Any link network that ranking in Google or advertising on AdWords probably isn’t a network you want to be in.

Instead, stay tuned on forums like the Warrior Forum, WickedFire or even BlackHatWorld for link networks. Typically the window of being open is small.

Guest Blogging.

Guest blogging is still one of the most effective ways to generate backlinks. This is especially true if you can get a backlink in the body of the content rather than in the resource box. Either way however, if you can get a backlink from a blog that Google considers an authority website, you’re golden.

Perhaps the best resource for guest blogging is myblogguest.com, a free internet forum dedicated to guest blogging. All you need to do is go on the forum, look for people who’re looking for guest posters and see if you fit the profile.

Put at least a much effort into a guest blog post as you would a post on your own website. Remember, the goal isn’t just to get a backlink to your site – The goal is to impress the audience of their site enough that they end up back on your website.

Comments & Forum Posts 2.0

Using comments and forum posts to generate backlinks isn’t such an effective way to get search engine rankings anymore. However, by no means does that mean you shouldn’t do it.

Instead, commenting and forum posting should become your first step towards reaching out to other members of your community.

By answering questions on a forum or blog, you start to build credibility, trust and reputation. Eventually other bloggers will reach out to you for content, or you can reach out to them to see if they’d be interested in having you guest post or be featured in some other way.

Answer Your Emails!

If you have an active blog or regularly updated website and you keep a strong presence in the forums and blogging communities, you are going to get questions.

People will see you as an expert in the field and seek you out. Often time’s bloggers don’t answer emails, since it takes so much time and there’s no direct benefit.

In reality however, those emails, if answered, will turn into goodwill. That goodwill then turns into people leaving your blog as resources for others in forum posts and even linking back to you from their websites if they have them. It’s hard to measure exactly how much good answering people’s questions does you, but if you want to build strong rankings, it’s definitely something you should do.

The gist of post-panda backlink building is this: You need to build real backlinks that’s truly a vote of confidence for your site, not just links you can create by hand. Google can tell the difference.

- Derek

photo credit: nathanmac87

Recently, Google has updated it’s algorithm once again. Some call it the “Panda 2.0″ update. Between 10% to 15% of all websites on the internet experienced a significant shift in ranking positions.

More significant than the ranking shifts however is Google’s shift in philosophy. In essence, how SEO works has completely changed with the latest Google Panda update. If you run a content-based website or blog, it’s essential that you at least know the basics of Google’s new ranking methodology.

No longer does PageRank play much of a role – In fact, Google is using a whole slew of new indicators to determine it’s rankings. How does this new system work? And how can content marketers adapt? Here’s how.

The Overall Synopsis of How the New System Works

The Google Panda update was named after the lead engineer who made it possible, whose name was “Navneet Panda.” What did he invent that made such a big difference?

Essentially, he created a method that allows computers to find patterns in things with very little computing power. In other words, Google can now take 50,000 websites that it thinks are “good” and 50,000 websites that are “not good” and feed it to the computer. The computer can figure out all the things that make a website “good” and rank those sites better in the future.

In the past, that kind of processing would have taken far too much power to be used in practice. But the Panda update reduced that computing power so drastically that Google can now use it to basically rank all of the internet.

How Google Went About Finding Examples

Essentially, Google went out and asked thousands of people what they liked and disliked about specific websites and pieces of content. They asked questions like:

• Would you trust the information presented here?
• Is this content written by an expert?
• Does this website have obvious errors?
• Does this website have original analysis?
• Would you consider bookmarking this website?
• Would you expect to see this content in print?

(Note: Credit for compiling these questions goes to Distilled and SEOMoz.)

Once they had a few thousand answers, they fed it to their new machine learning program. The program then figured out how to gauge whether or not a website is credible based on thousands of factors. In other words, the program can now look at a website and figure out how “credible” and how “original” it is much more like how a human thinks.

One More Thing Google is Looking At

Google now also has a ton of usage data from users, thanks to the rapid uptake of Google Chrome.

In other words, Google now has access to information like:

• How long do users tend to stay on this site?
• How many pages on this site do users tend to browse?
• How often do users come back to this website?
• Etc …

Naturally, the better your content, the better your usage statistics are going to be in Google’s eyes.

In Other Words …

Google has shifted it’s attention away from links and much more to the actual quality of the information on a website. This is something that Google has preached in philosophy for ages, but has only recently managed to actually implement in reality.

This completely changes the game for most internet marketers, content marketers included. Instead of focusing on building backlinks, you’re much, much better off focusing on actually improving your user’s experience.

Remove extraneous ads. Provide highly original content. Put in original ideas, not just rehashed ideas. Add personality. Redesign your site so it actually looks nice.

The only way to really make Google like your site with it’s new algorithm is to create your site in a way that real people will actually like it.

One last word on links: Do they still matter? Of course. But low-quality backlinks don’t matter nearly as much anymore. If you can guest blog or get your links on real highly trafficked websites, that’s still going to make a significant difference. But low-quality links have definitely been seriously downgraded.

- Derek