SeoLinkwheelers Case Study

Let me know in the comments if you have questions. Enjoy!

CNN focuses on the advertising aspects of what he said, completely missing the part about mobile phones being the primary gateway to the internet for a lot of people in emerging economies.

Seeing as how Carlos Slim Helu (owner of Telefonos de Mexico) just unseated Bill Gates as the richest person on the planet, methinks that there may be something to this whole “mobile phones are big now thing.”

The highlights are:

• Mobile computing is growing 8x faster than desktop computing
• Half of all new internet connections worldwide occur on mobile devices
• People use their phones for more than just voice, voice is almost a secondary function of the phone
• The Google Nexus 1 has a 1 Ghz processor
• 1 out of every 6 minutes online is spent on a social network
• From the dawn of time to 2003, 5 exabytes of information was produced, now it takes 2 days to produce the same amount of data. In 2013, it’s projected to be 669 exabytes of data per day.

The future is mobile.

Cloud computing is the new model.

What do you think about all this?

Basically, here are the steps:

1. Find companies that are already advertising on Google, Bing or whatever.
2. Go to the advertiser’s site, click around and find their contact information
3. Reach out to them and tell them why your blog/show would be a good fit for their ad money
4. Convince them that your channel is a good place for their ad. At the very least, get an affiliate deal with them
5. Popurls is your friend
6. Never underestimate the power of cold calling and asking people

Basically, Gary Vee says that you have to Google your way to the people that are advertising in your space.

You have to take it, because that’s how you’re going to get it.
– Gary Vaynerchuk

Photo Credit: thejourney1972 (away until april)

That article, is a complete load of manure. Let me tell you why.

The study period is from 1960 to sometime in the past, but we’re not told the exact end of the study period. Apparently, it’s not important for us know.

Also:

1. It makes reference to a “typical” Latin American nation, when there is no such thing. How did they determine what makes a country “typical?” Is Brazil typical? How about Costa Rica, Chile or Mexico, are they typical?
2. The IDB studied 76 nations, including 17 from Latin America and the Caribbean. So, when they say “typical” in the article, do they also mean Caribbean countries as well? What region of the world were the remaining countries in?
3. The IDB says that since 1960, only Chile has had productivity growth rates that are higher than the U.S. Apparently, Chile’s gains are still lower than India, Thailand and China but the article saves us from telling us what other nations Chile beat out. We’re also not told whether India, Thailand and China were a part of the 76 nation study group.
4. The article seems to reinforce the stereotype that Latin people are lazy, since the “productivity is so low.”
5. They never address why Latin American countries would want to “catch up quickly” with other regions of the world? What are the benefits to Latin American countries for doing so? What “other regions” should they catch up to?

I wish Newsweek had taken the time to actually write something that was informative, rather than something that was just filler. Had they actually taken the time to at least tell us the study period, I think it would’ve been a much better article.

They could’ve also bothered to tell us how they measured productivity, what the actual numbers are, what does “low” mean exactly. Actually, they could’ve just given us the numbers, period.

I disagree with Santiago Levy’s, the vice president of sectors and knowledge at the IDB, assertion that there’s an “opportunity for policymakers in the region to invest in reforms and sensible policies.” For one, how does he define “sensible?” and who are these “policymakers?” I guess the governments in the region just haven’t noticed that they need to create policies that encourage economic development, is that it?

Yes, I realize that the theory goes that higher productivity means higher per capita income, more leisure time, etc. I posit that the governments of the region have historically had little interest or need to increase productivity thanks to an abundance of cheap labor, the availability of valuable natural resources and a desire to keep the populace occupied at the state teet.

What do you think? Am I completely off my rocker?

Arik is well known in the anime industry for his animated movie shorts but has also done interactive movies at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center, and other projects with Sony, Motorola, Lennox, Compaq, IBM and AMD. (just to name a few).

Be sure to follow this rising latino as he makes his mark in the cinematic arena with his new release Upon a Midnight Clear.

You can follow Arik Avila on Facebook or check out his website at www.d7studios.com

Here are 3 things to do if you want to avoid looking like a spammer:

1. Avoid keyword stuffing. What does that mean? It means avoid putting too many of your keywords in your posts. You should also avoid having your key words close together. So, pay attention to the density of your target words to the rest of your text, shoot for 2-3% density and you should be OK.

   Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:
   

   Did you notice how many times the writer of that passage stuffs uses the words “marketing,” “online,” and “internet”?

2. Avoid talking and not saying anything. This is, I believe, an acquired skill. Most people, when they speak, they have a point to make. When talking to prospective clients or when blogging etc. make sure that you say something. Anything other than “sign up to get the 20 secrets to the best internet marketing widget known to man that they don’t want you to have.” Teasing someone in the text to entice your reader to take a next step is OK, but you have got to give me a real reason to take that next step.

   By the way, only scammers and spammers have “secrets” that “they” don’t want you to have.

3. Avoid being too religious. Let me explain, a lot of scammers and spammers will hide behind the guise of being pious. They believe that by acting and pretending to be pious that you will trust and believe them. Unless you know the person personally, be on guard any time any one tells you that they wanted to talk to you while they are “on their way to Bible study.” I feel strongly that someone’s piousness, or appearance thereof, should not be the reason that you do business with them.

Bonus: Pay attention to the comments on your blog or website. If you have a site where people can comment, such as a blog, or a squidoo lens or something along those lines, do yourself a favor and pay attention to what people are saying in the comments.

Here’s an example from the same site where I took the sample stuffing text from:

Looks like that site owner should’ve activated Akismet and enabled comment moderation.

For the most part, it appears that social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook and making some decent inroads into Latin America.

No, I do not have empirical data for you to use to verify my assertion, all I have is anecdotal data from seeing more and more people tweeting in Spanish and seeing more and more of my family members on Facebook.

I realize that this is not a representative sample, but I can tell you that on the surface, it appears that the people that are able to access the internet in Latin America are definitely getting on to Twitter and Facebook, I’d almost dare to say on a daily basis.

Why is it important that my family is on Facebook?

Because the majority of them had never been online before. They’d never bothered with blogging, with googling for anything, nor with buying anything online. The internet was viewed as something “the gringos” used and it was not something that they were interested in. Now, because of Facebook, most of my aunts, uncles and cousins, specially my cousins, are online and using Facebook on an almost daily basis.

I know that there are lots of other social media outlets out there. There’s something called Hi5 that keeps sending me notices that there are people on there that want to be my friends. There’s also q’oobole and quetal? and several other networks all vying for a piece of the social networking pie.

The big player making a move almost everywhere except for Brazil (where Orkut still reigns supreme), appears to be Facebook.

What does all this mean?

To me, it means that there is a huge opportunity in Latin America.

Recently, there was a social media conference in Mexico City called “SM Latam.” The conference looked to explore, teach and spread the word about social media and how to use it for creating connections and for increasing your business ROI.

I didn’t get a chance to go, and I only found out about the conference after the fact, but the fact the conference even happened makes me happy.

What didn’t make me happy was that a lot of the speeches, as far as I can tell including the keynote, appear to have been delivered in English. On the surface, it looks like the majority of the attendees to the SM Latam event were at least bilingual. This made me realize that most of the writing on websites that deal with social media is also written in English.

My question became: What about the rest of the people in Latin America that are not bilingual?

Lots of people that have small to medium sized businesses of their own that could benefit from using social media don’t speak English. Who’s reaching out to them?

I’ve decided to try to reach out to those people, either on this site or on a new site. I’m already bilingual, so all I need to do is learn how to say certain words and express certain concepts in Spanish.

From monitoring the #smlatam feed on twitter, I was able to figure out how to say some social media terms in Spanish. From the feed, I was able to ascertain that:

• Social media in Spanish is “social media”
• Fan page in Spanish is “fan page”
• Web analytics in Spanish is “web analytics”

So, moving forward, expect to see more content in Spanish on this site, and also in the podcast. I may actually end up launching a completely separate podcast en español, but we’ll see about that.

I am a big believer in article marketing. If you’re looking to generate traffic to your website, writing articles and then posting those articles on various sites is the cheapest and quickest way to get visitors to your website.
There are a lot of nuances when it comes to article marketing. For example, 90% of the success of your article depends on the title. If your article doesn’t have a good title, people won’t open it and read it. Yes, you should provide good content in your article body, but that won’t matter if no one wants to read your article because the title sucks.

The next most important part of an article, is the resource box. It’s the signature box at the bottom of the article. That’s where you invite people to come to your website and get a free something or another. The quality of the article and the relevance of the free something or another will help with getting people to your website, but more important than that, is that the resource box should flow out of the body of the article.

So, where do you go post your articles?

There are many, many, many websites out there that allow you to post your articles for free. There are also a lot of services that purport to automatically submit your articles for you. My experience with automated tools is that your mileage will vary. Some of the automated tools are good, but expensive and if you have money to burn for an article submitter service, just buy PPC ads instead and save yourself the time and hassle or writing articles, but I digress.

While doing some research for this post, I found a website that uses a proprietary tool that ranks the effectiveness of article marketing sites. I don’t know anything about the formula they use, so I can’t vouch as to how precise or accurate it is, but I do like that they have a list of over 450 article directories. They even recreate the list every month.

http://www.masonworld.com/masonworld-article-directory-rank/

Here are the top 20 article directories from the above site for the month of January 2010.

Notably absent from the list is Associated Content, I’m not sure why they didn’t make the cut, but I like posting my articles on AC because they split their adsense revenue with their authors. I like to say that every little bit of revenue helps.

By “good and successful” I mean that they pay their bills by performing SEO work full time, with legitimate clients and that you can see have a high profile within the community. Admittedly, by my own definition, I am not a good SEOer. If I had to peg my level, I would say that I am adequate to perhaps an advanced student of the art.

What are the traits?

• They never miss an opportunity for a keyword rich backlink I’ve noticed on certain pages for the upcoming SEO conferences that some experts have keyword rich backlinks, and others don’t. At first, I thought it was something to do with the organizer not allowing the links, but why allow some people to get a back link and not others? See the speakers page for the Search Exchange conference for a sample.
• They always link to themselves “above the fold”. The term “above the fold” is an old newspaper reference. Basically, if you picture a newspaper of yore, for sale in those boxes on the street, the good news would go “above the fold” where people would see it and want to buy the paper to get the rest of the story. On a web page, it refers to top part of the page, before you have to scroll down to see the rest of it.
• They always use the same keywords. They’re not listed as a “marketing consultant” at one site, as an “online marketer” on another site and as an “online specialist” on yet another. Even though all of those terms are related, they’re not the same keyword. The good practitioners always use the same keywords to link to themselves.
• They tend to be public speakers. I’m not saying that they have to always keynote at Blogworld, or something like that. What I am saying, is that good SEOers tend to speak publicly about their craft. Either in local, regional or national conferences you should be able to find an instance of your SEOer teaching or speaking at an event.
• They don’t promise page 1 rankings. It’s one of the biggest flags when you’re dealing with someone that isn’t good. A good SEOer will tell you that they can improve you rankings or they can optimize your rankings but they won’t promise or guarantee a page 1 ranking, or any kind of a page ranking for that matter.
• They own at least 1 domain. I’m sure after this post goes live I’ll get several emails from “SEO experts” promising me a page 1 ranking “in the Google.” All of those emails will come from a gmail or yahoo email account. It’s my belief that good SEO practitioners own at least 1 domain for their business and know how to use it for their business related emails.

That’s my little list of things that could help you figure out if your SEO consultant sucks or not. I’m not saying that if someone passes all the above criteria they don’t suck. They may still suck and do things that will get your site banned from the search engines or worse, these are just some quick guidelines to help you sort the wheat from the chaff so to speak. There are exceptions to the rule, but for the most part, these guidelines should treat you right.

Photo Credit:

Looks like Asok will be around for awhile since that other guy wasn’t quick enough to pick up on the gist of the conversation.