1. Aaron Wall released the free SEO guide for bloggers, aptly titled - The Bloggers Guide To SEO

2. In a very comprehensive and fully illustrated guest post over at Problogger.net, Ciaran McKeever shows us How To Herd Organic Search Traffic To Your Blog.

3. Google engineer, Matt Cutts, answers one of the most burning questions webmasters and site promoters have - the Duplicate Content question.

Know of super informative blog posts or articles on internet marketing and SEO that you’d like to see linked to in our next Quik Links post? Submit them here.

I popped by Lynn Terry’s Internet Marketing Blog a few minutes ago and saw her December Blog Stats post. Lynn’s a bit of an exhibitionist *grin* with her traffic stats and loves to show off the main traffic referrers, with some nice personal analysis thrown in for good measure.

Here’s what I find most interesting about her Clicknewz traffic:

Continue »»» Google Is Becoming Less And Less Relevant

Darren Rowse of Problogger.net fame linked to the following earlier.

Even though I’ve been blogging since 2003, I need to read and follow every step outlined in this article: 31 Days to Becoming a Better Blogger. I recommend you do too.

So you want to get traffic to your site (through links and search engines), but you’re so paranoid about ‘bleeding pagerank’ or sending visitors away that you won’t link to other sites?

Heh, good luck.

It’s a well known fact that referencing other sites, especially authority sites and blogs in your niche is one of the best ways to build awareness of your content.

Lets use your blog as an example. You write and publish a killer post, with no links. Now, you’re so paranoid that you ‘never’ link out in any of your posts.

Continue »»» Don’t Be A Hypocrite With Your Outbound Links

This is our first internet marketing link roundup of the best blogs and articles in the niche. I would recommend that anyone out there subscribe to or bookmark the following sites and read them religiously at least 3 times per week. They’re that good.

1. From SearchEngineGuide.com - 4 Copywriting Steps that Will Sell Ice to Eskimos

The 4 steps to copywriting that Stoney deGeyter outlines in his article are excellent, but it’s in the last paragraph that he spills the beans:

Continue »»» Marketing Blog Link Roundup

Go to almost any internet marketing forum and you’ll see posts by some poor soul asking “How can I make $500 in the next 2 weeks online?” The post usually contains a sob story of how they’ll get kicked out of their apartment, the water and power will be turned off, they already sautee’d their cat for food, etc.

The best advice to give to them is “Get a job” and they get offended if someone actually says that in the thread.

The problem is, in order for them to get to that point in their lives, they more than likely have no equity built up in their offline or online lives.

Offline, you build equity by investing either time, money or work into something that either holds stead or increases in value over time. Think realestate. You buy a house and every month you make a payment on your mortgage, you’re gaining equity + any increase in resale value over time.

Continue »»» Looking Ahead And Building Equity Online

When doing keyword research for niche discovery or article writing, a lot of newbie marketers use online tools or desktop software to generate data. In the hands of a skilled search engine optimization specialist these tools can produce a goldmine, because they know how to interpert that data.

But to many new marketers rely too heavily on the raw data and simply don’t know how to use it. They take things much too literally.

For example, one online tool takes related keywords and phrases from several different sources, runs them through Google to find out how many searches a month there are for those phrases and weighs those numbers against how many pages there are in Google “competing” for top results in the SERPs.

Continue »»» Keyword Research Mistakes That Could Kill Your Online Business

I did a live coaching call early in the new year where beginning internet marketers could ask me questions about blogging, SEO, and internet marketing in general. It was cool and I got to know a lot of good people, questions and answers flew furiously, but I realized something very quickly: A lot of aspiring marketers are getting started in the wrong places.

Here’s an example… One very nice lady had indicated on the call that she didn’t have a site, a product, didn’t know what niche she should get started in, etc. which, in and of itself is fine. Everyone needs to get started somewhere. The problem was, she hadn’t even gotten started and she was asking super-advanced questions about things like “latent semantic indexing.”

Continue »»» If You’re A Beginner Internet Marketer, Begin At The Beginning

Building a reputation as someone who knows what they’re talking about is crucial if you’re marketing online, especially now that web 2.0 and social networking makes it so easy for your customers to spread the word about you, good or bad.

Someone added me as a friend on Twitter a few days ago. Now, before automatically adding them back, I took a look at their twitter page and what they had written seemed cool. The person seemed to be coherent, social and knew what they were talking about. So then I clicked the link to their blog and that first impression I had of them was immediately swirling in the digital sewer…

Continue »»» How To Ruin Your Reputation Online Before You Even Have One

This post is in reply to the 100’s (if not 1000’s) of times I’ve seen the question: “Where do I get content for my blog?” In the past I’d answer “From your own brain” but this time I’ll go into a bit more detail.

There are literally thousands of ways to get ideas for blog content, but the following 7 should be enough to get any new blogger started:

Continue »»» 7 Ways To Build Killer Blog Content