Don't be the "Beat Cop Driving A Ferrari"

Joining me on the "Buying and Selling Links" panel at SES NYC this week was my friend Greg Boser.  It's pretty hard to mix comedy in with link building but he did it for me.  When describing the do's and dont's he said something to the affect of,If you are in an industry where your competitors are all PR4 and PR5 sites and you are out buying PR7 and PR8 links you are like a beat cop who drives a Ferrari.This really does help you visualize the problem with going too aggressive with your linking campaign.  The problem is when you are working way out of the scope of the websites you are competing with.  Ultra competitive industries require a different game plan than not so competitive industries.  You have to do your homework to see how your competition has risen above you and then you can decide what is best for you.  Just as the "beat cop who drives a Ferrari" you too can raise some flags from your competitors and from the engines by engaging in overly aggressive link building that is not in line with current competition.   

The Viral Copy Report

Brian Clark has posted a 30-page link baiting report on his site, CopyBlogger.Viral Copy: Trading Words for Traffic is your guide to creating content that gets attention.  In this free 30 page report, youâll learn:

The Four Viral Content Categories

Eleven Strategies for Getting Link Love

Why Headlines and Storytelling are Crucial

The Counter-Intuitive Rule of the Internet

Why Not All Traffic is Worthy

How to Avoid the Dark Side
Minus points for putting it in a PDF, plus points for going meta (link baiting a link bait report).

SES NYC This Week

Andy and I will be in New York City this week at the Search Engine Strategies show.  This is one of my favorite shows in one of my favorite cities to visit.  Andy and I both are speaking on Wednesday.  Andy is speaking on "SEM Via Communities, Wikipedia & Tagging", and I am speaking on "Buying and Selling Links".  We also have a booth at the show and invite all readers to please stop by and say hello if you get a chance.  Hope to see you there!

Search Engine Journal T-Shirt Contest

For those of you haven't yet entered Search Engine Journal's T Shirt contest, Loren is still accepting submissions. Winners get their shirt printed up!

Interview with Patrick posted at SEJ

Loren Baker has posted a lengthy interview with Patrick at Search Engine Journal. It touches on Text Link Ads, our new publisher program, SEO and more.

Attn: Magic Middle Re: We want to earn you money!

Interesting article by David Sifry on the state of the blogosphere.  Of particular interest to us at Text Link Ads is this quote on what Sifry calls the "Magic Middle":"At Technorati, we define this to be the bloggers who have from 20-1000
other people linking to them. As the chart above shows, there are about
155,000 people who fit in this group."Our publisher program is accepting quality blogs at a fast rate but we are going to have to do a better job of getting the word out as it looks like there are 155,000 possible TLA publishers in the blogosphere!  If you have a quality website or blog and are looking to make more money please check out our publisher program.

Turn Off Comments for Links

Link building for blogs carries its own set of (sometimes odd) strategies and tactics. Graywolf and Problogger have both posted on how turning off comments on a blog ensures that it gets more links. I have to admit I find the whole thing a bit funny... because it really does work.

Another benefit of this tactic is that it removes the need to deal with comment spam :-)