Jim Boykin said that natural links always work and presented a “1000 day linking plan”:

• Day 1: Submit to good directories, such as Best of the Web, Yahoo and industry verticals.
• Day 2: Submit comments on blogs and write forum posts.
• Day 3: Buy ads in industry portals.
• Days 4-20: Write linkbait articles, give away tools, widgets.
• Days 21-31: Analyse competitors’ backlinks and solicit for your site. Use tools such as Hubfinder by Aaron Wall, or manually using Yahoo. Check the site’s PR, check the Google cache and decide if it is a good link.
• Days 32-1000: Search for related web pages. Prove you are a human – phone the other site’s owner or email with something more than a link request. Why is a link beneficial to them?

Jim then spoke about Link Value, which includes:

• Relevance
• Age of site
• Number of backlinks
• Site’s trust (how many links from .gov/.edu?)
• Interlinks within this site to and from the page in question
• Blogs do not give good backlinks
• Other sites should also link to the link-providing page
• Who else is getting a link from that page?
• Where is your link on the page – do you have to write content for that page?

Greg Hartnett from BOTW spoke about Link Building Via Directories. They are not “paid links” but are “reviews”. He described “good directories” as follows:

• They have an history
• They are great resources
• Their categories are populated (not empty stubs)
• They are designed for the user
• They add unpaid submissions if they are good resources

Traffic to directories is low volume but targeted.

Some directories will take multiple submissions from a site. CNN is mentioned 745 times in the ODP.

Are the Yahoo Directory, BOTW worth the expense? Yes. Will my site get included? Not if it fails the review.

The best directories are:

• Yahoo
• ODP
• BOTW
• Business.com

Rae Hoffman of sugarrae.com spoke about Delegating Link Development.

Rae prefers to do linking in-house than to outsource it. If you have to outsource, create a training document for their staff. It would contain material including:

• A list of your competitors
• Guidelines for reciprocal links
• Sample emails to send on your behalf

Train your linkers to be traffic developers and marketers, not link developers. Give them a low-value site to begin with and observe them.

Roger Montti of martinibuster.net spoke about Alternative Link Building.

Roger has a linking team in India and one in the US. He is Bcc’d on each link request they send out, so that he can monitor their work and make suggestions.

One source is buying an ad in an emailed newsletter, if the newsletter is also archived online – you get a permanent link!

He suggested finding complementary (relevant) blogs via BOTW and other listings and then contacting the owner asking if they sold advertising (not links). Some of them don’t mention this but they might have AdSense blocks halfway down the page, so they want to make money. Good sources are ones that make no mention of PageRank, do not have ads for irrelevant websites, and offer a year-long deal.

You can try to sponsor small nonprofits, especially .org sites. YouTube videos can contain links and may send human traffic.

To find such sites, try the following searches:

• “advertise with us” [your keyphrase] -cpm
• “rate card” -”cpm advertising”
• allintitle:sponsors -cpm site:.org [your keyphrase]

Another option is to buy a neglected, under-performing site that you can improve. You could build a site for a charity in return for links, but they tend to be demanding customers because you work for free.

If your site is a software company that makes shareware, then there are numerous download sites where you can submit PAD files.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Michael Gray (Graywolf) offered some tips on what works for Social Media.

• Selling should have a low focus
• Products do better than services
• Consumer goods do better than business goods
• Target impulse buyers
• Offer doorbuster prices
• Let the customer get the content any way they want, such as an RSS feed or Twitter. e.g. Southwest Airlines gives airfare deals, Carnival Cruise, JetBlue.

Example sites: thisnext.com, techdiva.com

There are some pitfalls:

• Mention if there are restrictions or goods in short supply
• Anticipate demand – Microsoft was embarrassed when it promised a USB key to all survey participants but only made 1000 keys.

Alexander Barbara spoke about Monetising Digg Traffic

He mentioned a new site about health and wellness – not your typical Digg candidate because Digg is dominated by 16-year-old geeks – but it got good exposure through a targeted campaign. A site has just 24 hours to stay on the Digg home page, so it needs to be compelling.

Some points to consider if your site cannot withstand the load of Digg traffic:

• Consider making flat pages and serve them, which will reduce the load on MySQL.
• Provide a 302 redirect to the Google cache of your page.
• Use Coral Cache (http://www.coralcdn.org/), a free service that will provide peer-to-peer caching of your content.

Other observations:

• Digg users do not click ads.
• 50% of Digg users will unsubscribe from your RSS feed within two days.
• Monetise directly with CPM ads, not AdSense.
• Monetise indirectly by buildign long-term, loyal readers.

Laura Fitton of pistachioconsulting.com started using Twitter in March 2007 and offered the following tips:

• Build lasting value.
• Ads are ailing – you can make more money by helping others to buy.
• Listen: markets are conversations, but conversations suck if you don’t listen.
• Watch what others are saying about your company. Set up alerts. Buy the negative domain names such as [yourcompany]sucks.com before a disgruntled ex-employee or customer does.
• You cannot game the market. Facebook Beacon got it wrong.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Craig Newmark was the keynote speaker at the Webmasterworld Conference. Craig is a modest man who started Craigslist while he worked for Charles Schwab in 1994. By 1995, it was a Unix Pine based cc mailing list about San Francisco. It started with restaurant recommendations, then classifieds and job ads. At this stage, Craig wore a pocket protector and had tape on his glasses – he is a self-confessed nerd. The list moved to the Majordomo platform and when it came to giving it a name, he chose the informal name that its users were already calling it – Craig’s List.

In 1998 he tried forming a non-profit structure and tried charging for ads. This was a failure. By now the system was running Sun Solaris.

In 1999 he started the incorporation of Craigslist and hired Jim Buckmaster, the current CEO. The code was re-written in Perl and moved to Linux servers. Email harvesters started stealing addresses, so he wrote the current email options (hide or reveal) code in two days.

Today, Craigslist has a paid model in 11 cities for job ads and apartment ads in New York city. Each month, 9 million pages are served by 120 generic Linux servers that run Apache, MySQL and Perl. 80 more servers will be added soon and the site will be split over two hosting locations. The email still uses Pine.

Craig realised that his people skills are not the best, so he only handles customer service today and is not part of the management team. In spite of many offers, Craig has no intention of selling. Only 1% of the site generates revenue. His philosopy is simple: if you trust your community, they will respond in a trusting way.

Popularity: 18% [?]

I am leaving for CES, so I won’t get around to writing up my notes here. So I will upload the few I did type. I seem to have deleted several good photos by mistake, including one of me with Matt Cutts and another with Bill Hartzer.

The first is my own session, shared with Bruce Clay, Bill Slawski and Jill Whalen, moderated by Jake Baillie. There is a fine write-up by Avi Wilensky here: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015547.html except he keeps referring to me as “Ashi”.

Here are some photos from the session on Flickr:

(L to R: Bruce Clay, Jill Whalen, Jake Baillie – click to enlarge)

(L to R: Ash Nallawalla, Bill Slawski)

Popularity: 16% [?]

Google has picked up benazirbhutto.org’s condolence page in less than an hour after her death. I was trying to find the meaning of a word used as a prefix to her name – “Mohtarma” used repeatedly by a London spokesman on Sky News. He sounded as if he was saying “Mutarma Bannerjee Bhutto” which made no sense, so I had to look it up. While doing so, I noticed that Google has picked up her condolence book in less than an hour as the second main result for the phrase “mohtarma bhutto”. I am still none the wiser about the word as it is not used in India to my knowledge, but it would be a respectful prefix.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Enroute from SFO to LAS for Pubcon, I noticed my neighbour get out a device that I had not seen before. Turns out my neighbour was Fred Vallaeys, a Google Product Evangelist, who was a fellow speaker at Pubcon!

Fred kindly let me have a play with the Kindle, which is sold by Amazon. It cost $399 plus $24.99 for a protective, book-like cover. The display is easy to read in bright light. The scroll wheel works well but the keyboard is awkward to use. The Kindle is linked to your Amazon account, so you can order books and magazines from it.

Non-USA people like me can forget the Kindle for the time being. It connects to a special wireless service in the US, so it won’t work outside the US, other than to display content that is already in it. You would have to get the content with a PC and then transfer it with a USB drive. However, such problems have a silver lining in that we usually see a second generation device with all the kinks taken out. But Amazon hasn’t come to Australia, so who knows if we will see the Kindle in Oz.

Popularity: 23% [?]