SMX Advanced Live Blogging Post 2

Lunch was good. There was meat, pasta, bread, butter. All that good stuff. Now onto the 3rd session of the day. No Live Blogging of the second session, sorry. Dead laptop syndrome.
Show Me The Links: Real Life Link Building
Speakers, In Order of Appearance:
Roger Montti
Arnie Kuenn
Chris Bennet
Gil Reich
Debra Mastaler
Roger takes the stage (Applause)
Roger digs right in and starts belting out some strategies for your link building.
Strategies
Target searching
Look around for other sites using your keyword and sift through the giant pile. It’s time consuming, but can reveal many great opportunities.
Backlink Trolling
Snoop around your competitors and find their linking sources. It works, but not Roger’s favorite method. Roger believes that sites that are providing you with a link and do not link to your competitors are stronger.
Association Memberships
Do searches for membership lists and get on them. Restrict your searching to .org and enjoy the fruits of labor
Paid Links
Carries the obvious inherent risk of the link getting penalized or having no value.
Broken Link Campaign
Flame-outs from the past are fertile hunting grounds, particularly for B2B sites. Once you have identified a dead page do a linkdomain: search on Yahoo to find who’s linking to it and if it’s got some juice, grab it.
General Sponsor Campaign
Find sponsors of programs or companies related to you and get some sponsorship going.
Arnie of VerticalMeasures takes the stage (Applause)
Arnie starts out with a breakdown of how his company spends their time when Link Building.
~50% is Content Development
~20% is Blog Post & Article Placement
~10% Is Basic Link Development (Directories, comments, etc)
~20% is Targeted Link Requests
Arnies got a great example of a Pirate costume link they went after with some amusement. “Ahoy Webwench! I like yer site…” The moral of the story? Have fun when link building. Maintain a sense of humor and engage with the webmasters your spamming for links.
Targeted email requests require you to do research. Learn about the people your asking for links from. The more you know the easier it is to find a common interest and create a connection between you and the webmaster.
Doing favors for webmasters can also be beneficial. Snoop around your targets site and see what they could do to benefit their site that they wouldn’t normally see. Perhaps inform them of a broken link and then ask for a link.
Creating content for your targets site is also a great way in the door (Arnie is on a roll!). Everyone knows that content creation is hard. It’s easy to sit down and write for 30 minutes, but you don’t always walk away with good content. Go ahead and do yourself and your target a favor and take the extra time to create some great content and get a link for it!
Also make sure to research the links you get. If people start talking about one of your old posts, make sure to write a follow up or post new information and new data. Paying attention to your readers & community is important and can be extremely effective.
Chris comes to the stage (Applause)
Info-graphics are wonderful. It’s a great way to display various information and data. Chris recommends using these for link building. People love images and their more likely to share them. Chris is giving us some various examples of good info-graphics that have worked well including STDs Across America, Servers by country and company, and a Where Does the Money Go info-graphic, a look at the U.S. Consumer Unit Expenditures.
Setting up viral content rich hubs and host the content there and then link to your site and various products based on the viral content you create. Also fun are guest virals. Putting viral content on High Profile sites in behalf of your brand. Skip the Diggs and Buries and go straight to the link sources.
Chris also advocates looking at your back-links and thank those who have linked to your content in the past and when you have new content you can go back to these people you’ve created a relationship with and get your viral content spread faster. Perhaps even create guest virals for these folks. That’s always a great incentive for new links.
Gil takes the stage (Applause)
Get others to promote your brand and your message. Use You Rock! badges. Send people a badge saying that your brand says their awesome and get them to post it on their site.
Another great method is testimonials and awards. Have the chutzpah to just go around and just give badges and awards to people who you want to get in contact with.
Write on sites that want good content and can deliver an audience. Go to Yahoo questions and similar sites and answer questions and link back to you as the authority. Your reaching three audiences with this method. The person who asked, others who will ask in the future, and the sites users.
Be part of the community and get involved with other users. Talk about your thoughts, opinions, and do Q+A. Go to events and talk about things that happen, people you meet, anything you learned.
Watch for common enemies. If your in a room with a bunch of wolves talk about the sheep. But keep it clean and try not to make it personal.
Debra takes the stage (Applause)
Shes talking about all the great content you’ve already created and the great work you’ve done, now make sure it gets out there! No feeds on your contet? Have no fear, Dapper.net is here. You can create RSS feeds for all your content and make sure you get links.
Use an RSS Footer plugin that will automatically create a link back to your page with the content using the anchor text you want.
Debra’s big reveal? Podcasts! Turns out (according to her) podcasts are getting tons of links. So make ‘em. Everything you’ve ever written, all your content, can be turned into a podcast.
Building authority with widgets is yet another genius method. Make people come to your site to download. Email it to your customers, subscribers, guests, etc. As the Lord said, go forth and multiply your widgets. Or something like that.
Whew. Presentations are finished! Now on to the Q+A. For which we have little time.
I can’t hear Danny or the presenters, too much shuffling and people messing with their phones. Perfect. Hopefully the Q+A goodies weren’t vital and all-important.
Alright folks, have fun. Hope to blog the next session but I must first go in the pursuit of power.