Online Music Promo - Engaging, Email Lists and Actually Monetizing: Lucky 7 Final chapter

Okay on we go with the very last episode of our 3 part series on getting your head around online promotion basics and then it just mutated into a seven part whopper!

In today s stunning conclusion it’s just all business. It’s not basic anything anymore because we’re actually engaging fans and we’re actually monetizing it.

Here's whats happened so far:

Part 1 is here: In digital we trust - preparing for digital music marketing and promotion

And part 2 is here: Are you ready? Content you need for your digital online promotion campaign

And part 3: Google and the importance of words on the web: more “who’s going to write our blog copy” now then “who’s going to direct our video”

Part 4: Getting your head around using social media and web 2.0 to promote your music

Part 5: Setting up a music artists website

Part 6: Music Artist Website promotion: Marketing and Sales

And don’t forget: Our new artist community has launched @ http://www.newmusicmarketing.com/ - it’s still free to join in July and we’re starting to add new in depth content already.

And of course tomorrow @ The Depot in Devonport I’ll be be giving a presentation on all this stuff Check it out if you’re in auckland.

So it was cliffhanger end last time when we suddenly discovered while we were promoting our websites and building the power of our musics brand message to connect with audiences – it was the good old email list that formed a fundamental strategy for monetizing all along!

There are many unique propositions you can be using to monetise this valuable, influential brand you’ve built up and these relationships you’re building with your audience, but your potential fans don’t want to be bombarded by what you want to sell them. That's not real. They want to connect with a message that makes them open to having you earn their trust. And this is where the proposition of having new fans sign up for an email list is probably one of the most successful strategies to create income long term, because the relationship is based on respect for a fan who welcomes your interactions, and will be prepared to spend money as the relationship and the unique value grows.

As the music industry evolves, I always say well . . . the last time I saw the rulebook on making money, it was flying out the window. Only one thing holds true and that is creating value for the fans and managing the relationship leads to artist success.

I think most of the old music industry think Radiohead was just a bad dream. They need to wake up.
Okay so lets wrap up this thing by describing some different ways you can innovate to create revenue from your website and email list – and remember what I’ve said about new music business models – its not a horse race! You can ride every income stream that is worth the effort.

The idea is to continually innovate and optimize so that you are enhancing the value of your most profitable interactions and minimising the effort of your least profitable interactions. This is fundamental in guiding the innovative process.

Lets look at some areas for innovating monetization:

Pricing structure: Trent Reznors last Nine Inch Nails release was remarkable for the number of pricing iterations he created on different products available, so there was a product for fans at every level from a basic $5 download all the way up to a limited edition item valued a $300 that netted him $750,000 over the 48 hour period they took to sell out. The remarkable thing was also that this was an instrumental album, that though creating further options for licensing and synching, however was not really NIN's core content. But NIN's core fanbase is fully engaged and they dont care.

Income streams: The asian music market, where rampant piracy cripples the value of physical goods and copies, has led the way in showing how developing wide and deep ranges of products and service under the brand of an artist can actually leverage the effects of piracy.

The opportunities here to innovate abound. Maybe you need to have a serious and open minded think about what kind of products and services you can provide. I realised I could go to 6 year old’s birthdays and play pirates for $200 a pop, there’s this guy I heard about who offers to write and record love songs - mainly for the wedding market.

There's Bob Baker's buddy who sold 15,000 CD's on the pier playing cheesy love ballads twice a week for 18 months.

What have you got? Is it your raw technical skill? Is it your charisma? Is there are specific message around a common issue that peopel conenct with through your music? Do you have prolific output?Do you make a fashion statement with what you wear or a sexual statement with what you don't?

You need to identify exactly where you can creating the most value with your specific skills and doing those things that you love that dont seem like work and leverage it!

Fan supported: In the fan supported model which has already been demonstratably successful, the artist set up a system by which there was increasingly personalised rewards for example - $10 pre ordered a copy of the CD, $500 gave you a thank you in the CD liner notes, $5000 gave you a trip from anywhere in the US to stay courtesy of the artist for a weekend during the recording and participate on the backing vocal of one of the songs.

Ad supported revenue: We often talk about the digital revolution creating an “attention economy” that is, in a digital environment where copies of content cease to have financial value, the value is then transferred to the attention created through content and the opportunity that remains to create revenue from attention through advertising.

Advertising networks online are getting increasingly sophisticated, and although I hold fast to the assertion that in 2008, 1000 page views should equal 1000 cents earnings - and currently after blogging for over 9 months, that’s about what I earn from my blogs in a week – I honestly believe that conditions for online advertisers will improve across the board as the medium continues to improve and show its effectiveness. First, muso’s will start out with Google adsense ads, before looking into joining an ad network potentially capable of delivering more lucrative and more consistent targeted ads charged per impression, finally a successful established musician should be able to attract sufficient interest to be able to cut out the middleman and sell advertising directly to niche partners.


Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing is a lucrative form of online marketing that drives online sales with high commissions, thus attracting many like a modern day gold rush. Those with online products will join an affiliate network that will provide its “partners” (bloggers, webmasters etc.) with ad offers. The tracking of these sites and offers is a highly sophisticated commercial operation and once a sale can be traced to somebody who once visited your site with the corresponding ad displayed, you will be accredited with a 40%-75% commission on the sale value. As I’ve discussed before the range of products is staggering, and sure, miracle diets etc. do tend to sell better BUT what you’ve got to realise is that there are free offers that pay out. This means you can leverage your email list to present a variety of offers to your fans. But the fact that you are able to collect 75% commission on digital products does raise possibilities about relative product value.

E.G. – Buy a month worth of digital movie rental for $US40 (of which the band gets $US30) and get our new album (worth $10) free!!!

You getting me? Things could get interesting.

Monetized communities:

So monetizing communities is based around the concept that the content that drives your promotion and monetization through advertising etc. becomes exponential once you have harnessed fans to actually create content for you.

Discussion about you, discussion with you, discussion about content, interaction with content, deconstruction (“mash up”) of content . . . when your fans are doing this for you, you’ve now got a a wild freeform content generating, web ownaging machine!

You want them designing their own t-shirts and selling them to one another and taking a cut. “c2c” means “consumer to consumer”.

The way we do business is about to be fundamentally changed online.

But yes. Artists must accept relinquishing control.

In 2013 If some kid photoshops your face on a dogs body and sells 50,000 t shirts online then you’re going to have to take your 25% cut and massive exposure and sulk in the corner.

But on communities gotta touch on what I’m doing personally with kurb – as a working model – so you can see in practice the model of a high value online community that is monetized. And the fact that you can see that I’m doing it, it’s not some huge leap for you. Cost me a few hundy.

With http://www.newmusicmarketing.com I’ve set up a forum platform from which to distribute high value content. In my case it’s content that I feel is to valuable to share freely – in your case it’s most likely your music. But in creating a platform on which to monetize premium content and your fan relationships you can create dynamic propositions.

You can build a list of 1000 hardcore fans who are happy to commit to paying $1 per week ($1 per week????) and be part of a premium experience that gives them premium access (you stop in the members over the week to interact) and access to premium content: your music, videos, special exclusive content, giveaways, competitions and prizes, special free gigs, seriously, innovation can run wild!

BUT

like I said. It’s just one horse in the stable. Your making $1000 p/week of your premium membership sites – your also making pocket money out of advertising, digital retail, royalties and licensing, your gigging of course – even your good old CD’s and merch . . . y’know? The futures not dark.

But you gotta get started now. It’ll take years for your online presence to dvelop and mature.

Okay, So I hope you’ve enjoyed this series!

I’ll be doing a post soon about going back over your blog and editing it for optimisation as a clean up each of the articles in the series.

Part 1 is here: In digital we trust - preparing for digital music marketing and promotion

And part 2 is here: Are you ready? Content you need for your digital online promotion campaign

And part 3: Google and the importance of words on the web: more “who’s going to write our blog copy” now then “who’s going to direct our video”

Part 4: Getting your head around using social media and web 2.0 to promote your music

part 5: Setting up a music artists website

And don’t forget: Our new artist community has launched @ http://www.newmusicmarketing.com/ - it’s still free to join in July and we’re starting to add new in depth content already.

And of course tomorrow @ The Depot in Devonport I’ll be be giving a presentation on all this stuff Check it out if you’re in auckland.

It’s time for me to get on with developing my community at http://newmusicmarketing.com

And I’ve got work to building my blogs presentation to build a more powerful brand and develop more and new ways of monetization.

Look for me at http://musicmarketingblog,info as I'm getting my act together here!

And make sure you subscribe by RSS because I just know I’m going to be talking more about branding, engaging fans and more about developing these relationships and monetized interactions soon.

Cheers!

marketing and monetizing a music artists website

 Okay so we been doing this series on online promotion, in the last post in the series we talked about the importance of your website and how to set one up.

 

Today we’re going to be revisiting a lot of ideas we’ve discussed about promoting your website - and talking about how you can use your website to create value for fans that leads to income.

Now we're getting into the real nitty gritty and moving beyond the basics. So this time we're going to be going through website promotion and we're going to cap it off in the next part by continuing to discuss building email lists and building deeper engagement with fans by fostering interactions and ongoing relationships.

Lets look over the series:

Part 1 is here: In digital we trust - preparing for digital music marketing and promotion

And part 2 is here: Are you ready? Content you need for your digital online promotion campaign

And part 3: Google and the importance of words on the web: more "who's going to write our blog copy" now then "who's going to direct our video"

Part 4:  Getting your head around using social media and web 2.0 to promote your music

part 5: Setting up a music artists website

 

And don't forget: Our new artist community has launched @ http://www.newmusicmarketing.com - it's still free to join in July and we're starting to add new in depth content.

And of course tomorrow @ The Depot in Devonport I'll be be giving a presentation on all this stuff Check it out if you're in auckland.

 

So when I’ve talked about building your website and how important your “internet property” is, it’s about creating an online channel for you to present your content and develop profitable interactions, and retaining control of that environment and those interactions.

 

Blogs and websites are very similar in the way that they are used as a platform to deliver content, and can be both used to conduct highly valuable propositions such as building an email list of fans from which to monetize continued interactions. Though if you’re innovative and creative your website can be used to create opportunities to drive deeper fan interaction with content that can be managed for monetization.

I tend to explain website promotion in terms of two concepts: Sales and Marketing. First comes marketing, that’s about bringing people to your website. We discussed Social Media, and we also talked about creating digital content, writing and blogging – making a lot of words in particular - to increase your depth of presence, “owning more of the net” and improving search based results. In this way, you can say content IS promotion.

 

But as your building your content and “owning more of the net”, committing yourself to developing your website into a platform that creates income from your music becomes a long and cumulative process.

Once you’ve worked to bring traffic to your site, we have to examine the sales process, because “Please buy our CD” in big letters wont work.

 

 

When I talk about increasing “sales”, or “conversions”, we are optimising the content that visitors to your site experience in order to produce a desired outcome. That is, put in broad terms, when a visit to your website results in the desired action by the visitor, whether that’s downloading a free song, signing up to an email list or even . . . engaging in an interaction which leads to monetization!

How can optimize your website to encourage more “sales”?

Often we can start with basic tweaks - increasing the access, the value and the uniqueness of the proposition.

 

But this is where we start to discuss the power of building relationships with fans. It comes back to engagement, it comes back to branding. The reality is, unless you engage you’re not likely to even get people interested in downloading your music free. So what engages people?

Well music obviously. But the problem is we’re moving beyond the era in which they used to just play music at you on the radio until you liked it. The struggle is getting them to listen. Getting them to get that far.

What will make them give your music a chance?

Branding. Branding through content that carries powerful messages fans identify with.

The house music videos of Benny Benassi and Eric Prydz carry strong visual messages about sexuality. The Hip Hop music videos of P Diddy et al carry strong visual messages about the rewards of financial success, while Coldplay alludes heavily to personal struggles intepreted through monogamy. These examples abound. Bob Marleys music is depicted as spiritual and political, Radiohead's music is depicted as having intellectual and political undertones. 

Successful artists connect with their audience through strong brand associated messages.

Here again the importance of continuing to create content that enhances the brand value to the fans of what it is you represent. If you don’t carry strong messages in this way then you don’t really represent anything powerful or meaningful to people and so they fail to engage.

It’s not just about branding but also about being unique.

But it’s also about the proposition you’re presenting. It must carry value for your potential fan as well as being unique.

When I talk about the proposition that you are using your social networks and blogs and content to draw people to your site and draw people into, it’s not only a unique and valuable brand proposition such as:

 

“we UNIQUELY represent a brand powerfully associated with your identity”

 

but also a uniquely valuable proposition in order to capture the value in your brand as a relationship that can lead to profitable interactions such as:

”So sign up for mailing list so we can continue to have interactions based around uniquely valuable propositions that benefit you!”

So let me cut the marketing speak for one moment:  It means unless people think you’re cool, they don’t care about your free mp3’s. they don’t.

 

It’s up to you to give them something to care about.

You gotta create the greatest opportunity and encouragement to sell the interaction that will escalate the relationship with the casual visitor.

That’s why you’ve got to go back to Rapino’s statement and recognise the role your website plays in building your email list.

“ . . . and it’s all about the website. Collecting email addresses and maximizing revenue . . . ”

 
So here we see the value of the email list. We can grasp the simple email list as a way to foster deeper relationships with fans and then and only then arriving at a point at which you can actually start making some money.

So coming right up is our last post in the series before we accept we've well and truly moved beyond the basics into the business of building relationships and innovating to create new value from those interactions.

 

John Reese’s Traffic Secrets: A music industry perspective on internet marketing

“Finally.

The time has come.

4+ years in the making.

A small fortune spent.

Thousands of tests conducted.

A valuable system made even better.

“Traffic Secrets 2.0″ gets officially released
today at Noon EST!

If you’re serious about making money
online and growing an online business
then this is the course for you.

And I’ll stake my reputation on this… this may
very well be one of the last traffic-generation
courses you’ll ever need to buy.”

 

 

 

So today is the launch of John Reese’s “Traffic Secrets 2” and it is a big event in internet marketing.

This should be a great post because not only can we learn from John Reese in regards to applying online promotion ideas from his amazing free video material . . .

. . . but we can reflect on how John was able to create such a huge buzz for his product in an already overhyped and oversaturated market.

I understand the reason a lot of musicians come to me is because they understand the importance of promoting themselves and engaging fans online, but they’re not really interested in learning and practicing “IM” or internet marketing themselves, they wanna do their music.

Which is cool, that gives me a job to do, especially as there seems to be so very few music industry people interested in IM.

Which seems pretty strange to me, I mean call me crazy but if you were say in the recording industry and you kinda figured your whole industry was shifting to a digital, web enabled environment and you were wondering how to make money . . .

 

You’d probably start by looking at people who were already making money in a digital web enabled environment.

And I don’t mean like bill gates. I mean like garden variety twenty something geeks with a handful of computer skills (who me? haha), who to which the idea of not having to leave their bedroom to make money appeals.

You see no one who is involved in IM is interested in the music business because these kids are just trying to make quick bucks and there are no quick bucks in music.

Quick bucks are in diets and porn and peddling get rich schemes, and don’t forget the cornerstone of IM, the ebook. And when people are focused on one thing such as making fast, easy money selling whatever they can online, they begin to get very good at it. And a whole economic ecosystem has sprung up to support those who either work full time as a professional or part time or as a hobby earning extra cash as an internet marketer, and the industry has become ever more streamlined.

And it’s true that a lot more people are interested in miraculous weight loss cures than they are your music, but given that people make so much money out of weight loss online and anything else you can think of probably with a lot less resources then you have - while you’re still thinking about how to quit your day job - kinda suggests there’s some things we can learn.

And so that’s what I’ve been doing. Watching and learning from the ways that marketing is carried out on the web for RESULTS.

As in money results.

And I don’t mean results for Bill gates or Radiohead or anyone who doesn’t need my help.

 

I mean for you, at the arse end of the music industry, in a sinking ship with the rest of us, working out how to turn a crust.

 

So you can focus on your music, and I will focus on getting you to the best place online to get paid for it.

Lets get back to John Reese’s traffic secrets. I think the thing about Traffic Secrets is that it’s done a radiohead. Or is it a led zep reunion? The point is, within the internet marketing and blogging world people are hyped up about his product.

People that are masters of hype are hyped. Why?

Well the whole point of this post was to highlight his Free videos.

He has 3 free videos totalling almost an hour of free material where he discusses several in depth online promotion strategies and techniques.

You should watch them because theyre great, they’ll teach you a lot . . .

But - If you want direct access to these free videos then you have to jump into our new artist community.

http://newmusicmarketing.com

 

It’s free to join, (currently the whole site is free but there’s not much happening just yet, early days – by August should be a different story)

So back to this massive launch campaign. The first thing I noticed when I heard about this was that a lot of top IM people were blogging about the free videos from their friend John.

 

What if you had a dozen top bands all telling their fans you had a new album coming out?

 

But it wasn’t just talking about the videos it was what they were saying. Needless to say the free videos were packed with info and insight, they were distinctly authentic and valuable in content. In fact its only in the last half of the last video he even starts talking about the product itself.

 

But it wasn’t just the content. These bloggers and IM gurus couldn’t stop talking about the quality of the presentation, as although video has been growing in IM for the last 18 months, the general consensus was that he had risen the bar in promotional videos for internet products with the standard of his presentation.

And this is what many of the marketers touched on: They were personally excited about the product.

What they had seen and been given free was of such high standard they couldn’t help but be connected with the product and feel confident about purchasing it.

And this is the world we’re now living in. In order to stand out, you have to demonstrate superior value in a way that is accessible before you even create the opportunity to realise significant revenue.

Interesting aside:

I saw an ad emblazoned “John Reese is a scammer and owes me $30,000” I clicked through to a sale page for . . .

 

Traffic secrets . . .

I guess that’s one way of advertising. I don’t see myself running a “Matt Turner is a scammer and Kurb ripped me off” campaign . . .

learning search engine optimisation for your website

Here’s a pretty long but still real simple and useful article on search engine optimisation.



The thing about SEO work is it doesn’t happen straight away it often takes MONTHS to see the tiniest changes.

But this is the thing about music promotion. We all know the music industry is heading online. And I can tell you that for the foreseeable future that searches drive online information and basically as boring and un rock’n roll as this stuff is, it’s SO VITAL in the long term!!!

Luckily for musicians search engine optimisation is just one of many skills I make available on our digital coaching packages for artists as well as small business – check it out more here:

http://kurbartistmanagement.info
Remember on our digital coaching and online promotion packages we take care of all of this stuff it’s all inclusive!!!

Kurb SEO search engine optimisation search marketing adwords auckland new zealand

Kurb small business marketing and online promotion auckland new zealand

Kurb online marketing and web 2.0 promotion auckland new zealand

Let’s face it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complicated subject—and not only is it complicated, but the professionals don’t even agree about what works best.

On the other hand, it’s become pretty obvious that SEO is no longer something businesses can ignore. Especially small businesses.

Where does SEO fit in with small businesses, home businesses, and freelancers? How can a small business owner make sense of the many parts? Is SEO practical or effective for small business?

These are all questions I’ve been asked repeatedly by clients, and I’m pretty sure they are questions that are on the minds of many business owners out there. With that as my motive, I’ve created this article to explain everything a business owner should (and shouldn’t) know about SEO.

What is SEO and Why You Should Care

Search Engine Optimization is about getting more traffic by improving your rank in organic search. By organic search, I mean free search. So at it’s root, SEO is about getting free long-term exposure for your business.

Now there is an important distinction to make regarding types of SEO. There are generally considered two types of SEO, white-hat and black-hat, and they vary based on their primary goal. White-hat SEO is about making your site easy for Google to read, creating valuable content with relevant keywords, and building links in an honest fashion (more on these later). Black-hat SEO is pretty much about tricking Google into ranking higher, and doing anything dishonest to influence your search positions. There are several blurry areas, but for the purposes of this article I’m going to stay firmly within white-hat territory.

Now that we have that finished, let’s move on to the interesting parts.

Why you should care about SEO

The internet is only growing, and people are spending more and more time immersed in its digital waters. At the very center of this trend are search engines—they are the primary way of finding or being found on the internet. SEO is about getting you ranked well and helping you profit from search engines.

• SEO brings traffic. As in, people looking at your business.


• SEO increases visibility, so your business can be found.


• If you set yourself up correctly you can benefit for years.


• SEO helps manage your company’s reputation online.


• SEO is a necessary step to marketing your business online.

If you want to expand your business onto the internet, there really isn’t another choice but to understand and implement good SEO practices. Without them, chances are you won’t get very far online.

Code, URLs, and Crawlability

The first step in optimizing your site for search engines lies with making the code and URLs of your website “crawlable”. Just as a quick warning, these are things you should know about, but you should probably have your web guru implement them.

The code

Basically, in order for you to rank and get traffic from Google or other search engines, they have to be able to read your website. The key point is that search engines can only read text. This means all of your images should have a textual description, you should have a lot of textual content, and you shouldn’t have an entirely flash or javascript website.

The URLs

Once search engines can read your website, they index (save and file) each page based on the unique URL (the address you type into the bar). This is important because some websites don’t have a unique URL for each page, which leads to the content getting all mixed up in the search engines. If your website does this, chances are you won’t rank well in Google or any other engines. Take a look at the picture below for examples of good and bad URLs.

Not only are unique URLs important, but having keywords in the URL is also important. Search engines count URL and Title Bar keywords heavily, and if you aren’t using them then you’re missing out on a vital piece of SEO.

Semantics

This is something that we’ll look at more in the content section, but it needs to be at least brought up with regard to code. A properly optimized website will use semantic code to market headings, paragraphs, lists, etc… This means that each part of your content is given a relative importance. Google uses this prioritization to figure out which keywords are important, so you should ask your webmaster to make sure your website is coded properly to use these standards.

Content and Keywords

The content and keywords of your website are both things you probably have control over (you might even be able to edit them yourself), and are both parts of SEO that you can implement yourself.

Content

Content includes any text, images, audio, or video that you put on your website. For this article we’ll focus on text, since it is the primary way Google understands your website. The others need to be described with text in order for Google to register them.

Here’s the simple overview of content and SEO:

1. Content is good


2. More content is better


3. Lots of content is the best

Content is what search engines rank. If you have a lot of content, you will have more pages that can rank, and more ways to get traffic. So the more content you have, the better.

But it’s not quite that simple, content quality is very important. A high quality article will get a lot of traffic from social media and will get more links, which is a big factor in SEO (see the next big section). Also good content will be relevant to your website and have relative keywords in it. So don’t just throw up a crappy page and expect it to rank well—your content needs to be well thought out and provide some good value.

Keywords

When Google reads your content, it distills everything into a list of keywords. It is those keywords and phrases that control what searches your website will show up for, so they are of crucial importance.

There are three important things to consider when looking for keywords. Is the keyword relevant to my business? How often is the keyword searched for? How competitive is the keyword?

Keyword Relevance You want to find keywords that have to do with your business so that they will bring in traffic that is valuable to you. A good way to come up with relevant keywords is to just brainstorm and come up with a list of words and phrases your target customer might use to find your website.

Keyword Popularity You need to find keywords and phrases that are being searched for regularly, or else you might rank #1 and get no traffic.

Keyword Difficulty Once you have a nice list of popular and relevant keyword phrases, it’s time to cross out most of them. Many keyword phrases, and most individual words, are extremely competitive and very difficult to rank for. When you’re just starting out, it’s best to go for the easy ones first.

Content Structure

It’s important to structure your content in a way that is semantically correct. This means using the right heading style for each heading, and using them in order of importance. A properly structured page will look like an outline with big headlines, little headlines, and paragraphs. This semantic structure helps accessibility, helps people scan your pages, and help search engines rank you properly. Here’s an example of good and bad page structure:

Popularity, Links, and PageRank

Once you’ve dealt with code, content, and keywords, the rest of SEO is kind of like a big popularity contest based on who links to you. Each website that links to you is saying “hey, this site is cool” so your ranking goes up a little. But it goes a step further than that.

Do you remember what happened in high-school when one of the cool kids said something was cool? That something all of a sudden became much more popular than if a normal kid had said it was cool. Google works in much the same way—links from authority sites count much more than links from a new website. The end result of all of this is something Google calls PageRank, similar to link popularity in other search engines, all of which is basically a measure of how important your website is online.

More Links, Higher PageRank, Better Rankings

In order to give your site more weight, and get ranked higher, you need to build links from other websites—especially authority sites (sites with high trust and high PageRank). There are many different ways to get links to your site, some are good, and some are bad.

Some good ways to get links include quality directory listings, blog comments, writing articles, guest posts on blogs, and social media.

Get Trustworthy and Natural Links

Probably because of the number of people competing for search rankings, it has become reasonably common for businesses to try cheating the system. Most of this cheating involves the process of automatic link building, and most of the time it works terribly.

In order to defeat the cheaters, Google has made trust a key element of ranking well. This trust is not built upon the number of links you have, but on the type and quality of each link, and the overall appearance of all of your links (your link profile). Because of this trust system, it’s very important for you to get links naturally and really aim for quality links.

Link Quality

Getting a quality link has several parts to it:

Originating Page The page that the link comes from needs to be a quality page, with relevant content, and not too many other links. If the page is a “links page” and has little text and mostly other links, it probably isn’t a great source. Also important is finding a page that has a relatively high PageRank itself.

Anchor Text Anchor text is the text that actually links to your website. Good anchor text will have relevant keywords in it. Bad anchor text will be irrelevant or just a URL.

No-Follow This point needs to be here for accuracy, but it definitely complicates the matter and is something that you should probably ignore if you’re new to this. Basically, a link can be formatted such that it won’t transfer any benefits to your site. These links are called “No-Follow” links, and shouldn’t necessarily be avoided (they can still send traffic) but they won’t help your search engine rankings.

Basically, you’re looking for other up-standing citizens of the internet who will link to your content because it provides value. If you try to pay for links, or get free links with no editorial control (anyone can get in), chances are you’ll end up with low quality links.

Getting Links With Content

One of the best ways to generate links is by creating outstanding content and publishing it on your website—you want to create the type of article that is so in-depth, or of such high quality, that other people can’t help but link to it. This type of content is often called linkbait because it is designed to get links. Some people find that a term a bit spammy, but either way the fact remains that you can get good links by creating really valuable content.

Should You Pay For This Stuff?

Whether or not you should pay for SEO services depends on your situation and your marketing goals. If you want to build a popular website that generates a significant number of leads, it’s probably going to be necessary to get some SEO help. On the other hand, if you only have a business card website that helps you sell in person, and don’t really want to sell or market online, then it might not be worth the time or expense to go after search traffic.

Consider whether or not you’ll be able to get a return on your SEO investment. If you send more people there, will your earnings go up?

If your website can’t generate leads, or sell your product, or make money, then you might want to think about that in more detail before investing in SEO.

When thinking about investing in SEO, it’s a good idea to see what resources you can afford to spend. You may be in a position where you want to pay someone to do all of the work for you, or you might be in a situation where it’s better to spend the time and do it yourself.

Whatever your situation, I always recommend hiring a professional to deal with things like code and website structure. It’s very rarely worth it to learn highly technical parts, especially considering they change frequently in SEO. The content and link building are things you can do on your own if you have the time and energy.

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