Free Martini cocktail with every link added!

Ahhhrgggghhhh...

These days traditional link building is about as satisfying as squeezing a dogs anal glands.

When my task manager flashed up "link building" i would sob softly inside my skull and try not to snap another pencil, as the anticipated 3 straight hours of mind numbing unadulterated onesided email tennis would surely follow and from which i might only get at best 1, maybe two responses. Thankfully my manager Simon and i share the same desire to move away from this area and so we are slowly backing off traditional link building and adopting a more creative approach.

The awful thing is with every email i write to a webmaster or site owner i actually really care about their website and before long i am selling my grandmother to redevelop their homepage (well re-writing their meta tags and checking out their site for errors) and i always get disheartened when the "we only accept PR 5 sites" or "we get hundreds of these emails and no". WHAT HAPPENED TO LINK LOVE GUYS.. HUH???? are we all wearing virtual condoms these days?, i don't even know where to start with that "hem".

So the baby of change is crowning and it's all systems go!. (sorry, I heard that term 3 times this week already so just had to use it some where). Link bait, article syndication, corporate blogging, social networks, webpage consultancy, press releases and quality content writing are in the task list of tomorrow! and i say YIPEEE NO MORE LINK BUILDING..PERIOD!

Creepy cyber mutt; "YOUR WRONG CLAIRE - it's not all candy coated gerbils.. Link building still exists, just in less nauseating forms"

CLAIRE; "What do you mean "creepy looking cyber mutt" like what?"

Creepy cyber mutt; "Well theres; directory listings, association Listings, bartering for links on relevant Sites, reciprocal Links key industry Sites and Strategic Partnerships with other sites in your sector to mention but a few"

CLAIRE; "Why thanks for that CCM, thats given me some food for thought"

Creepy cyber mutt; "Can i eat Matt Cutts now?"

CLAIRE; "No weve talked about this before haven't we, right after the Steve Ballmer incident"

Creepy cyber mutt; "I thought he was an egg"

Anyway.... so traditional link building isn't dead, it just needs to be considered alot more and not simply taken for granted as a way to show clients "hey, look were doing all this work" when in actual fact most of those link requests are close but no cigar.

These days we are road mapping the clients marketing for the whole year or at least six months and mapping out the campaign to embody this activity. Ok, so you don't have a nice chart to tick of the 10 sites you approached, but you'll have syndicated a great article resulting in a few 100 links back, organised a competition that gets the users excited and maybe a few mashups are created or simply the suggestions to alter the sites registered user page mean that your clients return rate goes through the roof.

And yadder yadder yadder... yadder yahh.

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