We all know how important links are.

They are to websites as sunlight and water are to flowers.

With this in mind it is critical we all understand how to attract links. There are several strategies, from begging other webmasters for links through to viral marketing. The problem is many people get stuck at the begging stage and become frustrated with the whole thing and then never make it past this initial stage.

I believe there is one main cause of this and I think I can clear it up in a sentence …

It’s not all about you!

Really, this is the best advice I can give on generating tons of inbound links to your site.

Put your ego in a jar and lock it tight. You can get it back out after your links have arrived. For now, ignore the ego monster, instead listen to your audience.

• What does your niche really need?
• What do they already link to?
• What do you link to?
• What gets attention from social media?
• What has worked before?
• What is evergreen, consistently attracts links over time?

In a nutshell, think about what your audience wants, not what you need.

The more you give, the more you get back.

Episode 6 – 7/16/2007

Guest: Craig Newmark, Chairman, Customer Service Rep and Owner of Craigs List

Background: Community Builder, Entrepreneur

Total Time: 22 minutes

Craig took the time to have a phone call with me last week and not only is he the brains behind craigslist; but he is also the heart behind it. Craig tells us some reasons why he feels craigslist has grown as much as it has and why it will continue to do us. Listen to this interesting podcast and learn a little more about the man behind the list.

Podcast Highlights

• 0:33 – I ask if Craig is really his name. Yes I asked this. It was a must!
• 0:50 – Craig and I talk about how craigslist started
• 2:41 – Craig tells us he is just a customer service representative
• 3:41 – We talk about how the site has changed much in terms of look and feel
• 5:53 – Craig talks about the no-ad policy at craigslist
• 8:33 – Learn how big craigslist is now
• 11:05 – Craig tells us about some interesting ads on craigslist and we talk about the future of the site
• 18:09 – I get personal with Craig and learn a little more about his personality

Play the podcast now! Notice the Random Bits podcast player on the right?
Or Download the podcast for later!
Or Subscribe to the Random Bits podcast feed!

• Fighting Spam with CSS – this is actually a real good idea
• 80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding – i may get around to reading this someday
• No Plan, No Capital, No Model…No Problem – you gotta see this!
• The CSS Redundancy Checker – every now and then you find a tool that’s just money – here’s one of them…
• Crafty Baseball Pitch – only the japanese could think up this one
• Ninja Warrior – my new favorite show – anyone else watching this?

This blog is now old enough that I’m starting to get to know a few of you guys and gals that comment with regularity. But, I would still like to know more about you and that’s what this post is for. So let us know more about you.

Answer these questions:
- Name: Mark Angeletti
- Your website URL: Search-This
- Profession: Software Developer
- Favorite movie: It’s a Wonderful Life
- Blog you most frequent (besides your own): Chris Garrett on New Media
- How you discovered Search-This: built it
- Your main interest as far as web stuff goes: marketing and blogging
- What do you do for fun: hiking and soccer

Let us know – this is going down in your permanent record

This past week, I have been undergoing a week of rigorous training learning the key differences between .NET 2.0/3.0 and .NET 1.1. For the past two years our company has been working with the 1.1 framework, and is now migrating towards the 2.0/3.0 framework. This week the instructor said something I knew, but was glad to be reminded about. It wasn’t even a .NET oriented question, it was an object oriented question that does not apply to one specific language, but to all OOP (object oriented programming) models in general.

What is the difference between a struct and a class? When should you use a struct versus a class? How do you know?

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• FeedBurner Stats PRO Now Free – and the google love kicks in – hat tip dan
• How to Keep Momentum Going on Your Blog with a Points System – you can hear the chants now, “scoreboard, scoreboard” – hat tip dan
• Starting Ruby on Rails: What I Wish I Knew – maybe i will learn ruby someday
• HTML 5 Differences from HTML 4 – from the horses mouth
• Estimates, Invoices, and Time Tracking – For Free – Cashboard tracks time and money for your projects so you can worry about more important things
• Permalinks Migration Plugin for WordPress – could be useful for some

If you spend time at some of the SEO forums on the web it is quite common to have people stop in and inquire about hiring someone to help their website achieve better rankings in the search engines. What’s fascinating is one of the popular answers is to not hire anybody – that if you want to achieve better results you should just do it yourself. I’ve always found this answer to be a bit surprising.

This will be a two part series. This first article will look at whether or not you should do your own SEO. In a follow-up article we will then look at what you will have to learn should you decide to do it yourself.

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