What is the meaning of life, and link building?

It's been an eventful Spring and Summer. In April my father David Ward passed away, in a miserable sort of slow-motion way, and on his birthday of course. Dad had a great life, considering it ended (and started) terribly. He was from Duluth MN, and had polio as a child. He finished high school from his hospital bed, then found the means to flee the frigid Duluthian tundra and make his way to college at the somewhat less fridgid Northwestern, where he was determined to make something of himself. He did so. In fact, my Dad's marketing savvy for Shulton in the '60s and '70s is one reason Old Spice is a National Brand today. He didn't get rich, because back then you didn't get rich by being a loyal company man, but he was good at what he did, worked hard at it, took nothing for granted, and probably deserved better than he got.

SIDE NOTE: When I was 15, we moved from New Jersey to Tennessee, and I was not happy about it. Dad was smart enough and gentle enough to wisely convince his skeptical and snotty son (me) to go to high-school here, which cost Dad a fortune, instead of where I wanted to go, which would have cost him nothing. He was generous even when I didn't deserve it.

After Dad's death, and after putting up a brave face for several weeks, my Mom was admitted to the hospital . She ended up staying in the hospital for over a month, which necessitated several additional trips out and back to Phoenix. Each of these trips have the unintended consequence of causing my older brother and hero Steve or I to stop work quickly and mobilize for travel cross country. During these times I can lose touch with clients, they can get (rightfully) annoyed , and I can end up making the whole world mad, losing money in the form of client refunds along the way. I have a 6 year old (Noah) and a 1 year old (Abram) at home that I also have to say goodbye to for these trips, and that's no fun for me, or my wife.

As a mid-Summer-bad-news-palate cleanser, in early July our 3 year old golden retriever Izzy was killed by a reckless moron driving way too fast for the road in front of our house. Izzy had gotten out of the backyard, ran into the road, was hit, limped home, and collapsed. Dead. The rest is just too sad to write about. She was the most gentle animal I've ever met.

You know what's more fun than a barrel-o-monkeys? Explaining to your son that his dog is dead. It goes something like this:
NOAH: "Daddy, when I die will I see Izzy and Grampa again in heaven?"
DAD: (to himself) "There is no god Noah, because if there was a god none of these things would happen and Al Gore would have been our President.
DAD: (out loud) "Yes Noah, we will all be together again one day in heaven and it will be awesome, and we know this because that's what they teach us in Sunday School, right buddy?"
NOAH: "Right Dad!"

SHOOT. ME. NOW.

If there has been one positive thing to happen this Summer, it was my wife Melissa urging us to give the boys (and ourselves) a Summer so good they'd have a chance to forget the bad. So off and on we've spent most of the Summer in a house a couple blocks from the beach next to Seaside Florida. People like to make fun of this area, but they don't get it. It is a wonderful place, and I get to watch my son thrive in this not-of-this-world idyllic bubble, just as Truman Burbank did, only for me it's by choice, and I get to play with Noah doing things like skim boarding, surfing, trail mountain biking, hanging at the ocean, and just trying to provide a sense of normalcy during a time that is anything but.

I'll wrap this up with a note aimed at anyone who has been trying to do business with me over the past 4 months. I'm here and working, just not as much as you'd like. Parents come first, wife and kids come second, myself third, and you, patiently waiting client, come fourth. It has to be that way, for now.

I'm working a few hours each day, as well as late in the evening when the kids are asleep. In mid-August, when school starts and we're back in Knoxville full-time, I will be back providing link building services, strategy, and training, working longer hours, as usual. I have to. I'm going to buy that place at the beach and semi-retire by gosh, and you, my new and existing clients, are what will make that possible.

Thank you for your time and patience.

Eric

Updated - Farewell LinkMoses, Hello Link Building Q&A

By Eric Ward

Regular readers know I've been building links since the launch of TheTitanicJustSank.com, or close to it. This wasn't by design. I just had the bad/good luck to lose my advertising job at the right time; Early nineties. I needed something new to do, I went to grad school, and the Internet fell into my lap. The full story of the early years of ericward.com is yet to be written, but I hope to get to it this Summer.

The whole LinkMoses shtick was also an accident. A few years ago someone at a conference made fun that I was still link building, like it was a disease. So I made lemonade out of the joke and turned it into a few thousand new inbound links. Don't mess with a link builder...

I've never intended to be an expert at anything, and the only reason I know so much about link building is that I had the sense or stupidity to stay focused on just that one skill as the web exploded around me. I could have done a thousand different things, but I stayed the link building course. I passed up a $1.5 million buyout offer from BCentral. I ignored Overtures from Overture. I didn't move to San Francisco, Seattle, or New York like everyone thought I should. I stayed right here in my garage office. I didn't write a book when the publishing houses called. Instead I kept doing what I liked. Studied web sites and links. Watched how content gets known, linked, found, by who, when, and where. I did a few industry shows back when just us geeks went. Back when real talent like Danny Sullivan was working his rear off at his kitchen table for just a couple hundred appreciative readers. Somehow my business strategy resulted in other authors writing about me in their books. Again, accidently successful. I was and remain to this day very happy doing what I do. I hope to continue being a content publicist/link builder for many more years.

For several reasons I'm a bit reflective right now. I'm also worn down a bit due to criticism, some deserved and some not, from folks who have have taken issue with my contributions to several link building expert articles. They say I don't give up any secrets. I don't provide worthwhile advice. My answers to link value factors questions are too vague.

Fair enough. This month I begin Link Building Best Practices - Q&A With Eric Ward.

I'll take questions from all comers and turn the best of them into posts where I provide my opinion on what the best practice should be for that particular topic. I don't pretend for one moment to believe that my best practices should be your best practices. I'm just using this avenue as a way to provide very specific advice and opinion developed over the course of building links for 1,000+ new and old sites from 1994 til today. Here's the link to the Link Building Best Practices RSS feed

Link well friends!

NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the Comments link below, or the Post a Comment link at the bottom of any individual post.

Link Building Best Practice Labels, Tags, and Categories

Link Building and content publicity takes place in many ways and in many venues. For example, it's in vogue right now to talk about "link bait", and link bait itself has evolved to the point where some people have strong feelings about best practices just for link bait. Link bait best practices will be different than backlink analysis best practices, which will be different from social media link building best practices, which will be different than .edu link seeking best practices. Thus a "best practices list" for link building needs to encompass as many of these venues and approaches as possible. I'll use the built in functionality of this blog software to assign keyword "labels" for each post. That way as time passes if you only want to read posts about a specific subject, you can do so.

How The Link Building Best Practices Q&A Works

First Post - April 2, 2008, by Eric Ward

To ask a question, use the POST A COMMENT link at the very bottom of this or any post. Post as anonymous, and ask me anything you want about link building or content publicity. I moderate these questions so you wont have to read 8 million questions about how to rank first at Google for viagra.

I'll take your questions and turn them into posts where I provide my opinion on what the best practice should be for that particular topic. I don't pretend for one moment to believe that my best practices should be your best practices. I'm just using this avenue as a way to provide very specific advice and opinion developed over the course of building links for 1,000+ new and old sites from 1994 til today.

Empirical data is used infrequently to support my answers and opinions, and double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled studies were not conducted. I base my answers and best practice advice on what I see has worked (or not) for me.

I'm not doing this in place of my paid consulting and training, so if your question is about a specific web site or a sensitive subject that requires significant time and research for me to thoroughly answer, you might be better off trying my fee based service here.