| Part
One - Who my services are designed for |
..
NetPOST is the brand
name for my content announcement and linking campaigns. NetPOST
originated in 1993, and has evolved as the web has evolved. NetPOST
remains the most complete and best organic link building and publicity
campaign in the world, and has been used by many of the most famous brands
in web history, including Amazon.com, Weather.com, Law.com, and several
hundred others.
NetPOST is designed to
be effective for new sites launching for the first time.
If your site has been around a while, my existing site link building
services would be more appropriate.
On Being Selective
I work with very limited types
of content. I don't care if your site cost a million dollars to build
or $100. What drives my decision is your content. If I think I can
I help it become known and linked, I'll work with you. If I don't,
I'll tell you. I have handled the linking and announcement campaigns
for hundreds of sites small and large.
In a nutshell, my mission
is to announce your web content to the most targeted, logical and appropriate
online venues
that will result in new inbound links to your content,
based
on your content's quality and subject matter, without requiring a reciprocal
link in return.
Building inbound links
to your content from carefully selected and appropriate venues throughout
the Internet, my approach to link buidling and publicity is based
on several techniques, including but not limited to:
Linking strategy based on your
site's content
Links are pursued based on subject
relevance, not to fool search engines
No submitting to dubious directories.
They don't work, never have, never will
Submitting to appropriate online
media contacts and site reviewers who can't be bought or fooled
Identifying and outreach to social
media and social bookmarking influencers as appropriate. Yes, that includes
Twitter.
Holistic approach based on your
site's entire content family (feeds, multimedia, etc.)
Every contact made individually,
by hand, by me
Progress reports and phone discussions
provided
Art and Science
My NetPOST service begins with
me looking through your Web site and then, based on the content, features,
competitive niche and intended audience, I use proprietary citation analysis
tools to locate the most important online target venues for link seeking
for your site. I do the research myself. I identify high trust and
high quality target venues to seek publicity and links for your content.
I do this based on 14+ years of expereince knowing what to look for and
why. Every step of the link building and publicity campaign is carried
out by me, not a machine or unknown account executive.
The above technique is proven
to work and is exponentially more effective than just submitting to every
search engine and directory you may find, or to every site with a Google
Pagerank over 2. The directories and search engines should only be
one component of your awareness and linking plan, or you are wasting your
time.
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| Part
Two - How I execute content publicity and linking campaigns |
.
For me, the process of awareness
and link building for Web sites is not a task, but an art. It is
also a full-time challenge. The Internet is too big, and growing so fast.
The Net has such an ease of publishing that new submission resources appear
every day. For example, who'd heard of blogs five years ago?
Nobody. Or RSS feeds? Or Podcasts or Tags? This rapid change
dictates that the Internet needs, and for that matter deserves,
a specialist that focuses solely on it 24/7/365, and that's me. It's
all I do all day every day.
When I started, there were NO
search engines to submit to. Then came Wandex
(1993) and Webcrawler
(1994). I was online the day Yahoo! was first announced. I knew
Jerry and David in their pre-billionaire grad student days. I watched as
AltaVista became number one in spite of having no idea what they had. And
I gleefully enjoyed the emergence of vertical search (search engines devoted
to specific topics or content), which I predicted at a conference back
in 1997 and now the industry press writes about vertical search like it's
new. So now, all these years later, we have 1000's of directories,
search engines, portals, vortals, blogs, vlogs, feeds, guides, zines, links
pages, tags, lists etc., around the world. Some are good, some should
be ignored, and some should just go away.
The point? The point is that
I conduct a far more thoughtful, strategic, and complete linking, publicity,
and awareness campaign. It takes longer, but it works. Proof? My service
is the only awareness building service that has ever won the
Internet
Marketing Excellence Award, which was at that time our industry's Oscar.
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| Part
Three - My Private Contacts and Database |
.
This is where the art
comes in. With millions of possible venues on the Net, knowing which are
the best or most appropriate takes effort and skill. I'm online all day
every day and have been for years. I live online.
My personal private database
now has thousands of personally reviewed submission venues, and is added
to and pruned daily. I also perform a custom search for each client's site,
so no two submission campaigns are EVER the same.
The submission outlets I selected
and submitted to for Amazon.com
were much different that the outlets I submitted to for PBS.org.
Sure there were some common submission points, like Yahoo and the major
search engines, but then to be truly effective I research and hunt down
topic specific and niche submission venues for every client's site.
I have thousands and thousands
venues I can contact for links. Every day I find new venues around the
world that I can use for my clients. I also maintain a list of highly targeted
online media outlets that have print counterparts. Over the course of my
years doing this, I have built a professional relationship with theses
folks, and send them news about new sites based on interest profiles they
give me. I never automate any of my processes. I personally do all
research and make all submissions, site announcements, and link requests
myself, one at a time. Don't contact me if you're looking for a spammer.
My campaign for your site will
take place over a period of several weeks or even months. During
the campaign I will provide you with status reports and we can talk by
phone, email, and IM.
My work can have an effect both
quickly and over the course of several months. Some submissions take time
to propagate. Ultimately, your server logs will tell the tale of the effectiveness
of your site and my campaign.
I'm a well known person in the
industry, a frequent speaker for Search Engine Strategies conferences,
and I have written about linking and link-building for several publicatons
including Ad Age, MarketingProfs,
and ClickZ. I currently write the LinkWeek
column for SearchEngineLand.
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| Part
Four - How to begin the process |
.
Email
me via my contact form and include the URL for your site. Tell me a
little about what you are hoping to accomplish. I'll personally look at
your site and email you back my initial impressions. If you like what I
have to say (I'll pull no punches), we can talk further about next steps.
NOTE: I stay pretty busy, and receive a few hundred emails a week. If you
really want to get my attention fast, skip the initial email request and
immediately
request the $500 initial evaluation and phone call via PayPal now.
I respond quite fast when I'm sent money.
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| Part
Five - Fees, project options, etc. |
.
Link building project fees
range from a few hundred dollars for a single site announcement on URLwire
to $50,000 for a year long linking and publicity campaign. A typical three
month new launch link building and publicity campaign is around $15,000.
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| Part
Six - Some straight talk |
Whether you contact
me or not, here's a few closing thoughts...
Link building activities performed
just to improve search rank will not work over the long term, unless you
use some very subtle strategies that few people know and understand
You must be producing content
that someone wants to see, or no amount effort will help
Accept that some type of regular
awareness-building activity needs to take place on behalf of your site.
You can't build a site and do nothing
Most links are useless, and
some are even worse
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| Part
Seven - Why I do this |
.
What I do isn't high profile
work, and it requires a careful hand. I came to this business by accident.
After many years working in Marketing, Advertising, and PR, in the early
nineties I had a personal experience that forced me home for quite a while.
During that time I became an
Internet fanatic. I spent entire days online. This was before there were
any graphical Web browsers. I had Archie, Gopher, Usenet, Telnet, WAIS
and Lynx, a text based Web browser. All via dialup on a 9,600 baud modem.
I was online the day a college kid named Mark Andreesen announced
Mosaic and made
it available for the first time. Back then the entire program fit on
one disc with room to spare.
I was the very first person
ever to offer Web site awareness building services. A bunch of services
make that claim, but anyone who's anyone online knows the real deal: I
founded the site awareness-building industry, and I can prove it. On Tuesday,
December 20, 1994, I contacted
Jerry Yang at Stanford to ask if he'd add a directory category to Yahoo
called "Web Site Promotion", because there wasn't even a category for it.
There was no industry. There was me. He added the category for me
and I was the only service in it.
Reaching me
I am not easy to reach. If
you would like to talk personally, we can try to connect by phone. but
we may miss each other as I only answer it for pre-set appointments.
As mentioned previously, if you really want to get my attention fast, skip
the initial email request and
immediately
request the $500 initial evaluation and phone call via PayPal now.
I'm at (865) 637-2438. You
can also use my web based email form.
Thanks for your time.
Eric Ward - Contact
me
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