On May 21st in Phoenix, Arizona, the most amazing event will take place. It will not be witnessed by many people and some of the attendees will not doubt miss the significance, but for those who are prepared, it will change their lives forever. Though billed as a marketing event, it is really a journey of self-discovery for the leaders.

In the realm of marketing, branding is king. Creating a brand that has appeal to your target audience is a never ending process. When that brand is, it is of more import that you build correctly. The event in Phoenix is meant for such. Discover your brand, build your brand and market true to your brand.

Being true can be one of the hardest ideals of marketing to maintain. All too often it is too easy to over-hype and over-promise on your brand to not deliver. Once jaded about your brand, it is very hard to reacquire a good reputation. The wrong news spreads faster than the correct. Tread carefully and with integrity.

One may wonder how this event will be helpful. Getting to meet and be with the founders and leaders of CarbonCopyPRO is how. While it is true that many other business hold such events, very few limit the attendance to the serious and allow such up close access. Attend your typical MLM event and there will be thousands. The speakers, though leaders, are not close to the founders nor are they are accessible. If one has earned enough, one might get to sit closer, but that is it. How is that helpful? It isn’t. It is just a “Rah, rah, we rock!” party not an event geared to help you build your dream. This event is.

How can you get to the Master Marketing Event? Easy, plug into the system and get your ticket. Your next 90 days will never be the same.

This post comes in support of the effort to move the blog to a new site without doing a bulk copy of every post. It was originally posted on 18 April 2011.

A search of the web will reveal all manner of ideas on what makes a blog well attended. Is your topic interesting? Do you engage the reader? Is the information timely or are you commenting on old news? Is the grammar and sentence structure correct? Does it make sense? But what does it really?

In the world of business, timing and positioning is everything. Sometimes the pioneers of an industry survive, while others are eclipsed by the late comer. At the dawn of social media, MySpace became king. Here the narcissistic could trumpet themselves to everyone. It grew rapidly and pulled the concern of some parent groups. But what of now? Sure, it still has many members, but it is nowhere close to the likes of Facebook. What happened?

MySpace was first and acquired a bit of a party town atmosphere. It was young and hip. Facebook grew from colleges only to be something that your mom or dad might want to join. That was the biggest difference. With an older, more fiscally established crowd came better demographics for advertisers. That’s positioning right there. Being able to get the correct eyeballs to see content generated more corporate interest and thereby money.

Being at the right place at the right time is an ever changing mix of know-how, luck, experience and planning. Knowing what came before, knowing what your customers want, knowing where the markets are. Those are some serious keys to success. Some of it can be gained by study, focus groups, surveys, etc, but knowing how and when to strike, that is the portion that few seem to have. Many times, it is not just striking at the right time as it is persistantly striking. Trying new ideas and approaches. Constantly adapting the tactics and motives. Finding new streams and ideas. Tenacity.

Nice ramble, but what is the bottom line? All of these ideas are correct and incorrect, simultaneously. Not all blogs are popular with all people. Keep writing. Find new ideas. Post and tweet. Advertise on other blogs. Learn to use keywords. Get your friends to tell there friends etc. Position and timing, mixed with hard work and some luck.

And if there weren’t enough clichés, keep on keeping on.

Creating backlinks was an early want to get traffic to your site and have it known around the Internet world. In a way, one could argue that Yahoo started out as a large backlink site, though organized by topic. With the advent of crawling search engines, backlinks became one of the ways to measure of a site’s popularity. Knowing this, many site owners created pages of nothing but backlinks. As search engines became smarter though, out of context links were filtered.

Various methods arose to give the search engines more reason to view the links as relavant and meaningful. Placing links inside of text such as an article or a post help provide more information to not only the human reader, but the engines as well. Link pages started to content text and keywords to give more weight to sites. Services such as 3 Way Links aide in giving sites meaningful and context reach links. With the current algorithms in use, such links help to give a site more weight and move it up the SEO ladder.

In the area of article and post writing, an idea as risen on automatically generate different versions. The idea is quite simple, though it involves some rather ingenious methods. Write three different versions of an article, upload them to Unique Article Wizard and it will generate multiple versions of your article.

Sound like good services? What about a combined one? One that delivers both strategies and more. Does such a combined service exist? Indeed. Enter LinkNetworker. Write articles or have them written for you. LinkNetworker will also post your articles to various article websites, saving you time and money.

In answer to the title, “To Backlink or not to Backlink,” if you want your site to be found and measured in your favor by search engine, then yes. Want your website to be amongst the crickets? Then do nothing and that will be the result.

**In need of help marketing your business? We can help.**

As promised, here is a repost of an article from the old blog location. It was first posted on 13 April 2011.

I quite fondly remember a time in the late-mid-90’s when Yahoo had a Standford address and was more an exercise in manually linking websites than some version of an automated spider. It was the pioneer days of Internet search engines and no one really had a clue of what was to come. Over the next few years, various ideas of how to index and search the web were being tried. Soon to arrive were the likes of AltaVista, Lycos and Ask Jeeves. To index what eventually became known as Intranets, a resourceful programmer could download Glimpse onto a Unix box, run make, install and start indexing a list of sites. A rather simple CGI form was needed to provide a user interface and away it all went.

Times have changed since those days. Yahoo left the confines of the .edu domain and became its own business. Alta Vista became a favorite of self-filtering junkies with the use of + and -, as well as finding +links. Lycos dropped off the face of the Earth and along came Google. The technology wars were eventually eclipsed when it was figured out how to monetize searching. Pay results, sidebar ads and AdWords are now the norm. Without resources to back link like mad or not having a site that is already very popular many are linking on their own, attention has to be made to key words and content.

In real estate, the saying goes that there only three rules: Location. Location. Location. For websites, content is key and traffic is King. It is more than just making sure the content serves the keywords. It is about properly choosing keywords based on how users you want search and how they will find you. The business is marketing and marketing is the business. It is really no different than the old way, just made global. In brick and mortar, just putting out your sign and placing an ad in the Sunday paper will not drive business to your door. The same ideas apply on the Internet, now they are in an electronic environment. On-line advertising follows the same rules as off. Know your audience and how they will go about finding you. Then place yourself in their path, get their attention (and not their scorn) and give them a value proposition geared to why they should purchase. Some will, some will not, so what? Sell to those who buy and chase not those who wish not.