I was very impressed this morning while reading an article by Matt McGee about a company called Pink Cake Box, who sells specialty cakes located in New Jersey.

The internet marketing success story talks about how the company was able to succeed online. Because of their online success, they have received a lot of media attention and sales growth.

But the foundation all begins with a remarkable product. If you don’t have a product that sticks out from the norm, you’re not going to be successful with internet marketing… without a lot of effort. Seth Godin is the “God of Being Remarkable” in my opinion. Almost any industry can do it… it just up to you to figure out how.

They made the statement that “they have not yet explored PPC marketing and don’t plan to”. I LOVE that! My success online with our companies has always strongly focused on PPC, so any time that I hear of a business who doesn’t use it and is successful, it gets my juices flowing.

I’ve been trying to talk my customers into some three way link love lately. Crazy!?!?! Yep!

Check it out. When you’re building links for a new domain name that was recently purchased, which some experts feel isn’t worth the time, I believe that it’s EXTREMELY important to start first by creating content that is actually valuable for the sites competitors… NOT THE CUSTOMERS.

This is mis-understood by many of our customers before we get a chance to explain it to them. I’ll explain and feel free to tell me I’m insane in the comments.

Let’s pretend that I’m doing a lead generation campaign for a large event planning company. This company wants to meet people who are planning large corporate picnics and retreats nationwide. They have JUST purchased a domain name and because of that they have no authority with the search engines.

At this point, we would build the site in two separate pieces on the same domain. The first piece would include a basic lead generating landing page that we would toss adwords and yahoo ppc at and begin generating leads immediately.

The second phase, however would not be targeted to the sites potential customers. It would actually be targeted toward the sites competitors and provide those people with something remarkable so that it builds links. You see, if we create something of great value for the competitors to use on their sites, they will link to the new site.

You could create something of value for your potential customers as well… but here’s the thing… In many cases the customers do not have sites that would provide you with RELEVANT links that would effectively tell the search engines what your site’s about.

If you get ten links from sites that show up in the search results when you enter [your keyword phrase], won’t the search engines more quickly consider you relevant to [your keyword phrase]? Of course.

So, where the heck does the three-way take place? Right here! Once you have created a lot of industry targeted links by providing your competitors with creative and remarkable content, tools, articles, ebooks, videos… or whatever, then it’s time to use the organically ranked section of your site to help your customers.

The bottom line? Don’t worry about the portion of your site you want organic ranking for actually getting traffic from potential customers. Build resources for your competitors first… create great relationships with them… REAL ONES. Become trusted… and then go after the customers once you have trust in the industry.

We have just released our free link building chart to the masses. It’s pretty cool (at least we think so).

Check out the free link building chart by clicking here.

There’s been an update to the “Are SEO Experts Right About Building Links via Flattery?” post. It’s a quick read… Check it out here.!

Please comment in original post.

This post has been updated!

>>Click Here To Read The March 5 @ 10:30AM update or scroll down.

To see the results of this experiment click here.

In this experiment we will find out if SEO expert’s theories of building links with flattery really works and exactly how effective it is.

I have been doing link building with sites for years without the use of link baiting. Now, I have studied and studied theories of brilliant people like Aaron Wall of SEO Book, Jim Boykin from WeBuildPages.com and others. I had an awesome opportunity to chat with Aaron today about some things… Thanks, Aaron!

So anyway… I have a photography blog where I post some personal pictures of my family as well as some photo work that I do from time to time. It is only a hobby site and I have no intention of making money with it. Therefore… let’s do some experimenting!

As of today if you do a search for back links to that site, you’ll notice that there are an embarrassing 36… keep in mind I have done NOTHING for this site at all yet. Most of the links are from blog comments I made and a site that I submitted some images to.

I was reading a nice article tonight from Nick Wilson called “The Art of Link Baiting“. I noticed it on Jim Westergren’s link baiting page. In the article, Nick states that if you link out to blogs in your niche, that links will come back… “he promises”.

I’m sure that Nick is correct in his assumption - and he probably is writing from experience… but we’re going to see if it works on a site with almost ZERO traffic, my photography site.

I created an article called “The 10 Best Photography Blogs On The Planet” and did an in depth analysis of 10 photography blogs that I actually subscribe to. I gave them ratings for “design”, which was my own opinion, “search-ability” (I used SEODigger.com to find how many meaningful top 20 rankings they had) and “links” where I used yahoo to find the total number of links coming in from outside domains. They got points for each category and I rated them accordingly.

These blogs all have a small to large following in the photography circle, and if I was really trying to get ranking for my site, they are definitely the places that I would go to try to get links.

Oh… for future comparison… I spent about 6 hours putting the post together on ConklinImages.com. So we’ll see how many links I can get “per hour” that are from relevant sources with this method.

The next step I will take if I don’t get links automatically by the evening of Wednesday, March 5, 2008 is to have a bunch of my employees click on the links in the blog post to try and get the attention of the blog owners. I will then send emails to the blog owners. As a last resort, I will create a press release about the top 10 list and submit it with hopes that they will them link.

So… stay tuned… we’ll see what happens. Do you think ConklinImages.com will get links from my bait? What could I have done better or different? Submit a comment telling me what to do next.

SEO Flattery Experiment UPDATE 1 - 3/5/2008 @ 10:28 EST

So it’s 10am and Google has indexed the post where my top 10 photography blogs appear. I figured I’d wait to measure results until after it was indexed to ensure that any of these photographers who receive daily google updates about their names appearing in SERPs would have seen them by now. Of course, it’s only 7am for you west coaster’s, so there may not have been updates sent to everyone just yet.

One interesting observation that Ashley made in the comments for the post was that people who are not “tech savvy” may not have any idea who is linking to their blogs. Many of these photographers seem to use a company by the name of Infinet Design, a photography site and blog design company. I have no idea if they have the same type of tracking that other bloggers use to track incoming links, or if they’re using analytics software.

So, I’m debating on doing one of two things. I’m either going to email each of the photographers that made the list and congratulate them on winning the “award”, comment on their blogs congratulating them (this would show that I was on their site and they would probably have to approve the comment), or have some people click away at the links to get their attention with increased referral traffic from my domain name. Wow! That’s so spammy 8 )…

What are your opinions? What would you do next if you were trying to get these links for ConklinImages.com?

To see the results of this experiment click here.