If social media is the darling Cinderella of the current marketing world, then link building might be the u___ (unrecognized?) stepsister. When I describe link building and its important role in creating a company’s Web presence (see SEOmoz’s What is Link Building? for a definition/details), most people furrow their brows and say, “Sounds like you’re talking about social media.” (Cinderella gets all the glory!)

So, we’d like to end, once and for all, this unnecessary cause of forehead wrinkles by tackling the FAQ: What’s the difference between link building and social media?
 

Stoney (@StoneyD): Link building and social media have a lot in common and, in many cases, share similar goals. I would say that pure link building is a sub-set of SEO. The goal is to get keyword rich links on external sites pointing to your keyword-optimized pages. There are a lot of link-building methods, several of which cross over into social media: building relationships, creating great, linkable content and broadcasting it to bring eyes (and links) to that content.

Social media is an outlet for link building, but it also has its own goals, one of which can be getting valuable links. But social media has concerns far greater than just getting links, and any social strategy that doesn’t look beyond links is bound to fail.

You can have a link strategy that uses social media, as well as a social strategy that has a goal of links. But to maintain that narrow of a focus on either is ultimately not using each one to your greatest advantage.
 

Annalisa (@ahilliardm): Social media should be an important part of a business’s link-building strategy. It’s a way to engage an audience. In a sense, it’s relationship building. If you share information that is relevant and unique to your niche, you’ll be able to build relationships, and those relationships can lead to natural links.

Links are an outcome of a well-established social media presence. Here is an analogy to explain the difference between social media and link building. An athlete must train in order to compete. The goal of training is to be able to win the competition. Social media is the training and preparation. Link building is the reward or pay off. Now, don’t get me wrong, links are not the only purpose of social media. It’s important to create relationships in online marketing for many reasons. And, through those relationships, you can get links.
 

Jen (@martijen): Before I started with Pole Position Marketing, I had never even heard of link building. And, I suspect there are many in the marketing industry (particularly the “traditional” side) who are just as clueless as I was.

Thankfully, I’ve learned a few things about link building, including its primary Web marketing goal – to improve the rankings, visibility and credibility of your organization’s website. The more quality links to your Web content, the better your online presence looks to search engines, as well as readers. Think of them as love and hugs pointing in your direction.

But, it’s difficult to get that kind of attention without going where your potential “linkers” (and customers) are. Social media sites are vehicles for making connections and sending out your message. Think of them as online places where you give out love and hugs (with some specific goals in mind).

Social media can support your link-building strategy in two primary ways:

• Helping you identify and engage industry influencers who may want to collaborate with your business or promote it by publishing content or advertising. In either case, you have the opportunity to negotiate a link!
• Serving as a broadcast medium for your quality content that influencers may want to share and link to.

When you blend social media and link building together, they form the foundation for great online PR. Unlike the traditional discipline, online PR actually focuses on the public, not just a small group of media gatekeepers. Your news releases (with links) are for every online reader! For publicity, reputation management, coverage and more links, you can turn to not only social media, but also news outlets, bloggers, directories, partner websites, industry associations and even to yourself. (You, too, can become a publisher!)

So, while link building and social media have distinct functions and “directions,” they work better in tandem as a part of an overall online PR strategy.

Look for our Q&A posts about online marketing each month. Or, if you have a question you’d like to ask our team, just send it to ask@polepositionmarketing.com. We’ll be glad to answer via our blog.

How much does online marketing cost?

The response from our team comes at this tricky question in a variety of ways…

Stoney (@StoneyD): There is no one-size-fits all answer to that question. It’s kind of like asking, “How much does a house cost?” Or a car. Or surgery. Or ObamaCare. Well, not the last one because the others can actually have a defined costs. The better questions is, “How much ROI will I get for my investment?” While there is no “sticker price” that can be placed on that, it really is the bottom line question. Whether you’re paying $5,000 or $500,000 for online marketing, you need to make sure you will get a return. This comes back to making sure you trust your SEO. If you pay a lowball price then ROI can be very difficult to be achieved, especially if your competition is out investing you in SEO. You also don’t want to over-pay, either. If your SEO provides quality and gets results – and more importantly, gets ROI – then there is no such thing as overpaying. Bottom line is, you need to invest whatever is needed to grow profits and not a penny less.

Craig (@craiggeis): That’s a broad question. I prefer to look at online marketing as an investment rather than a cost. There was a day when playing the internet was like hitting the lotto. Those days are long gone. Today, setting goals, doing research and creating strategies are vital if you want to swim with the internet sharks. Don’t be fooled, there is risk when you invest online. But with the proper approach you can reap great returns if you proceed with wisdom and have patience.

Mike (@mflem25): Let’s say I have a friend who has agreed to give me $4 for every $1 that I give him. Of course, I’m going to give him as many $1 bills as I can muster up. That is, unless of course, I have another friend that will give me $5 for every $1, right? If this were the case, I would give friend #2 as much money as I could muster up until he ran out of money. If he stops giving me the $5, whatever I have left goes over to friend #1.

Yes, the friends are marketing channels and the Internet is one of them. Of course there is another layer in this whole deal. Whichever “friend” you treat better will make a better deal with you. So, if you don’t know how to treat a certain “friend” well, you likely would want to go get some counseling on how to conduct that relationship.

Jen (@martijen): For more than 100 years, businesses have been sold on the value of traditional advertising and marketing, such as newspapers, magazines, trade publications, flyers, brochures, billboards, radio and television. Hundreds of studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of these communication channels. Collectively, companies have spent billions annually on “crafting their message” in ads and commercials. Yet, all this effort was one way, sent out via electromagnetic waves or printed materials to nameless, faceless consumers on the other end. Metrics were based Gallup Polls, demographic readership studies or, in the best-case scenario, an actual pile of coupons that could be counted when redeemed.

The Internet, however, has ushered in true two-way communication between consumers and organizations. People have names and faces and personalities and conversations. And, oh yes, they CLICK. Suddenly, you’ve got some actual numbers. You have measurable statistics. You can tie your online marketing efforts to conversions of all sorts (purchases, subscriptions, likes, retweets, etc.). Of course, interpreting and managing all this still takes planning, execution and, yes, moola. But, when compared to traditional marketing, online marketing demonstrates ROI in a much clearer way. In the end, you must decide how much that’s worth to you.

Look for our Q&A posts about online marketing each month. Or, if you have a question you’d like to ask our team, just send it to ask@polepositionmarketing.com. We’ll be glad to answer via our blog.

Should I start marketing my website with search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC)?

The response from our three in-house experts was unanimous! You need both. Here’s why…

Stoney (@StoneyD): While both SEO and PPC results are displayed on the same search results page, they operate very differently (and independently) from each other. PPC can be set up much quicker and get results sooner than SEO can. But don’t let that make you think you’ll “instantly” get ROI out of it. PPC takes optimization before profits are secure. SEO, on the other hand takes along longer to work. My suggestion is, if you can afford it, get started on PPC right away to start bringing in profits sooner. While the PPC campaign improves, be working on the optimization of your website, targeting keywords, building links, growing your social base and improving conversions.

Craig (@craiggeis): SEO takes time to gain ground, so starting asap is important. SEO also improves site usability because it takes visitors into account. You need PPC because it helps fill the traffic void while SEO is ramping up. Together they generate a synergy effect on visibility and conversions.

Mike (@mflem25): There are going to be keywords up front that you know you want to rank for.  Begin both PPC and SEO for those keywords immediately.  Your long term goal is to dominate search results pages for keywords that work at growing your business.  The best way to do that is to have listings through both PPC and SEO.  Each reinforces the other, resulting in overall lift of visitors and conversions.  In fact, with the rise of universal search (including product listings, local listings, product extensions and the like), you can have more than two options for the searcher on a page, all with different messages.

After you’ve ranked well for keywords you know you should be hitting homeruns with, use PPC experiment data as intelligence for where to go next and how to proceed.  Since SEO typically takes 6-12 months to begin seeing significant results (if done right), here are some advantages that PPC offers that make it a channel you don’t ever want to leave behind.

Immediacy

1. Results – You don’t have to wait to see if a keyword, landing page, message or promotion will work.  You know what is going on as soon as you get statistically significant data.
2. Feedback – You’re target customers immediately tell you what keywords they are using to find what you offer, allowing you to customize the conversion process for their needs.

Control

1. Performance – Improvements in performance can be made instantaneously.
2. Keywords – You decide exactly what keywords you show up for.  With SEO, pages can show for many unqualified keywords.  Also, how about the keywords you aren’t ranking organically for yet, but that are important to your business?  You can have a presence there at a profitable ROI.
3. Landing Pages – You decide exactly what landing pages prospects using specific keywords land on.  With SEO, visitors on those same keywords may land on a variety of site pages.
4. Location – You are able to geo-target your ads to customers to make them more relevant.  With SEO, there is no geo-targeting function.
5. Position – You can decide to pay for any position on the page.  Although it’s not necessarily desired, you CAN test to find out what an optimal position is for you and stay there.
6. Spend – You can immediately raise and lower your bids or budget depending on results and other outside factors of your business.
7. Ad Messages – You can immediately test ad messages to see what resonates with your prospects better.
8. Promotions – If you want to run a promotion, you can immediately gather targeted customers to that promotion.
9. Special Situations – If something happens where you need to get a message out on specific keywords right away, PPC gives you this option.

Testing

1. Keywords – Which keywords work and which don’t?  You want to know before you optimize your site organically for them.  PPC gives the added ROI of market intelligence.
2. Landing Pages – Which landing pages work to convert which keyword markets?  PPC gives this too.
3. Ad Messages – Testing ads is immediate and easy to do, giving you results based on data, not opinion.

Question 11. How much time should I spend getting my SEO perfect?

Tough question to answer. You really have to weigh the cost/benefit ratio. Many small business owners want to do SEO themselves because it saves them money. But, at some point, business duties start to get neglected because you’re trying to learn SEO. Once you hit this point, hiring out is the smart move.

Once you’ve hired a professional SEO, there is still a cost/benefit ratio to consider. And, how much you spend on an SEO must coincide to the expected payoff. I have to say “expected” because SEO is an investment, and, like most investments, the payoff isn’t immediate.

But, the payoff AND the cost are both directly proportional to the time your SEO is expected to be involved in your campaign. Pay attention to this. If you’re only paying for six hours of SEO per month, you’ll only get the results those hours can provide. However, if you’re paying for 50 hours of SEO per month, your expectations can be a lot higher.

12. I’m re-designing my site, should I switch to more keyword friendly URLs?

If the re-design of the site requires URLs to be changed (such as moving to a CMS), then yes, now is a good time to employ keyword friendly URLs. If changing the URLs is not required, then there are a few more considerations to mull over.

First, you have to look at how well your site is already ranking, how authoritative it is, and how much changing URLs will disrupt your rankings. If your site is uber powerful, than changing URLs will not have a huge impact, though it might make for a bad week or two. But, if your site is pretty weak in terms of search engine authority, then changing URLs won’t really hurt and will likely only help you.

When you’re getting lots of good traffic from the search engines, disruptions can be devastating, even if they are only temporary. Proceed with caution, and always consult your SEO to ensure the changes are implemented in a way to minimize the negative impact.

13. Once my site is optimized, will it stay optimized?

Sure, it’ll stay optimized, but that doesn’t mean the optimization will stay effective. Good SEO is always good SEO, but there are a lot of nuances to the search engine algorithms that change over time. For example, usability issues have become increasingly important to the success of the optimization campaign.

Things such as bounce rates and page speed can reflect either positively or negatively. These are things that were not considered even a few years ago, or the search engines were just adding them into the mix. While none of these really change how you optimize, they do change how we analyze a site from the SEO perspective.

SEO isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it game. There is always something more to improve. From looking at your analytics, page performance, conversion rates, keyword rankings, keywords yet-to-be-optimized for, and so on, there really is no end. Your site is always a work in progress, and if you’re not making progress then, well, you’re not making progress.

14. Should I invest in SEO or PPC?

The short answer is both. SEO gets you the “free” traffic, but there is so much value in PPC that it shouldn’t be ignored.

People often think of PPC as a temporary measure. It’s just there until the SEO campaign achieves the rankings you’re looking for. But, there is no reason to stop PPC once you’re on the first page with organic SEO. The double branding effect you have far outweighs the potential that you’re paying for a click that you could have gotten for free.

Here’s the thing, the tracking you can do with PPC allows you to track everything, down to a minute level of performance. This allows you to tweak and test your PPC campaigns to ensure every dollar you spend makes more than a dollar in return. That, of course, means profits. As long as your PPC campaign is profitable, there is no reason not to keep it active.

And, since only about 30% of searchers click on a paid ad, you’re really not in significant danger of losing the “free” click.

15. Should I engage in any “black hat” SEO strategies?

That’s up to you. Just be sure you understand the risks you’re taking by doing so. I have no problem with such strategies, as long as those employing them are open and honest about the potential consequences of such actions and you’re on board.

If you can risk losing your domain name and don’t mind starting over, then by all means, engage away. On the other hand if your URL and brand is important, then maybe the dark side isn’t for you. This goes back to risk vs. reward.

So I’m glad to be back to work. Back to a regular schedule of long work hours, few sleeping hours and a few minutes on the pool table a day. While they are not quite as awesome as my “real” family, if you have to be stuck with any group of people for nine to twelve hours a day, you could do worse than the Pole Position Marketing team. They’re good peeps.

Lucky for you we have another installment of Q&A. For those of you new to this game here’s how it works. You post your questions in the comments below and then in the next installment I’ll answer them. Simple really. But there is one catch… you actually have to post your questions. I’ll make no attempt whatsoever to read your mind. I’m a bit of a clean freak and I know how dirty it can get in there!

So on to today’s question…

Hi,

Question about 404′s.
A site has been moved, twice really and is now a WordPress blog.
30% of the HTTP status codes are 404′s, about 2,500 hits in November.

Some are for pages that existed on the old site that do not exist on the new blog, in any way. Some are for “old” directory structures that have since changed on the new blog and were never on the original site. We simplified the directory structure. domain.com/blog/resources/page.html is now domain.com/resources/page.html, for example.

The old structure only existed for a few weeks as the site was being built in WP. Others are page coding mistakes that are being fixed. Others are related to feeds, archives and so on. Google web master tools shows that they have indexed all but a handful of the new correct URL’s, a couple of old ones are still in their index. The mast majority of 404′s are bots, robots, search engines and so on. Very few are people. I am using the WP plugin that emails me for every 404.

Should I care about and try to fix every single 404? Will the search engines eventually stop looking for old file/path names? Since they see my current content, does not finding old content effect me in the search engines in any way that I should care about? What would you recommend be done about the 404′s?

Many thanks for the opportunity to ask the questions.

First, you win the award for longest question in history. I feel like I’m running for president and this is the part where I say that if I was president there would never be any 404 errors and all bad links would be healed. Forever. And nothing like this would happen again, just so long as we all hold hands and “care”.

But I digress.

Can you tell me the name of the plugin you’re using? That sounds like something I might want here.

Ok, on to business. The occasional 404 error happens, but if 30% of your requests are coming up with errors I’d say you got a problem. Even if these are not humans and only search spiders, to continue to serve links that are broken will end up effecting your performance with the search engines. Too many broken links and the search engines won’t spider or re-spider as many pages as they might otherwise. You’ll also likely take a hit with trust and quality scores as well which will effect search engine rankings.

So yes, you should care and try to fix 404s within reason. I say “within reason” because over time blogs do tend to accumulate broken links. Old blog posts link out to pages that have moved or been removed and I believe search engines take this into account. But again, we are concerned here with the amount of broken links being found which is quite high. You should try to get that down to at least under 3%. But if it’s just as easy to fix them all the I would do that, especially considering you’ve changed your URL structure recently. And even more especially if these are internal rather than external links.

Will the search engines eventually stop looking for old file names? Yes and no. If the search engine visits a page enough times and finds that it’s not there then theoretically yes, it will stop trying to access that page. But by relying on the engine to stop looking on it’s own you’ll be effecting how the search engine spiders your site. You’re forcing it to make decisions about which links to follow and which pages have links worth following. Putting the search engine in this position leaves it prone to mistakes and not following links you do want them to follow.

The other issue here is if those broken pages are linked from external sites. If someone is linking to a page that’s not there then there is no link value being passed. That might be fine but depending on what site the link is on this may cause the engine to continue to try to access this page. I’m just speaking theoretically here, but still, I think it makes the case for fixing any and all links possible.

The easiest solution is to implement 301 redirects for every broken page or image that is being accessed. You don’t have to worry about uploading a file, just implement a permanent redirect for the broken URL passing the visitor and spider through to another URL. Not only does this tell the search engines that this page is no longer here, but it passes on any link value that this page is getting. That and it’s pretty seamless for the visitor and the spider.

A long question deserves a longer answer! I hope this helps and feel free to ask any followup questions. I’ll try to answer those in the comment thread below.

Which begs the question… where are all you question askers? I mean really, I know you’re out there, I can feel you lurking. Are you shy? Do you feel silly asking a question to someone that you’re just not sure is “real”. Hey, how do you think I feel? I have to deal with that every morning. Being in doubt of your own existence is quite frightening. But luckily I have myself to convince me that I am, in fact, real. I blog, therefore I am.

So fire away with the questions folks. And if you don’t know what to ask, go tell your friends that I’m here for them. I feel their pain. And here are this weeks answers to prove it:

Looking at the “big picture” is something I strive to do but my biggest obstacle right now is getting people on board with changes. I was wondering if you’ve ever had a client who refused to make the changes you recommended. Were you able to persuade them? How?

Thanks for rubbing salt in my wounds with that one! We have clients do this all the time, so don’t think you’re alone. For the most part, since we usually have access to our client’s websites we go in and make any optimization edits that we feel are necessary. Major changes go through the client for approval, but small stuff can just be done on the fly. No waiting for approval. We just let them know what we have done.

But many times we need to have some significant design and development changes made which we can’t do ourselves and therefore must pass to the client. These are the most likely to be shot down, put on hold or sent to the DMV to grab a number. Usually it’s because for budget reasons, other times changes can’t be made due to limitations with the CMS. But still, occasionally we get the client just not wanting to do what we ask for whatever reason. And we can do nothing but grin and bear it!

Just recently we had a client in the medical community create a page for a new keyword they wanted to target. They asked us to jump on this new page right away so they can start getting some rankings. We went through the process of optimizing the content for search engines and visitors, carefully integrating keywords, but being sure to tweak the content to speak to the website visitors. All said and done the end result was leaps and bounds better than the original.

We submitted it to the client for approval and they rejected the changes. My contact had told me that the doctor who wrote it wanted his version. Now there was really nothing wrong with his version, other than it wasn’t optimized and it wasn’t put into the language that would speak to their patients. So all that work flushed away for reasons unknown.

Yeah, it happens and in those cases you just have to let the client know that short of our work being implemented, that will effect overall performance of that page and the keywords it was targeting. At that point, since you really can’t do anything else, you move on to the next task for the client.

How many keywords can you target per page?

That’s a good question and one where there really is no right or wrong answer. Many in the SEO community will tell you not to target more than three to five keywords per page, but I think that’s shortsighted. I say optimized for as many as the single page can bear.

Think of it this way, if the page can support only a small bit of content, then you won’t be able to target more than one or two keywords while keeping the content focused on selling to the visitors. On the other hand, if you have a page that’ll support several hundred words of text, then your keyword targeting options for that page grows considerably.

In actuality, it all depends on the keywords you are trying to target. Our method is to target a single core term per page and then fit as many relevant search phrases onto the page as possible while still keeping rich, dynamic text for the visitor. Here is an example:

If a core term is ‘motorcycle battery‘ then we’ll target the main motorcycle battery page for this term. But we can also throw in additional terms such as:

* gel motorcycle battery
* discount motorcycle battery
* agm motorcycle battery
* gel cell motorcycle battery
* 12v motorcycle battery
* best motorcycle battery
* sealed motorcycle battery
* honda motorcycle battery
* suzuki motorcycle battery
* yamaha motorcycle battery
etc.

I’m simplifying a great deal here, but you can see how easy it would be two write a few hundred words of text that covers all of these ‘motorcycle battery’ keywords without looking dopey. But if the page couldn’t bear a few hundred words of text, then some of those keywords might be moved off to informational pages and allows to gain traction on their own.

If you’re headed to PubCon then you should catch Stoney’s presentation in the Keyword research session. He’ll be explaining the patent-pending secret formula (shhhhh!) for keyword research success.

That’s enough words for one day. But be sure to email your questions to bobloblaw@polepositionmarketing.com or just comment on this post. You do that and I swear I’ll try and make these things funnier.

Has anyone been able to find any internet marketing or sales techniques/strategies that have worked for them?

There are a lot of viable options for internet marketing, but you have to remember that not every method works for every type of business, product or service. You have to figure out what’s going to work for you and, sad to say, sometimes that means you have to do a bit of trial and error.

If you’re limited on budget then start small. But be careful, small budgets often don’t lend themselves to quality tests. Make sure you invest enough for a solid run that will give you an accurate picture if that method will return a positive ROI.

Oh, you want an example? OK, let’s talk about radio or TV advertising. It’s been pretty well established that a single commercial doesn’t provide much benefit. In fact, listeners/viewers need to hear/see the commercial three to seven times before it actually starts sinking in. So if a single commercial blows your budget, you’ll never be able to know if TV or radio is right for you because you didn’t give it a fair enough of a run

Being in the SEO industry, I can say pretty definitively that SEO is generally a safe bet, though not always for brand new sites. If your site is new then there are other things you can do that will be more lucrative in the short term, such as PPC campaigns. This can be very effective at driving traffic, plus with solid testing and tracking you are able to really control costs, profits, etc.

I’m trying to come up with a cool logo for my company. It’s a healthcare company and they are starting a new program providing healthcare awareness to their employees. I wanted to tie in that they don’t stop there concern for healthcare on just their patients, but their employees as well! Any ideas on how to say that and make it sound cool or creative?

Tag lines are always fun to try and come up with but it can often be difficult to nail it head on. Over the years many companies have changed their tag line. Heck, Pepsi seems to change theirs every year since they dropped the successful “choice for the next generation” tag line. Here’s my take:

“Better health care starts with personal health. We help you, so you can help them.”

I’m real keen on the “them” part but “others” seemed too impersonal and “our patients” a bit too much of a mouthful. Your mileage may vary.

Does anyone know of a good keyword research course to take up?

I don’t know of any specific “course” but there are a lot of good resources out there. We have developed our own guide to keyword research which many have found quite valuable. Stoney will also be using this as the basis for his presentation at PubCon in December. Don’t worry, I’ve gotten a peek at the Power Point and it’s much prettier than the document (and the presentation he gave last spring at SEMpdx).

Aside from that, you can get a lot of good information from SEO conferences. But for your money, the keyword research guide linked above can’t be beat.

That’s it for the questions this week. Just for full disclosure I didn’t have to make these questions up this time around. In fact I did the only sensible thing. Speaking of sensible, I’d like to thank coughYahooAnswerscough for their helpful input.

Email your questions to bobloblaw@polepositionmarketing.com or just comment on them here. I’ll hold the good questions until next week–and try not to be a conversation killer in the process.

Today I step out on my own and prove that I’m not just the side-kick that gets to say a few pithy lines for comedy relief. I’ve got a voice that wants to be heard… that needs to be heard… that you, my friend, want to hear! Am I overstating? Perhaps. But by the time you figure it all out I’ll have you wrapped around my little finger like a pig in a blanket.

I’m sure you want to know more about me so feel free to check out my Reno SEO bio and peruse our search engine marketing company site to read more of my cleverousness. Yeah, that’s me in those orange boxes in the middle of each page. That’s all the space I’m allotted. Weak I know.

So enough about me, let’s talk about what I’m going to do here on the blog. I thought I’d start off with some Q and A. You ask me questions on search marketing and I’ll fling the straight poop right back atcha. I’m not gonna cram any marketing mumbo jumbo down your throat and I’m certainly not drinking any SEO or Google Kool-Aid.

So let’s get to the Qss so you can see my Ass!

First question comes from Stoney, from Reno, Nevada:

Hi Bob, I have two questions for you. 1) how do you say your name? I’m having trouble pronouncing it in my head. 2) Didn’t you steal your name from Tony Danza’s character that first appeared on the third season of Arrested Development?

Great to have you on the show, Stoney. To your first question, I suggest you stop trying. There ain’t much in that head of yours so you’re better of just pronouncing it out loud. Go ahead, give it a try, I’ll wait. Ok, moving on to your second question. What’s your point? Next.

Bob, what’s with all these social networking sites? How in the world does anybody have time to participate in any more than a few? Does anybody work anymore?
– Stoney deGeyter, Reno, NV

Stoney, have we met? Hey, I’m with you. I honestly can’t keep up with all the social sites and certainly don’t have time to attempt to leverage any more than a couple. If you feel leveraging social media is important I suggest you start small. Build one profile on one site and work it from there. Once you have that down, then move on to the next. As you go along, figure out what you need to do with each in order to participate with the community, but be sure to save some time for your real job. With the writer’s strike in full swing you’ll have plenty of unused TV time to work on this. The bottom line, only use social sites that help you progress your long-term business goals, or just keep it as an after-work hobby.

I’m interested in hearing Stoney speak. Can you give me a heads up on his speaking schedule?
– Stoney deGeyter, Reno, NV

Uh, yeah. Anything for you, pal. Stoney will be speaking in the Keyword Research, Selection and Optimization session (Tuesday Nov 4, 1:30-2:45p, Salon D) at WebmasterWorld’s PubCon. You’ll also see the rest of the Pole Position Marketing crew (except me, I can’t get past the metal detectors on the plane) hanging around, meeting and greeting. They will, of course, be wearing our nifty Pole Position Marketing pit crew shirts.

Stoney has also pitched a session for SMX West, so if you have any pull with Danny or Chris, be sure to let them know you’d like to see him there.

Next up is SEMpdx’s SearchFest, March 10, 2008, which Stoney has been invited back to. Ask anybody, he was fanfreakintastic!

And April 21-22 Stoney will be presenting at an undisclosed location to be made known in the near future. Be sure to mark your calendars for that as well.

That’s it for the Q and A for now folks. Start sending me your questions so I can get them answered each week. I’m hoping for at least a couple of questions from someone other than my boss! E-mail me your questions at bobloblaw@polepositionmarketing.com and while I probably won’t respond to your emails, I’ll try to get them answered here.