Image by Noël Zia Lee via FlickrThis is less a sneaky tactic and more of an accidental discovery.

If you want really good inbound links from popular sites, you can develop content with links on many of them.

If you are a regular reader, you know about Squidoo, Humpages and Gather.

But what about an expert site that lets you build html into it?  For example, I recently set up a virtual assistant job board at Jobamatic.com.  I did it because I thought it would be another source for leads for my Virtual Buzz Assistant Network.

I customized the header to look like the site and added some important links.

The end result is that it is a link to my sites from powerful domain that is updating the page constantly with fresh content.  While it does not have page rank yet, it is a quality link that makes my sites have more credibility with certain keywords.

I am in the process of setting up a Virtual Assistant Radio Show – and guess what, another set of links that come from an expert site that should add some great juice to my site credibility over time.

Too often we are looking for those big publishing places or little social bookmark places – but this is an example of great in between opportunities.

Image via WikipediaI just read an excellent post at Chris Brogan’s blog about Content Marketing.

If you think you do not have a content marketing strategy, you are wrong.  It is just that your content marketing strategy stinks.

Do any of these describe your stinky content strategy?

• You have a website that never changes
• You started a blog but it did not produce sales so you stopped
• You write about things every once in a while but no one seems to care
• Your enewsletter has a small audience and a low open rate
• You write directly about your products that you are trying to sell all the time

The #1 reason I love Chris’ post is that he is discussing content marketing, not blogging.  When I talk to people about blogging, they think that setting up a blog and posting occasionally should do something for them. It may, but people usually give up before it kicks in.

If you instead understand that you are considering a content marketing strategy, then everything changes.  It is not about the technology (wordpress hosting) but about how you are going to build an audience and content that generates leads long term.

Now lets imagine that you are starting a TV show.  Is your TV show a success because you filmed 10 episodes?  Or is your TV show a success because you have built an audience and advertisers want to sponsor it?  Obviously the latter.

If you want to have a serious content marketing strategy, you are going to have to write about what people want to read, not what you want to tell them.  And you are going to need to learn how to write artilces for search engines as well as people, and how to build links and how to use social media to not be invisible.

Does it sound like a lot of work?  It is.

You’d think that all the great free martketing tools and low cost publishing solutions would benefit the small business owner.  It does not.  The constantly changing landscape and the skills that are needed to use them well mean that creating the audience and producing content is a bigger part of your job than running your business.  And lets face it, you probably do not have the time or the money to do it right.

That does not mean that you are not going to get results.  It does mean that you are very unlikely to get big results unless you make a big effort, which means all those “free” tools are not so free because you need people feeding them great, original and interesting content.

This is not something new

Years ago we went into business with a great eMagazine publishing system.  We got a fair number of clients and we were not a cheap hosting solution.  The problem we found was that our big clients (Universities and Magazine Publishers) were using the tools every week and getting fantastic results because they had people committed to publishing emagazines on a big scale to audiences that cared.

Our smaller clients, usually small businesses,  liked the idea of publishing emagazines and they were paying clients – but they were not getting a good ROI.  Why?  They liked the idea but they did not actually use the tools consistently.  I hated taking their money, even though we were providing them with a good solution that had the potential to create huge value.

Flash forward to now.  Web publishing solutions are everywhere for free or for a very low cost.  But you are still not getting it.  It is not about the tools, it is about having a solid content marketing strategy.

I got my copy of Traffic Secrets 2.0 yesterday and stayed up until 2AM watching some of it.

So far, so good.  John Reese did a nice job.

He stresses that the only way to be successful online is to build a content factory.  I am not talking in a spammy, crappy content way.  You need to publish good stuff all the time to own more of the internet and get better results.

That is why you need to work with blog writers, such as our Virtual Buzz Assistants.

Since there is no cost to you for submitting your project, why don’t you run over there and request someone to set up a blog for you and start writing content on a regular basis for you?  Everyone currently in our network understands blogging and some of them are hungry for more work.

Some of them are also maxed out – so I would suggest you not wait too long.  4-5 new projects may be all that it takes to max everyone out for a bit.

Submit Virtual Buzz Assistant Project

Recently I was interested in building a larger network of blogs that my Virtual Buzz Assistants could auto post to.

It seemed like a simple thing, but with a lot of research I found that remote submitting to a WordPress  blogis tricky.

There are several reasons that auto posting is not super easy.  One reason is that it is a security hole – if you made it easy to submit data to wordpress, it could be exploited to wreck someone’s blog.

Next, there are a lot of ways to do it but no standard, best way that is easy to set up.  I am going to post my findings and an explanation of my solution to help those of you that are looking for information about auto posting to WordPress.  Just keep in mind this is not the only way.

Why auto submit posts to WordPress?

The first thing you may be wondering is why?  Well, in my case, I have paying members of the Virtual Assistant network I run.  I wanted to set up some industry specific blogs and let these trained people write blog posts to these blogs to help them generate more buzz and inbound links for their clients.  No, it is not the only tool and technique they have, but it is one weapon in their buzz arsinol.

Submit Posts to WordPress Via Email

The first solution I came up with was to set up a form that would then (hidden) submit an email to the blog.  The blog would then pick up the email and post it.

While this technique should work, I spent several hours trying to get the wordpress plug in to work and I finally gave up.   It was also going to be tricky to set the whole thing up and get it to post into the correct category.  Plus, there was always a chance that spam filters could filter out some of the posts or mess them up with the parcing.  Ultimately, I just stopped trying because it did not work.

Then I discovered WP-o-Matic.  This plug in posts rss feeds to your blog on a regular schedule.  I suppose a lot of people use it to import data from other sites, but it is a very useful tool for taking your RSS stream and posting it.  It only took me a day to build an interface that stores the articles people write in a database and output it in RSS format via a secret rss link.  The WP-o-matick plugin then checks the rss feed every few hours and posts new posts.  I even added some things like delays on posting, by making the articles date adjustible up to one week in the future.

Once this was figured out for one blog, it was super easy to do for all future blogs, taking less than an hour to set up and configure a new blog with this capacity.

The key to auto-posting in WordPress turned out to be not posting in WordPress at all.

Other Advantages to this WordPress Strategy

There are some other advantages to this strategy.  If I want to allow other people to have their blogs in our network to recieve auto submitted articles, it is simple.  I simply send them instrcutions on how to set up the wp-o-matic plug in and the links to their rss.  They do not have to give me access to their blog at all.

Also, because RSS is a simple stream of data, I have a lot of flexibility with it.  For example, I could later put summaries up of all posts in another blog automatically, if I so chose.

One Disadvantage

The one big disadvantage I see in this auto posting strategy is that I cannot confirm that a post has happened.  I could maybe scrape the site and check later, but that is more work than I want to do.  So right now, you just have to check the blog later and see that the post has happened.

Non-technical people

I know there are some non-technical people out there that will not like this article because any coding is a barrier.  In your case, you may want to keep playing with the email feature to get it to work.  However, if you have some basic coding skills, it is easy to add data to a database and create an RSS feed that you can then import for auto posting into WordPress.  I am getting glowing feedback from the users and it has been a great tool for distributed publishing.

Every once in a while, someone will do something that really rocks for me.

Melody Campbell, The Small Business Guru was the first person to post a comment on Chris Brogan’s 50 website post.

Traffic is flooding in and I just have to say THANK YOU to Melody.

Also, check out the post.  It is much newer than mine and has some interesting things on it.

Last week I spent the entire week at a music festival.  I will leave it unnamed because overall I did like the event and intend to go next year again.

However, it was run by a bunch of music people, and it really needed a professional event coordinator to help with the big picture.  Here is the mistakes they made that you should not make if you are doing an event.

1. Big Breaks – They scheduled big breaks in time, which were fine for the people staying in the hotel, but a nightmare for our family because we were an hour’s drive away, so it was better just to sit around and kill 3 or 4 hours.
2. Too Much Information- I really needed one schedule that was specific to my needs.  Instead, there was too much information that left me confused.  I signed up for things I should not have, and missed other things because they were buried in blocks of text.
3. Expensive Add-ons – It was not a cheap event, and to take a family of four to all the extras would have doubled the price.  I felt like I missed half the festival by not being willing to pay for all the extra stuff.
4. Treat first time people differently – Clearly, the people that had done it before knew what was going on, knew each other and had a better time.  I talked to a lot of first-time people that were frustrated and not planning on coming back.  You really need to make sure your new people are taken care of so they will return.
5. Website – Similar to#1, the combination of too much information on the website and too much information in various emails only made it confusing.  One new person said he combined three different emails into one spreadsheet for himself, only to arrive and find everything had been changed.
6. The whole thing is a performance – There was a lot of complaining in the halls and general frustration on the part of some of the staff (all great people.)  You have to let the staff and volunteers know that from the first person arriving to the last person leaving, it is a performance.  Think Disney without the mouse.
7. Lack of community – People complained that they were having trouble making connections and having their kids meet other kids.  One person said that he attended another festival that was magical. The other one had ice cream socials and a better commons area where people really got to know each other.

If you cannot do it, hire an event planner. 

While a meeting planner may have added $1,000′s to the cost, it would have made it more likely that they would have more repeat business the next year.  Plus, if people are impressed and buzzing, they are more likely to tell their friends.  If an event plannercan make those happen, it is going to really impact your long term success.

A good blog writer is able to write an interesting, informative blog post that has a organic search engine goal as well as being people friendly.

A cheap blog writer is someone that will produce blog content quickly to keep the blog fresh.

I suppose there are some good, cheap blog writers out there – but I have never met any.  It is not so much because you cannot be cheap and good, but more because a good, effective blog post is going to be a great resource.  Not a quick post about something in the new and something common sense.

Want to know more about the differences, read cheap blog writer on the Virtual Buzz Assistant blog.   Ultimately it has less to do with the blog writer and more to do with your goal and budget.  Great content takes time.