Building backlinks to your pages is an essential part of SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization) for two reasons. The first reason is that it helps your pages get indexed faster, which is very important because you want the search engines to find them as soon as possible and crawl them regularly. The second reason is that it helps your pages get higher search engine rankings for the keywords of your choice. The more backlinks you have, the better. Period. However, building backlinks can be a time-consuming, boring process. You can outsource the process to an agency and pay a lot of money OR you can do it yourself with SocialMonkee! SocialMonkee is an instant backlink builder allowing you to build 25 unique backlinks, every day, FREE! All links are on unique C-Class IP addresses ...

Today, there is no shortage (no pun intended!) of URL shorteners. As a matter of fact, there are hundreds. Why? Well, there are several reasons people use URL shorteners including prettying up links, fixing links, and link tracking. In addition, the introduction of micro-blogging sites, like Twitter, created the demand for URL shorteners because, as I'm sure you've noticed, URLs take up a lot of space and we only have 140 characters! The most popular choices I see most often include bit.ly, owl.ly, ht.ly, budurl, and tinyurl (my old favorite when I first learned about URL shorteners years ago!). But because I see the use of Hootsuite's URL shortener - ht.ly - increasing, I want to warn people that ht.ly isn't your friend! Hy.ly doesn't pass you any link juice (meaning it does not do a 301 permanent redirect to your website) and we're in this ...

Ever wonder why it feels you're spinning your wheels? Not moving as fast as you wanted? Not where you want to be in your business by now? Well, never fear because I will show you the 5 fatal mistakes service professionals make so you won't have to (or stop making them if you've already fell into the trap)! I like stats so let me show you a few... In an interview of approximately 1,400 self employed professionals in a nationwide survey to discover the characteristics of the top earners, here's what was  found:*

• 73% of all self employed professionals earn less than $10,000 their first year
• Only 11% of them make more than $50,000 by their 2nd year
• Less than 60% have 10 paying clients
• And only 9% ultimately earn more than $100,000 a year

Promote others to promote yourself! Zig Ziglar said it best: “You will get everything in life that you want if you just help enough other people get what they want." That’s it! This is one of those killer best practice marketing strategies that if done genuinely and often enough, can reap you mountainous results. Okay, so let me get the obvious out of the way: before anybody will promote you, you must have quality products, services, and ultimately have a winning, positive attitude about yourself and what you do. No one wants to promote crappy products or negative, close-minded, conceited, know-it-alls. Common sense, right? Well, common sense isn’t evenly distributed so sometimes I have to clarify Now that we have that disclaimer out of the way, let me give you a few excellent examples. Online:

• Heather Stephens, creator of Clever Marketer, implemented a blog commenting tribe, which is a great community of

Have you seen the section called Trackbacks on people's blogs? Or maybe you've seen in a blog's comment section, it lists links next to people's names instead of an actual comment. I used to wonder what the heck that was. The more I visited others' blogs, the more I saw the word "trackback". Suddenly, my curiosity got the better of me and because I can't stand not knowing something, I looked it up. I had to see what I was missing out on. So what is a trackback? Susan, from 5MinutesforMom.com said it best, "A Trackback is like a remote comment." Well, lo and behold, I've learned trackbacks can be extremely useful in a number of ways.

1. For one, trackbacks can extend a conversation from one blog