I recently wrote a post asking if you are remarkable. I explained how people and products that are remarkable are talked about and the advertising is done by the product and not the marketing team. That left me thinking about some of the ways to achieve being remarkable, so here I have listed a few ideas.

• Always target the unsatisfied person or customer. Find the need that you can meet and meet it. If someone is looking for you as an affiliate marking expert to share in how to get started on an affiliate program, they don’t want to hear about each affiliate company and why you like or dislike them. They want the meat of the subject and are looking for answers. Same goes for a company that invents a new product and fails to innovate any further. People change over time, and the longer you stand there basking in your successes, your competition is finding new ways to meet people’s needs. This will slowly lead to the quiet exit of your customers.
• Market before you manufacture. You and all your friends might think an idea is really great and a sure fire winner. The case more often than not is the opposite. Start with marketing and find the product or idea to fit. A sales person does not walk into an office without knowing how he or she will be marketing the products, whether it is by phone, showroom floor, direct mail or other forms of advertising. Find the way you most like to connect with people and then find the needs they have and meet those needs. If you hate cold calling people, you won’t be successful selling any product, because you don’t like the sales method. Pick something that works for you.
• Innovate^n. This simply means keep trying, and run smaller test pilot marketing trials. It is much better to try 10 different ideas or products in a month at a cost of $1,000 than to spend the same time and money on one single idea. No matter how great and grand the idea or products seems, it will never have enough back initially to know if it is viable or not. Spend $200 of a landing page and some pay-per-click ads testing a new idea and see how the market picks up on it. If it doesn’t work right away, modify your product or landing page a couple more times and see if anything changes. After that, you will either have your answer to continue with production or to scrap it. The more ideas you have and the quicker you can test the ideas in your marketing niche, the more ideas you will have succeed.
• Change, rinse and repeat. After you start succeeding and making money is the time to plan the next release, version, product, book or whatever it is. Don’t get too comfortable with one product or customer base. The chances are in a couple month the buzz will die down and you will spend most your time patching holes in the ship when you could be sailing in a brand new one. Every time I have spoken with a successful person, I notice one trait that most of them have in common, they innovate and then move on to the next project. Rarely do you see a successful person stick to one idea for their whole life. Henry Ford stuck with the model T for 10 years after his competitors had moved on to bigger and better new vehicles. Don’t do this.
• If you don’t have fun, STOP! If you don’t like what you are doing or , stop now and save some hair. Remarkable products and services come typically from people who are having fun doing what they love and would create that same product without pay. Success is more fun when you enjoy it .

*Update: I wrote a Step by Step Guide on How to Build Backlinks to Your Website Using Guest Posting.

In a recent post, I mentioned I built backlinks for this blog and my girlfriend’s blog, www.thatmutt.com. A couple people asked me to explain more about what I did. Despite what many new bloggers believe, traffic isn’t everything. Break down where your traffic is coming from, dissect the numbers, and you’ll see. One visitor coming from a Google search is more likely to stick around, read your article, purchase your product or seek your advise than one random visitor from either Digg or StumbleUpon. I have said before that I would trade 1,000 unique visitors for one commenter / subscriber. In the end, it is the people who get involved that will add the most value to your blog. So here are some ways to build backlinks to your blog and dominate your niche.

1. Comment, comment and comment. I have about 60 blogs that I frequent on a regular basis and leave thoughtful comments when I do. I typically do this every 2-3 days to allow for people to update their blogs with new posts. If they have added more than one new post, I will try and comment on each new post. This builds my network. If you try this, you will find that in time they just might write a post about you or your blog. If people are writing about you and your niche, the search engine looks at that like you just won a gold star. Enough gold stars and you start to rank #1 in searches for your terms. You will have a higher ranking, more search engine traffic and better visitors coming to your blog. Problogger wrote about this yesterday and his blog receives 46% of its traffic from Google (P.S. he gets a lot of traffic).
2. Contests. I know most contests are a lot of work to maintain and it sucks to do them often, but they are a great way to build backlinks. The owner of the Winning the Web contest got a lot more from hosting the contest than any single person who won something. He received 1,000s of backlinks, more RSS readers and a lot of name recognition from hosting one contest. Here it is a month later, and I still know about the contest and where it was, and I never even entered it. The same goes for the contest held at Sense to Save. If you don’t want to take the time to cook up a contest, simply find all the contests you can, and donate something to them. I got about 20 backlinks from donating to the Sense to Save contest from other bloggers re-posting the list of donors .
3. Social networking and social linking. Before you start claiming I am a hypocrite, I will elaborate. I use social sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to build in anchor links. An anchor link is a link used in context with the keywords you want your site to rank higher in. For example, if I want my site to come up when people search the term “really expensive watches,” I would put the HTML <ahref=”http://www.joshwhitford.com/”>Really expensive watches</a> in the comments or description of the post I am submitting to the different social networking / bookmarking sites. The text “Really expensive watches” will be linked to my site. My site might never say anything about having “really expensive watches,” but if I get enough of these links out on the Internet, eventually I would rank #1 for the term. Ranking is all about links and link building. A great site to help with this is Social Poster. Other really good programs do this same thing but much faster like BookmarkingDemon. But if you don’t want to pay, then stick to the free ways of gaining backlinks. In a couple of weeks I have gone from page #10 on Google to page #1 for a variety of terms.
4. Get your link and keywords on sites and blogs with good Page Ranking (PR). I have done this a number of ways. I actually have a number of bookmarking folders in my browser that I have labeled PR1, PR2, PR3… and so on. When I come across a blog that has a good page rank, I will bookmark it for later. Then when I have the time, I will go through each folder and see what the source code is for each site and if they have a no follow tag for their comments or not. If you go under “view” and then “source” in your browser, it will open the code for that page as a search engine would see it. If there is a rel=”nofollow”> followed by the name and comment, then I won’t use that site as a method of gaining backlinks. If I like the site and it has good traffic, I should continue to leave intelligent comments (not spam) and gain the trickle traffic from curious people. Remember they are sharing their page rank with you and you should be thankful for that. Leaving worthless comments does you no good. Recently, I commented on Tim Ferriss’s blog about the post I wrote about contacting Warren Buffett. The comment section is a “no follow,” but the links found in the post are normal “follow” links. When he took the information and link from the comment and inserted it into the post I gained a link from a blog with a PR6 (more to this but this is the basic idea).
5. Pay, bribe, barter and swap. I don’t recommend purchasing or advertising the sale of links. The reason against it is simple. If someone wants your spot on the search page and knows you have paid for links, you are one report away from being kicked to the Google curb. If you can barter or swap links either in posts or with things like Entrecard credits, then it is much harder to prove any wrongdoing with Google or other search engines. This is why blogs who take on PayPerPost tend to get taken to the woodshed come time for page rank updates. Google knows when you are promoting sites for money and will punish you for “gaming” their algorithm. This is why John Chow doesn’t even show up on page #1 for his name. It really doesn’t matter for him if he shows up on page #1 because he makes good money selling paid links and ads on his blog. But, if a blog gets most of its traffic from Google and gets sent to page 5, then that could destroy that url’s future for traffic. Tread lightly and research before you act on the Internet.

This by no means is a complete list of ways to gain backlinks or is it the complete ins and outs of SEO. But the more you play, the better you will become. Everything about search ranking and page rank is based on the foundation of good backlinks and anchor text links. The more links you have pointing towards your blog on certain keywords, the higher you will rate for relevancy of those keywords. Nothing is impossible, and if you would like to rank #1 for Business you can, although you might spend 2 years building backlinks to do so.

David Kam is the primary author of Marketing Deviant. My favorite aspect of the marketing subject and niche is the ability to apply the same principles and scenarios to different situations. The posts are short and to the point without additional fluff. He is not dictating what to do or how to do things but rather guiding. As I read through his posts, I pick up on the subtle, yet powerful messages.

The blog layout is very simple and clean. I could learn a lesson from the lack of clutter on the blog along with the cool, clean, crisp colors. I wish that more attention would be drawn to his ebook Art of War Poem eBook under his link section. The eBook is inspired by Sun Tzu’s Art of War, if you haven’t read it, you should. David makes comparisons from the original Art of War to the poems he wrote in relation to business. Here is an excerpt:

Doing and Going

• Create an ethical work code Care and free your workforce of trouble
• Benefit your workforce Utilize their forces
• Think and wait before doing Things not in your advantage should be left alone What we avoid get the enemy going Engage when the enemy is prone

Overall, the principles are sound and the message is direct. The clean and cool appearance is an open book to stay a little bit longer for me. Hmmm, I wonder if that is the same reason Google doesn’t clutter its site, unlike the Yahoos and MSNs of the Internet.