Your business needs more links. Good quality links help you in getting visitors to your website directly or by influencing search engine to rate your site as more important.

Every site that sends you traffic has part in your success. You are partners even if you have not form any relationships with them yet.   

Who are these sites? Mostly web publishers from the smallest blogger to the largest entertainment, news, or information sites.

Why every online business needs back links: 

• Increase visibility.
• Build online traffic.
• Improve your rankings.
• Form partnerships and build your network. 

What can you do to grow back links?

You need to form relationships with publishers and then you need to give them reasons to write about your products, services or ideas. You do it by proactively creating relevant, useful and valuable content that publishers would be happy to include on their site and give to their readers.

We are building Publishedin to allow you just that: To connect with many web publishers who have an interest in covering news or ideas you write. Provide them with your informational, educational or entertainment content, and reach all their readers when they publish your content.

“Every company is a media company”. It’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot recently. Tom Foremski a former reporter with the Financial Times and publisher of Silicon Valley Watcher who founded http://www.everycompanyisamediacompany.com in 2010 even created an equation to describe this relation EC=MC (Every Company is a Media Company). In an article, he wrote in March 2010, he said:

Every company is a media company because every company publishes to its customers, its staff, its neighbors, its communities.

If you read it, you may think that it was true a long time ago, so what have changed now? The answer is the Internet. The Internet that brought many new media technologies have transformed the entire media industry and is now transforming nearly every business.

Before we continue we need to ask ourselves, what’s a media company, anyway? The truth is it’s hard to tell. The classic answer for media companies is audience aggregators that make money by selling advertising against content to third parties who want to reach those audiences, or by charging the audiences directly through subscriptions, or some kind of a combination of both. If you look carefully you can see that Google, for example, is a media company, though Google does not produce content, which traditionally is the main asset of media companies.   

What about Cisco or IBM? Do they fall under the definition of media companies? It seems that the answer is no, since they don’t sell advertising or subscription, but when formerly Forbes, Red Herring, Wall Street Journal and Business Week journalists write for them, how can you call it?

While traditional media companies are in business of making money by selling content to their audience and/or selling advertising to reach that audience, the “new” media companies are in business of making money by selling products and services. Another name for them that is growing popularity today is “Content marketers.”

Using Google Insight, we can see that the interest in “content marketing” is increasing especially in the last year.

There is another major difference between media companies and content marketers. Since content marketers make money selling products and services but not content, it’s in their interest to distribute their content as much as possible in order to reach and attract more clients. According to Content Marketing Institute recent report companies invest twice or more money on distribution than on creating content. On the other hand media companies usually keep their content in one place to retain control.

Every company is a publisher

I think that a better and more accurate way to define content marketers is to call them publishers. According to Wikipedia Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public. 

Joe Pulizzi Author, speaker and founder of Content Marketing Institute summarizes it very nicely: 

Today, publishing is marketing and marketing is publishing.  In order to attract and retain customers in this messy word of marketing messages, brands need to develop stories that are relevant and compelling to their customers and prospects.  They need to think and act like publishers, and even think of their customers as if they were subscribers.

Is every company a media company? What do you think?

Yossi Barazani is the Founder of Publishedin.com. The first marketing technology to use content instead of ads. With Publishedin AdFree network, advertisers get their content published on partner publishers’ websites, grow website traffic, leads and sales, improve search engine rankings and position their business as a thought leader.

After working in beta testing and getting feedback from businesses and publishers in the last few months, we are very happy to open the first AdFree network to deliver relevant and useful business content to consumers.

If you have ads, go somewhere else. However, if you have valuable content, we would be happy to help you reach more customers with it.

To start: Add your first content for FREE

To learn more: http://publishedin.com

That’s what Michael Stelzner suggests in his new book “Launch”, and with praises from Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Brian Solis and others you should at least listen to what Michael has to say.

The main message is that great content plus other people minus marketing messages equal growth (GC+OP-MM=G).

When you offer great content—such as detailed how-to articles, expert interviews, case studies and videos—that focuses on helping other people solve their problems, you’ll experience growth. 

The “other people” component transcends your reader base and involves reaching out to people outside your company, such as industry experts. 

Once the marketing messages are caged, the focus of your company shifts from “What can we sell you?” to “How can we help you?” You shift from pitching products to boosting people. Instead of investing in ad space, you invest in creating content, experiences, gathering places and communities where people who need help can find it.

You have the chance to own the place people go to for help, eliminating your reliance on traditional marketing channels. You can become the center of your industry, niche or local market. And when that happens, you’re launched on an unstoppable trajectory that will take you places you never imagined possible.

The result: You no longer need to sell! Instead, you demonstrate your expertise by the content you produce, the ideas you showcase, the stories you share and the people you attract. By creating a platform for others, you can also build strategic alliances, quickly grow a large following and dominate your industry.

I also liked his rocket ship analogy:

Think of content as the fuel for your rocket, and people as what ignites the fuel and directs the rocket. Think of marketing as friction that slows your rocket’s progress. The more you use it, the slower your rocket ship will move. 

If you want to launch and navigate your rocket ship successfully (launch new business, releasing a new product, or transform your company) you should read Launch - Highly recommended!

I was recently invited to write for MediaPost publication about the future of media.

You can read it and other articles about the future of media here.

Here is my full article:

Online Marketing Without Advertising

Let’s face it, most people don’t like online ads, are not interested in ads and do not click on ads.

Need some proof?

• According to the Pew Project for American Journalism annual report for 2010, the vast majority of Internet users, 79%, say they never or rarely had clicked on an online advertisement. They don’t mind them. They simply ignore them.

• Click-through rates on Facebook ads only averaged 0.05% (5 clicks per 10,000 ads) in 2010.

• According to Comscore and Starcom research, 8% of internet users account for 85% of all clicks on display ads. So, when marketers use ads they miss most of their potential customers.

Do you know why? The reason is simple: Readers come for editorial content, not for the ads. I want you to try thinking of yourself. When you go online, do you go for advertisements or for editorial content? Do you click on ads or on editorial links?

Then why online marketers continue to use ads as the main way to reach their target audience, and why publishers continue to use ads as the main way to monetize their content? It’s because online marketers and publishers copied the way offline newspapers monetize content - ads.

The basic point about the Web is that it is not an advertising medium, the Web is not a selling medium, it is a buying medium. It is user-controlled. -Jakob Nielsen, Web usability expert, 1998.

If not ads what else? To find the answer we need to dig a little:

First, we need to find the essence of publisher’s value. The answer for me is simple, it’s what brought readers to the publishers’ site in the first place - great content.

Second, let’s look at the biggest money machine on the Internet, Google, and what we can learn from her:

1. Google doesn’t own any content, it’s like a parasite living on others’ content.

2. Marketers are paying billions to Google for sending users to their websites (via AdWords pay-per-click program).

3. Ads work well on Google because every ad in Google, looks the same as content (search result).

How all this relates to publishers?

As a publisher you want the ads to look like your content, but if you look deeper you can see that every time you write about a business and link to the business’s website, you create a value for that business (visitors and SEO benefits). It is clear to me that this value is much better than any ad the business may place on your site.

• Clickthrough rates on editorial content are up to 96 times better than on banner ad, social media link or sponsored link. -Eric Wittlake’s Blog on B2B and Digital Marketing

I believe marketers would be more than happy to pay publishers (as they pay Google) for the value they create for them. As a marketer, imagine that you are connected, on a daily basis, with many publishers relevant to your business and reach all their readers when they write about you. You can even provide them with your own news, white papers, events, presentations, etc.

In contrast to advertising where the Web sites hosting the ads don’t really care about your business (except the money), here; the publishers have a genuine interest in your business’s products and services.

Would marketers be interested in it? You bet.

As a marketer you create many pieces of content for your company, to name a few:

• Case Studies
• Presentations
• White Papers
• Online Articles
• Videos
• Blog Posts
• Events Communication
• News/PR
• Promotions

Maybe you don’t know it yet but you are doing what is called “Content Marketing”.

What is content marketing? According to Junta42 Content Marketing Institute:

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.

Now what to do with it? Your next step is distributing your content in order to reach your target audience. To get you started, here are some content distribution ideas:

1. First your website or blog.
2. Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.
3. Email newsletter and email signature.
4. Comments in forums and blogs.
5. Video/Photo/podcast sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr.
6. Article sites like Squidoo and Hubpages.
7. Document/presentation sharing sites like Slideshare and Scribd.
8. Social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon and delicious.
9. Social news sites like Digg and Reddit.
10. RSS and syndication.
11. Display Advertising.
12. Content distribution platforms like Publishedin Ad-Free Network. It’s a new platform that can help you distribute your content to publishers relevant to your business, and reach all their readers when they write about you. 

Have more ideas for content distribution, add your comment. 

In a recent video published in AppSumo website, Jonathan Kay from Grasshopper reveals his company secrets that allow them to increase a conversion rate from 1.5% to 20% and to decrease cost-per-click from $8 to $0.80.

How to increase your conversion rate

Let’s start with the average website conversion rate. Jonathan says that websites in general convert at 1% or 1.5%. I did some research and found some real time data of the global conversion rate from Fireclick. According to their data collected from websites that are using Fireclick service the average conversion rate is about 2% (interesting to note is that a year ago the average conversion rate was closer to 1.5%).

So how Jonathan managed to increase their conversion rate:

Our website goes from 1.3% to 1.4% or 1.5%. If you were to convert at 1.6% or 1.7%, we could all take a vacation for literally months. It would be insane. Word of mouth converts it 20%.

The answer is simple Word of mouth. When people talk, tweet, or blog about you and refer their readers to your website, your conversion rate could increase tenfold.

How to lower your cost per click   

When people search on Google they use branded terms or product-specific-terms. In Grasshopper case product-specific-terms would be an 800 number, voicemail, toll-free number. Branded terms would be Grasshopper, Grasshopper phone, Grasshopper phone number. And how much Grasshopper pays for product-specific-terms versus branded terms? Jonathan says they pay about $0.79-$0.80 for branded name, versus $7-$8 for product-specific-name.

The same word of mouth increases branded-terms searches, costing Grasshopper 1/8 or 1/9 of the price they would pay for product-specific-terms.

I highly recommend you to watch Jonathan Kay’s full video on AppSumo website, it’s free but you need to register.

How to use Publishedin to grow word of mouth

Publishedin allows you to connect on a daily basis with many web publishers relevant to your business. You can provide them with information about your product or service, and reach all their readers when they write about you.

To learn more click http://publishedin.com 

I’m sure you already feel it, but here is some data I collected that explains why it’s getting harder and pricier to drive traffic to your website.

1. The number of websites competing for traffic is increasing:

Source: Netcraft

2. CPC (cost per click) costs are increasing:

Source: Houchman

3. CPM (cost per impression) costs are increasing:

Source: Houchman

4. Number of blogs is increasing:

2008: 133 million (source Technorati).

2009: 126 million (Source BlogPulse).

2010: 152 million (Source BlogPulse).

5. Few biggest Google advertisers (less than 2%) receive most of the traffic:

If you have some more supporting data, please comment below and I’ll update the post.

A few days ago I received an email from Google with some interesting data about traffic sources gathered from Google Analytics users. Google describes it as an experiment to surface useful or interesting data to Analytics users. The data comes from all websites (hundreds of thousands) which have opted-in anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics.

Traffic Sources:

In this post I want to concentrate on Referral traffic which I believe is very important for any online business. Referral traffic means that people clicked a link on other sites and come to your site. It is not just that you get visitors to your site, every link also gives you a boost to your rankings in search engines Why referring sites traffic is better than search engines traffic.

Referral traffic has the highest average time on site

Visitors coming from referral traffic are engaged with your content much more than direct, organic search traffic or paid cpc traffic. The biggest difference is over paid search traffic - 70% more time on site.

Total visits from referral sites decreased

Visits from referral sources dropped 1.6% while total visits from other sources increased 1.6%. I believe this trend will continue as more websites that try to monetize their content stop to link to outside websites all-together Make money without manipulating your readers to click on ads. 

Publishedin gives back a reason for publishers to link outside to businesses. And Businesses gain more engaged visitors, and improve their SEO rankings.

Publishedin “eats our own dog-food” through Publishedin Reward-Per-Click program.

We are happy to announce that Publishedin uses its Reward-Per-Click program to reward publishers in Publishedin network for every click to our site.

If you are a publisher and want to make money from your editorial content without ads you should join today (it’s free): http://publishedin.com/publishers/

If you are a business and want to grow your website traffic, sales, and improve your SEO rankings, all without writing a single ad you should join today: http://publishedin.com/businesses/

Wikipedia - Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is when a company uses the products that it makes.