BiggerPockets

The answer is content, content, content. A very good book to read is "Crush It" by Gary Veynerchuck

Since I've in Vegas, we have a lot of quirky conventions in town. It's fun to drop in on a drupal convention (they were there at the same time as bp in colorado). You'll find masters tradesmen when visiting those events.

Originally posted by Andre Key:
I have also found that being an active blogger can help you with your search engine optimization campaign. You can also visit www.fiverr.com to outsource some of your optimization needs for as little as 5 bucks. to see what works best for you before you focus your time on one specific strategy.

I agree, fiverr.com can be a great resource but you need to be very careful with the people you use. A lot of backlinking campaigns on fiverr.com can actually hurt your SEO efforts.

A lot of them will send out 100's or sometimes 1000's of spammy backlinks pointing to your site. Especially with Google's new algorithm updates this can really damage your rankings in several ways.

1) When you are getting backlinks you want them to be site related to your website. For example, if you have a real estate blog site you should have links pointing to your site from pages or sites related to real estate. A lot of fiverr gigs will have random articles, Chinese or foreign sites, and weak directory links that lack any page content. Google has really been cracking down on spammy backlinks and has been penalizating sites for this.

2) Receiving 100's of back links at one time is very unnatural in Google's eyes and you can get "sandboxed" for this. If you can find a fiverr gig that will spread out the links over a month or two it would be better.

3) A lot of the gigs will only offer you 1-3 keywords in the backlinking campaign. With Google's most recent update you will have to use a wide variety of anchor text/keywords. If you are buying several gigs it could work if you spread out your keywords.

I don't mean to talk badly about using fiverr because you are right, Andre, fiverr is a good resource. But, just be really careful with who you are using and make sure they provide good quality links. I actually use fiverr but I went through some pretty crappy gigs before I found some legit, good quality gigs.

Originally posted by Ken Latchers:
@Brandon

I agree with your assessment. THe same things can be applied to people found through EBay, virtual worker sites like eLance or rentacoder or vworker, etc. They claim to provide links, link from their "high PR" website, etc.

THere is no easy pathway to useful links

I found one of the best ways is to find a method that works and then hire a VA to follow your method step by step. But, even then social media seems to be plays a bigger role and is something I an experimenting with even more.

I just read "Platform" by Michael Hyatt.. excellent! He goes into great detail on how to blog successfully and build an audience.. not just general motivational info.. he gives step by step instructions with real websites to use and how to use them. ooh.. and Lots of good info on "how to Twitter" too..