When YouTube announced last week that it would be offering five films from the Sundance Film Festival for $3.99 a pop, it wasn’t a big deal because people no longer had to make like Ari Gold and Vinny Chase from Entourage to view some of the best independent films upon their release.

Michael Schwartz

Michael Schwartz is an Internet marketing strategist at Vertical Measures as well as an accomplished reporter, blogger and editor. He covers the link building beat.

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The SEMMYs, an annual online award event in the SEO industry, nominates posts for recognition on a variety of topics. We’re proud to announce that this year one of our posts has been nominated as a SEMMY finalist in the category of reputation management. Our readers may remember reading the extensive and thorough post "Be Proactive With Your Reputation Management" (posted September 18th) now nominated for the award. We discuss the importance of being proactive with your online reputation management, and give you 16 opportunities to dominate the search engine rankings for your business name.

As a SEMMY finalist our readers, friends, family, and connections are able to vote for our post to win the prestigious award. Voting closes this Friday, and we’d be thrilled if you took a few moments to vote: here. Feel free to pass on the word and help us win by telling your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or via e-mail. We’ve made it easy, just copy and paste: VM made the 2010 SEMMY Awards Finalist list in category: Reputation Management!!! http://bit.ly/SEMMYFinalist Vote 2day!

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

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If you know a thing or two about search engine optimization then you are likely aware of how important creating link worthy content is (and probably know how hard creating it can be as well). Recently our founder, Arnie Kuenn, came to the Vertical Measures team with an idea: lets do a series of video interviews with experts in our field. We’re in Phoenix, many Internet experts are here in Phoenix, why not? Within two weeks the concept, "2010 Predictions from 10 Internet Experts", was developed, experts were contacted, the recording took place at GreenScreenFX, videos were edited, and promotion had started.

Was it successful? For us, yes: we’re an Internet marketing company and appreciate the power of a link. For a relatively small investment (time to shoot videos/promote/organize, and money it cost to film/produce/edit) we accumulated MANY backlinks from different domains (325 links according to Site Explorer). Not to mention the publicity we received from our post: Business Journal picked it up, many bloggers did as well, and we were featured in Search Engine Lands Search Cap on January 15th. In addition: 

2000+ page views, 120+ retweets, 3800+ results on Google, 49 Sphinns, top 5 Google ranking for term "internet experts", and 150+ views on Stumbleupon.

We are extremely thankful for the Internet experts who agreed to the interviews, as well as our staff for putting the time and effort into this project. You too can create your own successful link worthy content piece with the below tips for creation and promotion: 

A Few Link Worthy Content Ideas

Interviews: Just as we’ve done, take an interview (or interview series) and turn it into something applicable for your business. Instead of just interviewing over the phone or via e-mail, why not video the interview or interview in a non-traditional setting, like on Twitter (as Jay Baer does: The Twitter 20)?  Ask interviewees for their predictions, tips, tools, secrets, their take on controversial topics, etc.

Whitepapers: An expert in your field? Write about it in an informative and interesting whitepaper. Give away a few of your trade secrets, and don’t be afraid to give truly valuable information!

Lists/Tips: It may sound like old news, but creating lists and top tip type posts or articles are highly linkable…if done well. Make sure your blog post or article is extremely helpful, interesting, and not just a reiteration of old news.

Promoting Link Worthy Content

Ask connections: Don’t be afraid to ask your friends, family, and professional connections to help get the word out about your link worthy content. They might just be the spark that ignites the conversation and buzz about your content.

Press Release: Distribute an online press release about your new content. Many online press release distribution sites will get the word out, links back to your website, and traffic to your site as well.

Social Media: Send out tweets, post on your Facebook fan page, submit your content to bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, and others, and don’t forget about LinkedIn. If your link worthy content is centered around expert feedback or insider information, LinkedIn will prove essential: other professionals in your industry will want to get the insider scoop.

Creating link worthy content and promoting it, is probably the very best strategy for obtaining those highly valued "editorial" links.  If people voluntarily discuss your content and link to it, those links often provide the very best link juice for your website.  Feel free to list some other link worthy content ideas in the comments below.

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

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Our industry is an ever growing one. With the rapid growth of Internet usage comes expansion in social media, online marketing, and so on. Here at Vertical Measures we feel that it’s important to engage younger generations, and get them as excited as we are about marketing and social media! The more bright minds in our industry the better!!

For this reason we will be rolling out our Valentines Day inspired creative contest, giving away one $1,000 scholarship to a lucky winner, and a $250 second place prize. This contest will be open not just to High School students, but to College and Graduate students too. The winner has the option of choosing an alternate prize of an Apple iPad Tablet (64GB Wifi Model, available in March), instead of the scholarship. We thought this would be a great prize for a future Internet marketer, although money can be just as useful!

The scholarship contest will allow entrants to flex their creative muscles and will encourage research to gain knowledge about key Internet marketing and social media terms. Don’t know much about Internet marketing and terms? That shouldn’t stop you from entering this great contest.

Check back to our blog on February 1st for more details on our Scholarship contest, or subscribe to our blog…..and dust your keyboard off.

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

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In the Phoenix Metro area on January 25th and interested in social media for your business? Check out Social Media AZ, an event for local business professionals to learn from experts in the field. Our own Arnie Kuenn will be presenting "Social Media and Search" at the event. Several other presenters will be there including Jason Baer (Convince & Convert), Noah Plumb (GoDaddy), Laurie Buczek (Intel), Mike Corak (Off Madison Avenue), and Jeff Moriarty (Sitewire) just to name a few. This will be a great way for business professionals to learn more about social media, and search engine marketing.

The event will be held at the MadCap Theaters in downtown Tempe, and tickets are still available for purchase. Use discount code ‘smazzie’ to get a whopping 45% off your ticket! Quite a few of the Vertical Measures staff will be in attendance. Hope to see you there!

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

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