As long as the focus is getting links, you’ll fail miserably. It’s like Guy Kawasaki says: “If the focus of a startup is to make money, it will fail.”

The idea that getting links is the objective is the result of bad reverse-engineering. The common idea is: “All successful, high ranking, website have many backlinks,…. therefore if my website has many backlinks, It will be successful and rank high.”

That’s like thinking: “All rich people have lots of money,.. therefore if I have lots of money, I’ll be rich.” (if you don’t understand why this is not correct, you’ll never be rich.)

Money is the result of some form of success, it is never the cause of the success. The same applies to links. Links are the result of some form of success, they never are the cause of the success.

To most this feels like a chicken and the egg problem (what’s there first? The success or the links?) If you really want to know what was there first, the chicken or the egg, then you’ll study evolution and find that neither one was there first. They evolved!

The same applies to success and links. They evolve from something else, something more basic. Trying to take evolutionairy shorts cuts by link building just doesn’t work. It may help a bit, but it hardly ever works.

Links do come by them selves, first from your friends and family, then from colleagues, then from customers, then from some newspapers, then from communities, and eventually, if you´re really good, from already recognized authorities in your field.

Most sites however, hardly get passed the colleagues and customer links. There’s a reason for that,..  But it is also necessary to recognize that in many cases, that’s all people want. Success is a very relative concept.

Posted by Peter (IMC)
http://www.brane.com.br/

Want to know the link-building methods that still work to improve your popularity? Read the article here.

If you’ve ever had stumbleupon, digg or technorati melt your hosting (raises hand) you know what I mean.

But here’s what your favorite marketing guru didn’t tell you about social network marketing and driving traffic through social networks.

Hobby oriented networks consistently get more users than social networks or business networks.

But then, a lot of marketers tend to forget that we’re flesh and blood people with personalities,  hobbies and interests… not just opt-in prospects to be captured by a squeeze page and measured by an analytics program.

Do you have hobbies?  Like, besides Internet Marketing? Maybe look for some hobby networks that you can actually have real conversations in.  You know… the kind that don’t include squeezing anyone.  You might just be surprised at the connections you make.

It’s amazing how interested people become once they actually know and like you.

Read the entire social network report at eMarketer.com