I don’t think I’ve read too many books that tell a lengthy list of people to stop reading two pages into the first chapter. So, in keeping with that spirit, if you need to learn how to get more links ASAP or don’t believe in using quality content as a marketing tool, this book review probably isn’t for you.

Ontolo‘s approach to link building is, in a word, fresh. The 100+ page ebook walks the reader through all the steps of their link building process and provides insight into why they go about their unique approach.

I won’t spoil all of the fun, but two of the areas that are especially interesting in the Link Building Book are linkable assets and the concept of “preciprocation.”

Authors Garrett French and Ben Willis spend a lot of time on linkable assets and I believe it’s a concept that a lot of link builders need to rethink. A few types of assets are easy to come up with — a blog post, a resources list, etc. — but the book does a good job of detailing an audit of your entire organization’s linkable assets, both real and abstract.

A few examples: Many companies have experts in one or more areas. Their knowledge and skill can lead to links in prominent publications, blogs and other media outlets. Does your company frequently hire? A lot of college sites frequently link to pages with relevant job openings. The Ontolo Link Building Book challenges the reader to think beyond traditional link building opportunities and to learn to leverage all of the existing assets at their disposal.

The concept of “preciprocation” is talked about at length too and is my favorite topic in the book. It is what Garrett and Ben call their biggest “secret” to their link building success.

The “preciprocation” concept is simple: promote the best content of others(especially including your link prospects) before they ask for it via links from your site and placed content, votes, newsletter mentions, Tweets or whatever platform or medium you have at your disposal. Link out lavishly to deserving content, even from competitors if appropriate. Use followed links. Expect nothing in return, though certainly do occasional outreach to let folks know that you appreciated and cited their work.

This is a philosophy that is rare in the entire online marketing world, but especially so in SEO and link building circles.The benefits of this strategy are numerous, but there are a few risks too. Openly sharing and promoting quality content is good for everybody. It educates readers and lets the ‘promoter’ become a trusted industry source, as well as providing a few links. The downside? Time. Actively searching for and promoting good content is a time hog. Not many organizations will have the time on their hands to spend an hour or more each day “preciprocating.” Another danger lies in “over preciprocating” and becoming the platform instead of the experts.

Garrett and Ben really believe in this idea, though, and it is a recurring theme throughout the book. They even go as far as recommending that “preciprocation” occur in every email that a link builder sends:

For example, if you haven’t contacted someone yet you could send preciprocation signals like this: “I really enjoyed your piece on X. In fact I mentioned in our email newsletter, to my twitter followers and added it to this massive roundup of our industry’s top resources (URL). Check it out and if you think it’s worthy, please mention it to your readers! Also, I’d like to interview you for an upcoming article – are you open to answering some questions for my readers?”

The Ontolo Link Building Book has tons of other goodies like link prospecting queries and even some quick email templates for link acquisition. If you are interested in getting  more out of your link building campaign or want to understand the strategy behind Ontolo’s success, definitely check it out.

Ontolo also has an extensive (free)  list of 77 resources for link builders that is a must-read even if you don’t read the book!

You can’t escape Facebook news these days. Next week’s nationwide premiere of ‘The Social Network’ – a highly fictionalized account of the company’s founding – has focused the lens of the media squarely on the social networking giant. I’ve read through in-depth profiles on founder Mark Zuckerberg, leaked log files and IMs from his days at Harvard, and a few financial projections on Facebook’s worth.

While all of those pieces were at least mildly interesting, the last topic was the one that most grabbed my attention. How much is Facebook worth? It depends who you ask.

Forbes says $23 billion. Sharepost says $26 billion. And Financial Times says $33 billion.

Those lofty numbers certainly jump off the page, but do they make Facebook a successful company?

In the technology world, success can sometimes be a hard thing to define. Profit has always been the best measuring stick for true success. After all, the reason almost all companies get into business is to make money. It seems simple enough. However, today the business model for most startups looks something like this: build/create something awesome, get users, figure out how to monetize or sell to the highest bidder.

Monetization is often low on the priority list and success is too often measured in users, followers, or fans, not dollars.

Certainly, it takes time to properly monetize a service on the web. Amazon, for instance, didn’t start turning a profit until 2001, 6 years after they launched. The wait was well worth it for them.

But was Amazon a ‘success’ in, say, 1998? Not at all.

In Facebook’s case, they are pulling in revenue. Since they are a private company there’s no way to know all the numbers, but reports have projected that they are making over $1 billion in ad revenue.

Don’t let that number fool you either though. Facebook has taken almost a billion dollars in venture capital alone. And 500 million users requires an awful lot of overhead.

As David Heinemeier Hansson wrote: “Facebook has been around for seven years. It has 500 million users. If you can’t figure out how to make money off half a billion people in seven years, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re unlikely to ever do.”

So while the wild popularity of companies like Facebook and the billions that they are said to be worth are nice, the numbers aren’t real. Headline-grabbing valuations are not indicators of success at all. They are just ‘Monopoly money.’ Somebody can say your company is worth $1B dollars but unless you are selling for that figure or bringing in that amount in profits it is all just fantasy money.

If you step away from the online world for a second, it helps to clarify how ridiculous some of these valuations are.

Let’s look at an overly simplified example of two coffee shops:

Coffee Shop A – 800 people per day with an average of $0.20 profit per customer

Coffee Shop B -  300 people per day with an average of $0.75 profit per customer

It’s clear to anybody who can make a couple quick calculations that Coffee Shop B is the more profitable and more successful company. Coffee Shop A might be more popular and maybe it has really cool events and a great location, but it isn’t monetizing nearly as well as Coffee Shop B.

If these were two Internet startups, things would end up backwards. Coffee Shop A would get all the buzz. You’d read about it on Techcrunch. All the ‘cool kids’ would be talking about it.  Some ‘expert’ would compare the two and choose the hip, more popular one. Then the expert would come up with a ridiculous method of assigning a dollar value to each of the users. Projections would be made and suddenly  Coffee Shop A is a billion dollar company. This is why you read headlines like “A $65 billion dollar value for MySpace?” (2007).

An inflated valuation figure is not ‘success.’ A million users is not ‘success.’ They may end up as by-products of success but if you are chasing after followers instead of dollars, you are doing something terribly wrong.

Google has always been obsessed with speed and their latest search innovation takes “fast” to a whole different level — Instant. Google Instant is a new twist on search that displays results as users type based on predictions. The new feature went live on Wednesday.

We’ve done some digging and came up with 7 things you need to know about Google Instant.

1. If a user stops typing and results are displayed for three seconds, it counts as an impression. This could make for a pretty significant change in the AdWords world. How will it affect the number of impressions terms get? Will users who type slowly create more impressions? It remains to be seen.
2. Yahoo! developed and “launched” a similar product in 2005. Called LiveSearch, engineers at Yahoo! created search technology that’s eerily similar to Google Instant. But Yahoo! only launched it on AllTheWeb, a smaller search engine owned by Yahoo!
3. Google Instant is localized. I couldn’t even get through typing “movie theaters” before it was suggesting a few location-based searches. Other searches like hotels, restaurants and shopping malls return similar results.
4. Users will save time. By Google’s calculations, the average searcher will save two to five seconds per search. That adds up to 3.5 billion seconds saved by all Google users. Wow.
5. Brand names are more important than ever. Currently, if you type “travel” in instant search with no spaces, Travelocity has the top five (!!!) results. Google’s Instant algorithm is predicting that the search query will be “Travelocity” and is showing results for that term. However, if you actually press enter and *really* search for the term “travel,” the results are much different. Travelocity doesn’t show up until number 8 and sites like Orbitz and Expedia jump to the front. If your brand name is similar to keywords you are targeting, Google Instant could bring a big boost in search traffic.
6. You can turn it off! If you hate Instant, Google still wants you to search with them. You can turn the feature off to the right of the search bar.
7. Instant searches can be tracked using Google Analytics. It’s not the easiest thing to set up, but after creating a new site profile and a few filters, you can start analyzing how users are searching for your site in Google Instant. Here is a great guide on tracking Instant in Analytics.

Gmail fail

Today a hacker got into my Gmail.

I got a strange notice on my BlackBerry saying that emails to my Gmail account were not being delivered. I figured Gmail was down or something. No big deal. A couple minutes later I got an email from my Bill that simply said “You hacked?” with an email I had sent him from my personal account 20 minutes earlier with a shady link that I had never seen before in my life. Yikes.

This was ruining my day already, but it got worse once I finally verified my account and logged in to my Gmail. It turns out I had “emailed” the link to, well, just about everybody I had ever emailed in the last four years. Ex-girlfriends. Fedex. Newspaper editors. Professors. Former employers. Fantasy football rivals.

I found out the hard way that spam doesn’t discriminate.

There was some good news though. Google managed to block most of the outgoing emails and saved me a lot of embarrassment.

After I realized that the situation wasn’t quite as bad as I had feared, I started trying to figure out how some “spam artist” in Lithuania got my Gmail information. My web browsing hadn’t been any different the past couple of days than it had been the past several years. I certainly didn’t disclose my login credentials to anybody else.

Eventually, I found that Gmail had been compromised at some point a few weeks or months ago and thousands of usernames and passwords had been accessed. I wasn’t the only one having the same issue this morning. It wasn’t my fault, right?

I’ve always told people that they need to change the passwords often, but I’ve never really done it myself. I think I’ve changed my Gmail password once, maybe twice, since I opened the account. So it turns out I did play a pretty big role in my account being comprised. It just took some shady dude to poke around in my account for me to realize my error in judgment.

My web-based email account is the information pipeline for my entire life — both online and off. For about 20 minutes, somebody had access to everything about me. They could find bank statements, passwords to other sites, names, and addresses. They could see when and where I was meeting up with friends, what kind of pizza I ordered last weekend, and what I was watching on Netflix.

The amount of information a spammer or hacker could gather by spending even 5 minutes reading through your emails is staggering. While I was lucky enough to escape the intrusion without any major damage, it was certainly a wake-up call.

Change your email password often. Change it right now. The 30 seconds of hassle every few weeks sure beats spending an hour explaining to your ex or your biggest client why you emailed them a “must-see” deal on some sketchy enhancement pills.

Illustration by anonymonk

One thing that boosts online conversion rates is accurate “scent trails.” Your ad should match your page content should match your branding should match your links…etc.

And it starts with your domain name.

When you’re a brand new, unique company (like Google or WebpageFX), there are no pre-associations about what your site should be. No scent trail to follow.

Google.com could just as easily have been a horse farm in Iowa.

But if you have a service or keyword as your domain name, your site better be a great resource for information about that keyword. Like birdfeeders.com.

You had a mental image of what to expect from birdfeeders.com, right? Birds and feeders all over the place. The site communicates, “you’re in the right place.”

Depending on your domain, you don’t have to go all out. Here’s the two best sites that fulfill their domain name scent trail:

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