During the past eight years, I’ve learned a lot. I’m still learning new things every day, and I hope this will continue for years and years. When I was thinking about some of the things that I’ve learned thus far, I decided to write eight of them down.

 
1. People with the biggest mouths are not always right. Nor are people with the most experience, the best reputation or the most followers. The sole fact that you have eighteen years of experience doesn’t mean shit, except that you’re probably older than me.

 
2. Google makes the rules in SEO. If you’ve always blindly obeyed these rules, you’ve probably been thinking “Just wait until Google fixes things tomorrow, you mean spammer!” every day, for the past six years or so. Ain’t life a bitch?

 
3. Trial and error is the best teacher. Not an eBook, not a forum and certainly not some kind of 3-day online course. However, you can definitely use some of these sources to come up with ideas for things to test and try yourself.

 
4. Getting things done is the most important thing in online marketing. You can analyze things, write reports or fine-tune stuff all day long, but things don’t change unless you get shit done. Hit that publish button, press ‘send’ or kick someone in the nuts to make things happen.

 
5. If you never question anything or anyone, you don’t deserve to know the truth. If you want to believe that links don’t matter, or that 20,000 people a month are really searching for “ski chalet Miami, FL”, be my guest.

 
6. White hat link building is just the search engine friendly version of plain old marketing. You can talk about dofollow and nofollow all you want, but if you don’t know the principles of marketing, you’re doomed to fail.

 
7. Most SEO conferences are a just a nice way to see something of the world and to make your boss pay for your beer. Most of these conference’s networking events, on the other hand…

 
8. Paying for something only is a bad thing when the costs outweigh the benefits. It’s called ROI, and it not only applies on the CPM campaigns you’re managing for your clients, but also on the tools, forums, PR services, books, people, web hosting and many other things you use yourself. Don’t be a cheapskate.

 
Bonus lesson. Never, ever trust someone who calls him or herself a guru. If gurus are a disease, than social media gurus are a nasty STD. Okay, I didn’t need the full seven years to understand this one, it’s an important one to keep in mind ;)

 
Do you have any other important lessons to add? Like I said, I always love learning new things :)

This post, 8 Lessons I’ve Learned From Doing SEO, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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Although I still love working at Tribal, I felt it was time for a new challenge, which is why I decided to leave the company. Until the end of January, I will still do some work for Tribal. As of February, I’ll be completely independent.

So what’s next?

That’s what I asked myself when I decided it was time for something different. I love being creative, I enjoy testing & tuning, helping others gives me a boost, and trying new things is awesome as well. And all of this had to be part of whatever my next step would be.

A few months of thinking, brainstorming and talking things through, resulted in an interesting combination of developing & running a few (publishing) projects, taking on a few link building clients on my own, and teaming up with the brightest Dutch link builder I know. He happened to have a great link building domain name laying around, which is where you can see both our faces now.

The next few months will tell how this combination turns out to be, but I’m definitely looking forward to it :)

This post, Ready for New Challenges…, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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1. Time flies, things change
2. New Link Building/ SEO Colleague Wanted

Don’t be afraid, this isn’t a post about my son, but I just wanted to show you the main reason why things have changed enormously for me during the past year.

Personal Projects

In a few weeks, I will start working on a few personal projects more often and in a more structured way. Although this will partially be compensated by working less for Tribal, this will also mean that I have less time to blog. I do, however, still plan on blogging about link marketing quite regularly.

Less frequent, more in depth posts

This can only mean that I will have to drop the pace, but improve the size of my steps. More posts like the guide to creating link targeted content or 69 link building strategies will follow next year. I’ve already got quite a few ideas that I’ll be working out in the next few weeks and months.

No more Link Building this Week…

…but Link Building this Month in stead. Like I said, I will be raising the quality bar of all posts, starting in January. This also includes the Link Building this Week posts, which is why switching from a weekly to a monthly report is a logical choice, in my opinion.

So…

…now you know that things will change a little bit around here. Not a lot, but just a little bit.

This post, Time flies, things change, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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1. So many things to do and yet so little time

One of my colleagues decided it’s time to move on and will leave Tribal Internet Marketing pretty soon. He and I work pretty close and kind of manage the whole Link Marketing department. This means that Tribal’s looking for someone with link building related experience. The vacancy is so fresh that the profile of this new function isn’t even online yet, but I can assure you that it’s a pretty interesting job.

So, if you have SEO and/ or link building related experience and if you want to work together with me and several other very inspiring people (check out the video and other vacancies as well), feel free to drop me an email ;)

This post, New Link Building/ SEO Colleague Wanted, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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This post, It’s a boy!, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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Currently, I’m working on a few tests (hope I can give you some results soon) and working on a huge list of Social Media website. I hope to be back soon, maybe I’ll even be able to post some quality stuff then…

This post, So many things to do and yet so little time, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

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