Why on earth would I click an advertisement for “imprinted ceramic mugs” when Google has invested billions of dollars in technology to show me the absolute best, top-notch, high-quality, popular web site for ceramic mugs right there in the middle of the page? Quite a few reasons, actually, but the most salient one may be that Google has quite a few more billions riding on the accuracy and effectiveness of those ads that surround the natural results than the results themselves. Google’s stated mission is to organize the world’s information, but their balance sheet tells the real story: Google is an advertising company. That’s not to suggest Google neglects their organic search results; quite the opposite. Google’s search results are probably the best they can possibly be given the volume of information they have to process.

But the web is increasingly polluted with massive amounts of near-worthless information created solely for the purpose of improving search engine rankings or selling ads. This is nothing new; companies have been trying to game (or fix, or engineer) search engine rankings for years, and Google, with over 80% of search market share, is their primary target. But lately it’s become apparent that Google may be fighting a losing battle. Competition for those first ten slots of natural search results is so fierce, and the slots themselves so valuable, that Google’s engineers and search quality team face an endless, uphill battle as content and searches explode.

If you’ve ever tried to get your own site in the top natural rankings for very generic search terms – say “promotional products” –you know that it’s virtually impossible unless you already rank very high to begin with. You also know that placement on the third or fourth or twentieth page of those results is next to worthless – users simply don’t click “next” that often if they don’t find what they need.

In organic search, you’re competing against thousands of other businesses for those 5-10 precious first slots. You really haven’t got a chance. In fact, in many industries, those first 3-4 slots will always be taken by an aggregator (Yelp, Citysearch) or marketing company that spends thousands of dollars and man-hours building high organic rankings, only to sell off that ranking to businesses like you who are willing to pay for a listing on their service. This costs you money and results in lower conversion rates, because the customer now has to sort through the aggregator’s listings (many of which are artificially ranked based on the type of listing purchased) before they find an actual business to contact.

If that weren’t bad enough, the advertising dollars available to sites that rank well organically are so high that many sites that rank well don’t sell anything at all! Ever search for “kitchen knives” and get a site that has a whole lot of information about kitchen knives, a whole lot of ads for other sites that sell kitchen knives, but no actual kitchen knives that you can buy right there? These content sites exist solely to sell advertising, and they’re multiplying like wildfire. They’re built and managed by huge organizations with armies of low-paid freelance writers. These companies know exactly what kind of content Google is looking for, and they build it rapidly based on search popularity, current events, or anything that results in eyeballs and advertising clicks.

So, quite often you’re not even competing against your competitors. For businesses selling stuff online – reasonably generic stuff, that is, like shirts or hats or mugs – ranking highly in organic search is unrealistic. But that’s where my late-night epiphany comes in. If organic results are unreliable for so many search terms – if they take me to places that either don’t provide me with what I need or require additional steps to find what I’m looking for – then why shouldn’t I see if the ads do a better job? And if the ads are actually more effective and accurate at connecting me (as a consumer) with a given seller, shouldn’t those of you who sell online be using those ads too?

Many of you already are, of course. We build, manage and consult on pay-per-click campaigns for our clients, and most of them find those campaigns to be effective when created and managed properly. But many who come to pay-per-click do so out of frustration with their inability to rank well organically. I’m suggesting that it’s exactly the opposite – that pay-per-click is actually a better use of your time and dollars than investing heavily in organic SEO.

Why? Because pay-per-click is precise and targeted, a rifle round to organic search’s shotgun. Pay-per-click shows your product or service where you want it, when you want it and, in many cases, to whom you want it. More importantly, users respond to it. Google’s multi-billion dollar business model is built on it, and they’ve got it down to a science.

For me, pay-per-click ads often provide a more trustworthy link than a high organic result. That’s not to suggest that top-ranking organic results are necessarily of poor quality or filled with junk content, but I generally believe that an advertiser who is willing to spend money to directly reach someone looking for an imprinted ceramic mug is going to actually have that product for me to buy. The top organic result could well be a long article about decorating ceramic mugs for fun, peppered with ads and links.

There’s one other factor at play here: Within the last couple of years, Google radically changed the “quality” guidelines for their advertisers. For many years, a search on Google for nearly any product would bring up multiple ads for companies that would not and could not sell you that product – eBay, Target, Amazon and others would advertise for literally anything, just to drive users to their sites. While there’s nothing ethically wrong with that – it’s the digital equivalent of a billboard on the highway – it adversely impacted the perceived quality of the ads surrounding the search results.

So Google told advertisers that their ads had to not just be relevant to the search results (“Buy Aircraft Carriers on eBay!”) but also link to relevant content. Sorry, eBay – no aircraft carriers for sale, no ad. Now, this doesn’t prevent an advertiser from buying ads to link to their own content sites, but since they’ll pay every time somone clicks on that ad, they’re certainly fewer and far between. That’s why – at least for now – the ads you see when you type in “imprinted ceramic mug” may get you to a real vendor faster and more effectively than sorting through the organic results. And that’s why I’ve turned my attention away from organic search and toward pay-per-click, and why I think you should consider it, too.

This article also appears in Identity Marketing Magazine. Brent Buford is the CEO of eBlox.

Now, this is as simple as entering the segment of the URL path in webBlox:

Custom SEO URL Management in webBlox

Contact us with questions on implementing this feature.

In some cases, these services are more or less equivalent to their desktop counterpart and, in many cases, they go beyond them. Salesforce.com, for instance, has grown far beyond what is available in desktop customer relationship management applications like ACT! In other cases, the cloud software is a much simpler version of its shrink-wrapped competitors. While Google Docs will handle your short documents and basic spreadsheets with ease, you probably don’t want to build your 500-page textbook with it.

In all cases, these cloud-based alternatives offer a couple of key advantages over traditional software packages. First, they are accessible anywhere you have an internet connection. You don’t have to be on your computer or, if you have multiple computers – say, a desktop PC at home and a laptop at work – your documents, files, sales leads, and so on, are all available to both your computers at all times, and always in their current, updated version.

Second, these services make it incredibly easy to share things. Need to share a sales forecast with your other team members on the road? Just invite them to share your spreadsheet and all of you can view, comment and even edit the document in real time. Want to send some product image files to a customer and they’re too big for email? Drop them onto a cloud-based file sharing service and your customer can just grab them as easily as copying a file on their computer.

Finally, in many cases these services are either free or cheaper to run than their desktop counterparts. Services like Google Apps offer fully capable free versions, and even Salesforce.com, which is priced on a per-user basis per month, is often less expensive overall to use than an equivalent number of desktop packages because all of the infrastructure you would normally need to support internal software packages – servers, backups, tech support – is no longer required. Salesforce.com takes care of your backups, your upgrades and technical support.

A lot has changed since we last visited the cloud, so the next few columns will address the best services out there – the ones that have not only survived but thrived. Obviously, you’re concerned – as well you should be – about putting important business documents in someone else’s hands, and some business owners are simply allergic to the idea of their valuable files residing anywhere other than their own facility. For the rest of us, cloud services represent a quantum leap in convenience, access and affordability. This month, we’ll take a look at the cloud-based file storage/sharing services that just might make you put those flash drives back in your desk drawer for good.

Dropbox

While it didn’t woo me at first, I’ve grown to love a cloud storage service called Dropbox. For those of you that dig simplicity and ease of use, Dropbox is pretty tough to beat. Install Dropbox on all your computers and you’ve got a storage location right there next to your other drives that just works. Copy stuff to it, it shows up everywhere. Create a link to another folder on your computer, it keeps them all in sync. Need to share files with someone else? Dropbox generates the invitation email automatically and they can see your files just like that.

Dropbox comes with two gigabytes of storage – enough for a ton of documents – for free, and offers some reasonable yearly plans for upgrades to much larger capacities. If you want a bonehead-simple, cost-free method of syncing, storing and sharing files, Dropbox is pretty hard to beat. Honorable mention: If you’re a Mac-centric shop and you don’t mind paying an annual fee, the iDisk feature of Apple’s MobileMe service offers the same type of functionality, although I’ve found it does not perform as well as Dropbox, even on the Mac.

Box.net

If you’re looking for something a little bit more “corporate”, Box.net offers the same kind of storage you get with Dropbox but with a more “we mean business” feel. Box.net has four different service levels and their goal is clearly to earn your monthly subscription business. The service offers integration with a number of other cloud-based systems like Google Apps and a host of “OpenBox” applications that support Box.net’s storage model.

Box.net’s free version is limited to a paltry single gigabyte of storage, but their ten gigabyte pay service is a reasonable ten bucks a month. As you upgrade, you get access to project management tools and other features that appeal to corporate customers that do a lot of file management and collaboration. If you move a ton of files around, Box.net might be the best solution for you.

Skydrive

From a pure bargain standpoint, it’s tough to beat Windows Live Skydrive: 25 gigabytes for free. That’s a monstrous amount of storage for no charge, and Microsoft clearly wants to bring in as many customers as possible by throwing out an offer that’s hard to refuse. If you need massive storage and you’re already sold on Microsoft’s ecosystem – Windows, Live.com, Office, and so on – then Skydrive should be first on your list.

Skydrive and Live.com also integrate with Microsoft’s forthcoming web-based Office suite. That’s right: Microsoft, the king of shrink-wrapped desktop software, has seen its market share encroached by the likes of Google and is now releasing a free, web-based version of Office to compete with Google Apps.

Next month, we’ll talk about cloud-based sharing, project management and collaboration tools, including one that bleeds over between the file storage services discussed here and true real-time, online collaboration: Drop.io (www.drop.io). Check it out if you have time, and I’ll dive into that and a number of other great project collaboration tools next time.

This article also appears in Identity Marketing Magazine. Brent Buford is the CEO of eBlox.

When Apple released its new iPad tablet computer, very few (very few normal people, at least; all of us geeks were keen to it) may have noticed the omission of a web technology that’s pretty commonplace these days: Adobe’s Flash. Flash is a web browser plugin that is installed nearly everywhere; if you’ve viewed a video on Youtube, then you’ve used Flash. Many of you probably have websites that use Flash for introductory animations or to showcase product videos and demonstrations. It’s the most popular technology on the web for presenting video and interactive content.

That may soon be changing. Apple thus far has steadfastly refused to implement Flash technology on the popular iPhone, and the same goes for the new iPad: no Flash – not now, and probably not ever. Apple touts performance problems with Adobe’s Flash plugin as the main reason for this stance, but there are likely larger strategic motivations behind it – Adobe’s platform is “closed”, which means that Adobe controls how it works and what people can do with it. Technically, Apple’s iPhone/iPad operating system is closed as well, so there is more than a whiff of irony here. But Apple does have a lot of support in pushing for a world wide web that is based entirely on open standards.

What does that mean? Simply put, an open standard is something everyone can agree on; more specifically, it means a way of doing things that is not controlled by a single company or vendor, but is instead managed by a publicly accountable group. HTML, the main language of web pages, is an open standard. Anyone can use it, anyone can propose modifications to it, and no one pays royalties when they use it to build their own web sites.

Adobe’s Flash is a closed standard, in that Adobe owns the technology, controls the details of how it is licensed and implemented, and derives revenue from selling the software that enables you to create web sites, presentations and video in the Flash format. This is beneficial in the sense that no agreement is required among many parties to decide how to change or improve the software, so that advances in the technology can be made at a rapid pace. The downside is that what Adobe declares to be the standard, so the standard shall be. For Apple, that meant dependence on a possibly hostile competitor for delivery of web content. And with so much content delivered on the web now, Apple likely felt that a closed standard over which they had no control was a risky proposition. It didn’t help that Adobe treated the Macintosh version of the Flash plugin as a second-class citizen; Flash still performs poorly on the Mac compared to Windows computers.

Why would Adobe – or you, or anyone, for that matter – really care about Apple’s refusal to play nice with Flash? After all, Apple computers make up less than ten percent of the personal computer market as a whole. Enter the iPhone. You may not have one yet, but chances are a lot of folks you know are talking, surfing the web or playing a game on the iPhone right now. My parents, sister and roughly 60-70% of the people I know have one. While it may fight with various Blackberries for the title of the most popular smartphone, the iPhone possesses the overwhelming share of mobile browsing – more people browse websites from the iPhone than any other phone or smartphone in the world.

Even more important, the share of mobile browsing vs. browsing from a computer is on a steady rise. That means more and more people view websites via a mobile browser every day. When the most popular mobile browser out there – the iPhone’s Safari browser – doesn’t support Flash, that makes web site owners and content creators stand up and take notice. And over the last two years, thousands of websites have created mobile-specific versions that omit Flash components specifically for this reason. Even sites based almost entirely on Flash – like disney.com – now offer mobile versions for the iPhone with no Flash at all.

What does this mean to you, the business owner with a modest web site and scant budget for big Flash animations and videos in the first place? Many companies, even small ones, use Flash to produce very simple animations for their home pages, like scrolling product displays or quick slideshows. On an iPhone or iPad, these Flash animations show up as a blank box with a little blue “Lego” in the middle indicating that a plugin is missing. As more users access your website from the airport or a taxi or a beach chair, you need to be aware of what the web experience will be like for mobile users on sites that use Flash.

First of all, using Flash does not mean that you have to show users a blank box when they visit from a mobile device that doesn’t support the plugin. Adobe’s Flash tools include code to load alternate content when the Flash plugin isn’t available. So, if your site has an animation of multiple products on the home page, you can tell Flash (during the publishing process) to just load a single image or a frame of the animation when the Flash plugin is not present. This keeps your pages looking pretty, and the user is no wiser to the fact that they’re missing something.

If you embed Youtube videos on your site for product demonstrations, you likely won’t have to worry about that either – Youtube has a native application for the iPhone and iPad, so clicking on a Youtube video embedded in your website should bring up the Youtube player. Note that not all videos get encoded quickly to this different format, so it may take time for your video to be encoded in this format.

Finally, Adobe is working feverishly to produce alternative methods of publishing Flash content to non-Flash compatible devices – they have a very profitable franchise in Flash authoring tools, and they will happily create additional avenues for publishing interactive content provided they can sell the software behind it. Don’t count Adobe out by any means; if there is a way around Apple’s proscription of Flash, Adobe will probably find it. Apple’s goal may be to exterminate (or at least render trivial) Flash, but Adobe is a powerful company that will not go down without a fight (the fight has indeed already begun, across blogs, technology publications and any other forum where Adobe can defend its own stance).

For the weary web site owner, there is one other alternative, of course: Embrace open standards. HTML 5 (the upcoming version of HTML) promises many of the very features that have been exclusive to Flash for so long, like direct embedding of videos and animation. HTML 5 (really, all HTML) also has one keen advantage over Flash – easier search engine indexing. In a world wide web where search position is so critical, the more difficult job of preparing Flash content for indexing makes building sites with lots of Flash a pretty unattractive option. The rules I’ve mentioned here before still apply: Use Flash judiciously, sparingly, and make sure that users have an alternative. And be prepared for a long battle over the future of the web.

This article also appears in Identity Marketing Magazine. Brent Buford is the CEO of eBlox.

In case you haven’t noticed, everyone that was a search engine expert a few months ago and a “Web 2.0” expert a year or two ago is now a “social media” expert. The transition has occurred so rapidly that the biggest beneficiaries are the business card printers and web designers who have to crank out new brands and identities for the scores of self-styled social media consultants minted every day.

What constitutes a “social media” expert these days? In most cases, not a whole heck of a lot. Most social media gurus are simply folks who are a few steps ahead of the technology curve and got on Twitter and Facebook long before you did. They realize – as does CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and pretty much the rest of the world at this point – that web-based social networks are ubiquitous and free. Whether or not social media offers any tangible benefit to your particular enterprise is often beside the point to these people – they want you promoting your business there, because, well, they’re promoting their business there, so it must be the right thing to do.

But, as I’ve discussed before, the benefits of social networking and media like Facebook and Twitter are minor for many businesses. That often doesn’t matter to social media experts, who tend to assume that you “must” participate in every possible venue in order to fully promote your business. What they won’t tell you is when that might actually be a waste of your time.

The problem is this: There really aren’t any established formulas or strategies for promoting most specialized businesses with social networking and media. Social media can be extremely effective for any type of brand that typically has “fans” – for instance, a movie, a restaurant, a club, or any kind of well-known personality. It tends to benefit and reinforce existing celebrity and, occasionally, make new things popular.

But, while Oprah may get a million followers on Twitter in a matter of weeks, you’ll be lucky to get thirty or forty of them over the course of a few months. Let’s face it – the latest eco-friendly polo just isn’t as sexy as whatever Ashton Kutcher happens to be doing at this particular moment in time. Further, when you realize that a lot of folks use social media to escape from the drudgery of the workplace – if you don’t believe me, go ask your IT department to block Facebook and Twitter and watch the reaction of your under-40 employees – you’ll understand why social media may not be the ideal platform for trumpeting your latest free setup special.

Nevertheless, should you find yourself looking to create or reinforce a “hip” brand, or touting your own expertise and personality as a selling point for your business, hiring someone with some experience in social media might make sense as part of an overall marketing strategy. Since social media is a relatively new phenomenon and most so-called “experts” don’t come with an extensive, years-long track record (if they claim they’ve been experts in social media for ten years, walk briskly in the other direction), here are some tips to help you evaluate them:

Ignore their stats: The quantities of a social media expert’s followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook are meaningless. Friends and followers can be gained through countless means and are no indication of someone’s suitability for any given task. If your candidate touts such numbers as an indication of expertise, that’s a mark against them.

Be wary of numbers games: Many social media experts will propose that gaining fans and followers is the most important thing you can do, and they’re the only ones that can help you get there. But acquiring fans and followers doesn’t guarantee any benefit for your business. If those fans and followers don’t actually care about what you have to say and never act on your updates or attend your events, their numbers don’t add up to much.

Ask about a bigger picture: If your expert truly understands social media strategy, they’ll explain how fans and followers do matter as part of bigger picture. For businesses looking to maximize exposure in search engines, good numbers of Twitter followers can translate into better search engine results provided that your Tweets are worded correctly. Twitter is rapidly becoming a huge source of instant inbound links, which is why so many businesses are turning to it. But again, numbers are meaningless if the formula for relevancy doesn’t add up (Facebook, unlike Twitter, is largely closed off to search engines, thereby severely limiting its SEO impact). If your social media expert doesn’t have a plan that explains and lays out the SEO impact of their strategy, you might want to look elsewhere.

Beware idle hands: The last time I checked, something like 85% of Twitter accounts have one Tweet (update) and then are never active again. Your candidate should present a solid plan for you to create regular updates and avoid the “one-and-done” problem that plagues so many social media endeavors. Acquiring numerous fans and followers and then dropping the whole effort might even be worse for your business than never getting involved in social media in the first place. Those people who do actually want to know what’s going on might wonder what the heck happened to you!

Establish some tangible goals: “More Twitter followers” might sound like a reasonable goal – and it probably is, if you’re a celebrity, a blogger or a personality that can benefit directly from simple exposure. But for most small and medium-sized businesses, you should expect something a little more tangible from a social media strategy. Maybe you want to gauge the impact to certain promotions and events, or you want to juice your audience for short-term specials that you might run. Or perhaps you want to see a measurable improvement in position for certain search terms. Ultimately, you want to make more money (I hope) and your strategy should point to that. At the end of the day, your candidate should have a plan that impacts your top line in some form or fashion. If your input and coordination are required to establish monetary goals, be prepared to discuss exactly what it is you’re looking for. A social media expert may not be able to speak directly to sales numbers, but they should be able to work with you toward establishing some targets.

Control the engagement: Social media experts, like many SEO/SEM companies, are looking for long-term engagements that provide consistent revenue. They often use the same formulas and tactics for most of their customers, and their primary sales objective is to sign you up for a monthly fee to manage your social media strategy (in fact, SEO/SEM companies now constitute a great deal of the social media expert landscape). You should pay for performance and avoid long-term agreements whenever possible. Work with your candidate to establish metrics for success and make those metrics part of the engagement. Since this is primarily a consulting arrangement, don’t push for discounts, refunds or bonuses based on performance, but do give yourself an out if the relationship isn’t working.

Essentially, Google is looking to index information in a more meaningful way so that computers can understand it and provide better results to users. Right now, when Google looks at something like a product page, it really doesn’t know the difference between something like an imprint area and an imprint method, because they are both simply textual information. Google may understand them in the sense that they are similar to other terms in other places, and it may be able to help you find something using that similarity, but at the root, Google doesn’t really know what those terms mean.

XML gives us the ability to structure data in a meaningful way, but it isn’t necessarily available to Google in an html web page. It is only meaningful within a system or when exchanging data with another system.

RDFa attempts to structure and label data in a way that in meaningful to a computer. The development of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) pointed web content in the direction of semantic markup, but RDFa takes this much further by explicitly defining the structured content in a web page for the purpose of indexing and understanding.

If all this is making your head spin, think of this: What if you saw an event on a web page, and could automatically add it to your calendar, with all details correct, with just a single click? What if you could compare the lead times of products across many different websites just using a search engine – say, to find the vendor that has the fastest turnaround time for a given product?

That’s what Google is shooting for, and we will be testing these features and incorporating them into storeBlox over the next few months. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Mondo Tees is operated by the fine folks at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, another great Austin company.

Mondotees.com showcases two great strengths of storeBlox: Complete design customization and apparel management. eBlox also built a JavaScript-based dynamic image slider for the homepage that loads thumbnails for all the products in the site and then allows a visitor to quickly scroll through them.

eBlox also developed custom listing styles for categories and searches, and used the storeBlox Banner Management system for rotation of header images on every page load.

The result? A dynamic, appealing merchandise site with a lot of visual “wow!” Check it out!

We’re very proud of both sites (and many others!) and are happy to see storeBlox-driven sites take these big honors from the premier association for the promotional products industry. Both sites are products of much sweat, hard work and intensive collaboration with the clients.

Both sites showcase the extensive customization capabilities of storeBlox, as well as a wide variety of custom-developed distributor tools that enable both suppliers’ customers to market, sell and purchase their products easily.

Please check them out at advalite.com and promote.3m.com. You can view the Web Awards winners here.

PageRank is critical to understand (or at least know how to find) because it affects the quality judgment of inbound links. If a site with a very high PageRank links to yours, it can have a positive effect on your ranking; PageRank is “passed on”, to a degree, to the site that receives the inbound link. Conversely, a site with very low PageRank offers little value to your ranking. This is why trading links with your buddy’s nifty new website won’t accomplish much (most such “link-swapping” tactics are completely ineffective); you’re both passing on nothing of much value to each other. So, the goal in building inbound links is to get those links from sites with higher PageRank than your own.
Even this can be problematic, because Google is on the lookout for anything that might pass PageRank inappropriately – that is, without actually reflecting quality. That means that a lot of sites that you might consider as possible venues for building inbound links will actually not help you. For instance, advertisements, blog comments and many other commonly used tactics for building inbound links no longer pass PageRank to the target site. Google has even removed many common directories from its page ranking algorithm.

With all these barriers to building quality inbound links that pass PageRank to your site, what can you do to increase your ranking? Truthfully, unless you have a bundle of money to go out and increase your business’ exposure, your choices are fairly limited. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do everything in your power. Search engine optimization for most small businesses is about using best practices to get whatever exposure you can realistically obtain.

First, know what you’re up against. You need information, and the first place you’ll go to find that is Google’s Tools for Webmasters. Register and verify your site – it’s free (you’ll have to ask your designer or webmaster to upload a small file to your site). Webmaster Tools offers up pretty much all the diagnostic information you’ll need, albeit in a somewhat technical format.

The “Links” section is where you’ll find all the juicy information. To determine how many inbound links you have, click on “Pages with External Links.” Google provides an exact count of the number of inbound links to each page on your site (often, most of them go to your homepage) and the actual URL of the pages that have those links. This is the dashboard, if you will, of your inbound link generation activities.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to increase the number of inbound links from sites with higher PageRanks than yours, with all the above caveats in mind. Tough job, no? It takes time, so start with the obvious ones first. Get in every online business directory that makes sense – local, regional, industry-specific, etc. Some of these pass PageRank and some do not, but the ones that don’t shouldn’t hurt you.

Next, participate in social networking and online communities, and make sure you reference your site when it’s feasible (and not annoying). Again, many of these may not pass PageRank, but the ones that do, especially if they have content relevant to your website, can benefit you.

Finally, generate buzz everywhere you can! Traditional marketing and press releases are actually excellent tactics for generating inbound links, because so much press coverage is online now. That press release that makes it into your local business journal may not seem like much, but if it has a link back to your site, it might help you.

Perhaps most important, remember that Google does everything in its power to measure real popularity. It’s getting tougher and tougher to game the system, so your best strategy is to build inbound links naturally, over time, by having a quality website. It’s an ongoing process, and you should check into that dashboard every month. With luck and a little hard work, you’ll watch those links grow.