I live in Chicago and would gladly like the opportunity to view your presentation. Any chance of getting a guest pass for your segment? or perhaps you could point me in the right direction so I can attend?

Matching media assets with channels of promotion are simply effective strategies for link acquisition on their own and could actually work in conjunction with gray areas if a company was so inclined.

Not all of the methods are gray in relation to blogging your way to the top via “blog posts on private networks”. Although it may be just a obvious as PR Web and the pay for post mentality, it is only one aspect of link development.

For the vast majority of businesses looking to eek out an existence on the web, much of the stuff that Google now prizes more highly (video, Podcasts, RSS et cetera) excludes them from greater success, since most of this kind of thing is completely inapplicable to their businesses.

For me, this is all smacks of Google pandering to the music labels and movie studios by giving them an artificial leg up over P2P file traders and illegal content…

A holistic strategy always sounds good but it may not be right for everyone all the time. It’s a game that moves as you play it, I believe.

I have to confess I’m bad at picking up the phone unless it rings, and often need to give myself a kick up the backside to get away from promoting the business online. Its a demanding thing though to be a online marketer, verbal communicator, and effective business networker – too many hats for one person to wear, so without a marketing team, you’re always going to fall short in some aspect or other.

Conversions are of course what matters – for my customers my responsibility often ends when they have the search engine results they were looking for. If these don’t turn into conversions, then strictly speaking its outside my mandate, but I often can’t resist getting involved to help sort such things out as, this is of course what really matters to the customer and their business, and what matters to us in terms of referrals, testimonials and good press.

I’d like to comment this part: “Rankings, traffic and links are not final outcomes”.

This is true: in many cases people are too focused on stats and rankings, risking to lose contact with the real world (:)).
Of course it depends on the type of site, but the majority of internet users don’t rely on the Page Rank of a web site when they look for a specific product or service, and we should take it into great consideration.

With regards to the use of different media on the web (articles, banners, videos…) there’d be a lot of things to say (in my opinion very interesting). But I don’t want to get boring… maybe in a future post.