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This post is a little satirical, please do not use it as solid advice. It is more of an accidental case study that happened to me and I wanted to share it with my readers.

Back on March 15th, I made a simple one paragraph post mentioning that I bought an iPhone. For those of you who didn’t know, the iPhone was one of 2007’s most hyped online product launches, and nearly every technology blog in the world was keeping tabs on iPhone news. This also means that since it was being searched for a lot, there were a lot of blackhat search engine spammers trying to steal their piece of the pie by their use of content theft. They scrape blogs around the world that mention the word iPhone and then post a piece of that blog post on their blog hoping it will rank for long-tail keywords.

Well, it turns out a lot of those blackhat blogs that steal the content off other blogs are still focusing on the iPhone niche, because even though that post was one of my shortest “blurbs”, it has received far more spammy backlinks than any other post. In a sad piece of advice, if you mention the word “iphone” in one of your blog posts, you just might end up getting a TON of low-quality backlinks. — While these backlinks won’t help a lot in raising your rank on Google, you can still ping them with Technorati to improve your rank.

Here is a screen-capture of all the trackbacks of blogs that linked to my post about the iPhone. If history is doomed to repeat itself, this post will also receive a ton of these blog mentions.

The following is a paid review and is my complete and honest opinion. If you would like your own paid review on my blog please visit the advertise page.

In the past few weeks, I have done a lot of conference calling with my friends over at Datepad.com, and there are two things I have learned from it. The first thing I learned was that a LOT of work gets done when you have a weekly phone call with your team to see what everyone has done and what improvements can be made. It makes doing business over the internet as close as it can be to working as if you were three feet away from your team. While conference calling is incredibly useful for small (and large) businesses, it does have one downfall. It is incredibly expensive and can rack up a serious bill at the end of the month. Lucky for you, todays paid review is a startup that hopes to change all that. The site that is being reviewed today is called AffordableConferencing.com.

Affordable Conferencing allows your business to have a conference call with a large (or small) number of people all connected to the same line, much like having your entire staff in your room. By getting everyone together, you can get a lot of work done in less time, and a lot of unique ideas get thrown out that wouldn’t have been heard if you talk to your staff on lets say, instant messengers.

Affordable Conferencing is prominent in offering a very personalized service, and fitting all of their customer’s needs. The company offers many different ways to get your audio conferencing the way you want it. They stride in being able to set you up in 5 minutes for your teleconferencing needs. The owner, Tom, is a down to earth guy and has continually offered me his phone number so that I may talk to him in person if I wanted to. This one-on-one service is what sets the powerful small startups from the ‘big companies’ that take weeks to reply to a simple support email.

The three main products that Affordable Conferencing offers are Econo toll free conferencing, a flat rate conferencing solution, and “Sunday School” teleconferencing. If you have a large company with around 250 employees, a monthly flat rate can get you the bulk price of only $1 per line per month. The weird thing is, if you get MORE than 250 lines, the price per line actually goes back up to $1.50 each, so it is incredibly expensive for a few lines, and for a lot of lines, but it is normal pricing for 250 lines. That seems a bit off in my mind, as you would think if you had 1000 lines, you would get them at a really bulk price of only $0.40-60 each instead of increasing the price from $1 each to $1.50.

Good Things

1. It is easy to use.
2. You can have it setup within 5 minutes.
3. They offer a direct line to call for support.
4. No overage charges.
5. Cheaper than a lot of very large conference calling providers.
6. They focus highly on customer support.
7. No advertisements other than the product.
8. Very brandable name, easy to remember.

Bad Things

1. For many small startups, $0.09 per person per minute is expensive.
2. If you have more than 250 lines, you lose your bulk benefits.
3. The site is an ugly “sales” page, rather than a nice looking site.
4. The right side is hard to read. Lots of information in a one inch column.
5. If you have 9 or less people, you can use a free alternative like Skype.
6. The $0.09 a minute is in ADDITION to your actual cell/phone bill.

Tom asked me if I could give him a little plug, and here is Tom’s quick 5 second pitch:

Conference Call ’til your heart’s content - Get your entire group on the phone at once! Sell more, get more accomplished fast!

In a nutshell, if you have 9 or less employees it is a wise idea to use a free internet alternative like Skype, but if you are a larger corporation it might be more affordable to consider getting flat rate conferencing.

I would like to personally welcome everyone who has visited my blog for the first time due to Mashable featuring a few of my easter eggs on their Mashable Easter Egg Wrap-Up post.

If you are one of the 150,000 daily readers of Mashable, I want to personally introduce myself. My name is Collin LaHay and I am an 18 year old internet marketer who makes my entire income on the internet.  My blog is about teaching everyone how to better market their blogs/websites, how to build links to raise your search engine rankings, and how to effectively make money from your blogs/websites.  If that sounds like something you are interested in, I recommend subscribing to my RSS feed.

To all of my current readers, if you are wondering what I am talking about, Mashable recently requested easter eggs that mentioned their blog on them, and I took the opportunity to make a few of these with my websites branded on them.  I had originally submitted a few different eggs for different clients, but only the one that featured my blog was posted publicly to the 150,000 daily RSS readers. For those of you who are curious, here are the pictures:

Find your perfect egg(companion) at Datepad.com

and the one that has provided me with many new readers:

Thanks for being creative and offering free publicity Mashable!

Everyone is familiar with search engine optimization (SEO), but I have just stumbled across some people who (accidentally) have optimized their videos to be heavily promoted. Have you ever considered making an advertisement/commercial video and submitting it to the video sites? Sure, everyone has. The problem is getting people to see it.

Well, have you considered registering a username for a typo of the site you are submitting to? Just looking at popular typos of youtube (such as youtub). — People’s videos have received literally MILLIONS of views. Imagine if instead of their stupid video it was a 5 second video advertisement… you would see a nice burst of traffic and sales!

For the visual learners, here are a few examples of accidental, video engine optimized pages.
http://www.youtube.com/hanggliding
Info: Ranks #1 for youtub
Result: Channel Views: 2,837,297

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPgA1nAWhLQ
Info: Ranks #1 for youtoob
Result: 112,872 views, useless video

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.Channel&ChannelID=88331292
Info: Use to be #1 for Facebookk, has since moved to #3
Result: 2500 views in a week.

(NOT SAFE FOR WORK) http://www.dailymotion.com/daily-motio (NOT SAFE FOR WORK)
Info: #1 in google for “daily motio” a typo of dailymotion.com
Result: 119663 views, 95 fans, 1328 favorites

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghn4-uFOjnk
Info: #1 in google for youtuube
Result: Views - 10,000+

This is only a sample list of the many possibilities…

—-

Here lies the real question… if these accidental videos can receive 5000 to 3,000,000 views… just imagine what making 10 of these videos and PURPOSEFULLY optimizing for these keywords could do. Think of any typo you can for your favorite video upload sites (youtube, revver, metacafe, dailymotion, etc), and create a username for it. Upload the video and call it the typo. You now have a powerful domain, related page, and related video that keyword and have a good chance at ranking #1 without even building any links.

Now, I do not have time to experiment with videos, but I thought I would give away a pretty ingenious way to build traffic for those that are interested. Who needs viral marketing humorous videos when you can appeal to the massive amounts of stupid people?