Whiz Kid Entrepreneur: Harrison Gevirtz

Earlier this year at SMX West, I met (then) 15-year-old entrepreneur Harrison Gevirtz. He was on a panel with my (then) 16-year-old daughter Chloe Spencer the owner of the Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site. Harrison blew my mind. Here’s a kid who travels the world, often times makes six figures a MONTH, and lives the high life and he isn’t even old enough to vote let alone drink. I got a chance to chat with him and get a bit of an inside view on his rock star lifestyle. Read on and perhaps you can glean a few secrets to his success and perhaps repeat that for yourself…

For many self-made Internet marketers, Harrison Gevirtz is already a legend. He’s a whiz-kid 16-year-old globe-trotting Internet advertising genius who pulls in six figures a month. How does he do it? Is it legal? What about school? What are his secrets? The rules of online marketing have changed and it’s kids like Harrison who are driving this new future. If you are smart enough, and creative enough – with the tenacity to make your own rules – perhaps you too can drive this new future. So much for needing a college degree or to graduate high school to really get somewhere in this world!

You might guess that Harrison doesn’t think too much of school and may be a dropout. He tells me he goes to “Continuation School” and is in a special program called “Independent Studies”. This means he goes to school 1 day per week for about 45 minutes! He collects his assignments and then is done until the next week when he repeats the process. This program will allow him to graduate school normally in four years. Kids – don’t try this at home! Harrison has an unusual gift and this type of school arrangement is not beneficial for everyone. Most kids (mine for sure) need more structure to prepare them for college life and their career. Harrison’s lifestyle is the exception.

With this loose of a school schedule, what does a typical day looks like for Harrison and how many hours a day do he work? Keep in mind he is still a teenager, regardless of his genius – so yes – he does sleep late and starts his day around noon. The luxury of this income obvious allows him the ability to set his own schedule. He chooses to travel a lot too — whether it’s Taipei or Monte Carlo or the Bahamas, he looks for any excuse to hop on a plane. When he’s not on the road he works most of the time, ordering lunch, which he says, allows him to keep working at his computer. Yes, this is the picture of a young workaholic, potentially addicted to his computer and the Internet at the tender age of 16. He tells me though that he doesn’t live his entire life in front of the computer. “I do like to go out with friends, go eat out and have fun like a normal teenager does. But I’m still really motivated. I do most of my work during the night (which neither of my parents approve up), but usually end up going to bed around 2-4am.”

Harrison is a dealer-maker. He relies on old-fashioned networking to establish direct relationships with advertisers. He brokers out many deals with various advertisers ranging from small web stores having the privilege to market products exclusively, onto larger various lead-generation advertisers. His secret? You bet he’s not telling. He won’t deny though that he often pulls in six figures a month. He admits that affiliate marketing can be very fast-paced and not very consistent. He’s more focused on his work than the bottom line and admits that not every month is a whopper, “when I don’t make six figures in a month it’s OK; there’s always next month!” Ah – the role of youthful optimism comes into play for this Internet advertising hero. Harrison is known to be a Super Affiliate, yet claims he is not. Which networks does he prefer to work with? He thinks very highly of CX Digital and Neverblueads, but he’s reticent to go into a larger list or provide many details (and of course I don’t blame him!). Harrison emphasizes that he is focusing more on making deals directly through advertisers now instead of going the affiliate route.

In addition to having an unconventional school and work life, Harrison’s lifestyle allows for him to travel extensively. He tells me that about 90% of his travel is for business. At the time of our interview he was in Boston for a meeting. In 2008 alone he said he has been to Denver/Boulder, San Francisco, New York City, the Bahamas, India, France, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and London, to name a few! Of the more exotic locales, the Bahamas was for pleasure, India and Amsterdam were for business, and France was a mix of both (mostly for pleasure, but Harrison’s wise to the value of tax deductions so he worked in a bit of business there too). Considering the circles Harrison networks in, the super-exclusive Elite Retreat conference run by superstar online marketer Jeremy Schoemaker (“Shoemoney”) was — despite the $5000 price tag — a no-brainer for him. He found it to be well worth it: “Elite Retreat was great… the conference was very unique because all the attendees were willing to share information about what they do and not be secretive. I learned quite a bit, not only from the speakers but also just as much from my fellow attendees.” Clearly conferences are important for Harrison, to network and to strike deals. For him, ad:tech NYC so far has been the best conference for this. He is also very complementary of “boutique conferences” like the Elite Retreat which “provide knowledge on a whole different level.”

He may be a genius, but he still makes mistakes and learns from them just like the rest of us. He admits that being overconfident with various projects and campaigns has been a pitfall and caused him significant losses from time to time. One example of this was when he was first starting out and earning his first profits from PPC advertising. He had a small campaign that he was spending about $30 per day from which he earned only about $75 per day. In his learning process he thought the best way to scale it would be to double the bids because even with a double cost per click he figured he would still be profitable. The result was an increase in his budget from $30 to $1,000. He was overconfident in his strategy and quickly lost $1,000 in a single day. From this experience he learned his lesson about how to efficiently scale up a campaign. Harrison’s risk-taking has paid off for him though — big time. But there is a constant risk. He can’t take his eye off the ball; he works incessantly. He also has to hold his own in a business world full of adults who don’t take teenagers seriously — not a small feat. In fact, Harrison says his greatest challenge this year has been in negotiating with various online media companies as a youth. While he finds this to be very frustrating, often there’s not much he can do about it. It’s not personal, but the policy of many affiliate networks and ad networks requiring users to be 18 years or older is a serious roadblock. He’s shared in other interviews how in the past he has been terminated, not paid, and taken advantage of by numerous networks because of their legal terms and minimum age requirement. Harrison advises other entrepreneurial kids to demand respect despite their age.

So where does Harrison see himself in ten years? He hopes to be living somewhere abroad, preferably Europe. He’s not sure if he’ll be pursuing the exact same business model that is working so well for him now, but he hopes to stay in this industry and continue to have the flexibility to work from anywhere.

How can high schools and universities inspire and prepare more students to achieve what Harrison has achieved? In his opinion he doesn’t think schools inspire students to come up with ideas or to establish a drive to accomplish something. But, he thinks that some professors can be influential and help you make future decisions that can improve your life. He thinks high schools and universities should better prepare students by offering more real-world, relevant business curriculum, instead of useless broad information.

Harrison’s latest business ventures that he was willing to share include BlitzLocal, his local-focused SEM firm, and LeaderClicks, his social advertising network. Harrison also invites readers to check out his blog.

Widget Best Practices

The following is from a handout I developed for my presentation on the use of widgets in online retail at the Shop.org Strategy & Innovation Forum earlier this year. It’s a checklist of widget best practices. Enjoy! (There’s also a Word doc version of this available for download: widget_checklist.doc.)

Thinking of developing a widget for folks’ desktops, mobile phones, blogs, or social networks (e.g. Facebook or MySpace)? First off, you need to decide what type of widget you’re going to be developing. There are three types:

• Desktop (or Dashboard) Widget: Installed on your computer. Platforms include Yahoo Widgets, the OS X Dashboard, and the Windows Vista sidebar. One example is the customer-developed widget for the Mac that monitors availability of the daily product at Woot (http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/shopping/ wootcom.html).
• Web Widget: For your blog or social media app like Facebook, MySpace, etc. One example of this is the LastFM widget (http://www.last.fm/widgets/) which allows you to “share your music anywhere.”
• Mobile Widget: For mobile phones on the DotMobi domain, as well as iPhone-specific widgets. Some examples at https://www.widsets.com/index

When planning and developing your widget, it might be helpful to keep the following in mind…

FUNCTIONALITY / UTILITY
• Is your widget useful to your target audience? What’s the hook (incentive) that will compel them to install it or use it? Does the widget solve the user’s business problems? Does it save them time or money, or make them more productive? Users listen to WII-FM (“What’s In It For Me?”).
• Are the functions your widget provides on-message with your brand?
• Is the data delivered by the widget always fresh and up-to-date?
• Are there features that leverage the community of users?
• Does your widget have the capacity to go viral? In other words, is it contagious? And is it “slippery” – in other words, easy to share or distribute to friends?

FINANCIAL
• Is your widget ROI positive?
• What are your objectives? Brand building? PR? Links? Lead generation? Driving conversions? Increasing the customer’s AOV?
• Set realistic marketing and ecommerce goals for the widget and track success.
• What is your budget for widget development and maintenance? What if your widget is a huge hit…do you have an action plan in place to upgrade all aspects of service?

PERFORMANCE & RELIABILITY
• Monitor and evaluate the widget’s server reliability (uptime). Fully QA and stress test the widget.
• Determine the widget’s loading time and optimize it for maximum performance.
• If it’s a blog widget, make sure it doesn’t hold up the rest of the blogger’s page from loading quickly if the server that serves up your widget becomes unresponsive.
• What is your adoption rate of your widget? Conduct traffic volume scalability testing to ensure your widget’s servers can cope.

TECHNICAL
• If a web widget, does its HTML code validate?
• Is the widget code well-documented (for the benefit of your programmers)?
• If a web widget, will updated versions of the widget require that the blogger/webmaster update your code they inserted into their template?
• If it’s a Flash-based widget, does it have an HTML wrapper?

USABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY
• Evaluate the usability of the widget’s user interface and of the installation process (via surveys, focus groups, and/or usability consultants).
• Does your widget follow the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle? Don’t try to make the widget do too many things; stay focused.
• Design your widget for the market you are targeting. Use language that they identify with.
• Consider allowing the user installing the widget to customize its look to their own tastes.
• Check for browser compatibility on various versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.
• Check for platform compatibility on various versions of Windows, Mac, Linux.
• Conduct international usability tests. Does the widget offer localized content for international users? Has the widget been translated into foreign languages?
• Is the site mobile device friendly?
• Is the widget usable for people with disabilities?
• If a blog widget, is the widget printer friendly? Or does it mess up the formatting of the page when printed?

SEO
• Don’t neglect PageRank as your incentive to build widgets. If nothing else, a good widget can serve as link bait, driving lots of inbound links to your web site.
• Web widgets can pass PageRank from the website where the widget is placed to your site, but only if done correctly. To help increase your chances of the links being counted for PageRank:
• If your widget is coded in JavaScript, place your text links outside the JavaScript, or use a “noscript” tag.
• If coded in Flash, you can utilize progressive enhancement or an HTML “wrapper”.
• For iframe widgets, place your text links outside the iframe, or use a “noframe” tag.
• The best widgets for SEO are WordPress widgets (written in PHP) or HTML-based widgets because the widget’s HTML code, including links and content, is fully accessible to spiders and integrated into the rest of the blog’s HTML. WordPress widgets are similar to WordPress plugins.
• Include relevant keywords in the anchor text of the links back to your site. For example, instead of a link saying, “Your Brand,” spice it up some and say “Your Brand’s Weather Widget,” or other keyword text that describes what your widget is about.
• If it’s a blog widget, have a plugin version of it for major blog platforms such as WordPress. Thus the links and content generated by the widget will become integrated into the rest of the blog’s HTML code, and the links will appear more “real” to the search engines.
• Create your links with a “target=_blank” code so that webmasters are less inclined to remove the link. Some webmasters believe that widgets “steal’ traffic from their website or blog.

Monitor the Back Channel

It’s hard enough presenting in front of an audience of a dozens or hundreds of your peers, let alone to be paying attention to what’s happening on Twitter at the same time. But that’s exactly what a good presenter or good moderator needs to do these days. Particularly if you’re presenting to a tech-savvy audience.

Checking for real-time online feedback on your session is called “monitoring the backchannel.” One of the most famous recent incidents where a speaker should have monitored the back channel but didn’t was Sarah Lacy’s interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at the South by Southwest conference this year. That session went very pear-shaped for Sarah as she pursued lines of questioning that frustrated and aggravated the audience. Sarah was blissfully ignorant as the audience began to turn on her.

That thankfully hasn’t happened to me (yet). But I did get a reminder that the audience is twittering about you while you’re on stage. Last week when I presented at the SEOmoz Expert Training intensive, I preceded Danny Sullivan. He was sitting in the audience during my session. I was doing a solo presentation, so I didn’t have time to check the back channel. After I was finished, I saw that I suddenly had dozens of new Twitter followers. That was a surprise. “What the heck happened?” I thought to myself. I found the answer soon enough. It was all instigated by Danny’s tweets about me:

watching @sspencer explain new loophole for shooting to the top of google rankings in one day. amazing stuff, wow. 01:34 PM August 20, 2008 from twhirl

@mattcutts just joshing. @sspencer is being very good, doing amazing job talking about vertical search and seo opps and tactics 01:34 PM August 20, 2008 from twhirl in reply to mattcutts

@presellpageman @sspencer is presenting at the seomoz.org training seminar. i was ses yesterday; seomoz today; gnomedex on friday. busy week 01:39 PM August 20, 2008 from twhirl in reply to PresellPageMan

If only I were better at multitasking while presenting, I’d have picked up on this and worked some funny quips about it into my presentation.

I remember from Dan Lyons’ (Fake Steve Jobs’) keynote at Web 2.0 Expo he was poking fun at Robert Scoble’s suggestion that speakers take a “Twitter break” every 10 minutes or so to keep on top of the backchannel. It’s actually not a bad suggestion, although it may not be for everybody (such as Dan Lyons, for instance!).

Bumper Sticker Wisdom

Here are some cute bumper stickers that caught my eye recently:

• Miracles happen. Sh*t happens. It’s a package deal.
• Spiritual people inspire me. Religious people frighten me.
• So many men, so many reasons to sleep alone.
• Will somebody please give George W Bush a bl**job so we can impeach him

Return a 404 When You’re Supposed To, Or Get Dinged by Google

A friend’s website’s Google rankings have tanked after their redesign. And I think I know why. Have a look at the status codes their web server returns when you request a garbage URL (a page that couldn’t possibly exist)…

#lwp-request -S www.randomcompany.com/dafsadf
GET http://www.randomcompany.com/dafsadf –> 301 Moved Permanently
GET http://www.randomcompany.com/search?q=dafsadf%20 –> 200 OK

A 301 followed by a 200. Oh noooes!

That REALLY should be a 404 status code instead.

Make sure that garbage URLs like www.yourcompany.com/aadsfadsfdafs return a 404 status code. Googlebot is known to request garbage URLs and to see if you respond with a 404 like you’re supposed to. If you don’t, your quality score goes down the tubes.

Forrester, Retailers, and GravityStream

A new Forrester Research report came out this month, titled Retail Interactive Marketing Spend Grows Steadily. According to the report, retailers are increasing online advertising investments at a rate of 25% per year and working to get the most out of the tools in their toolkit to increase ROI in tough economic times. This includes focusing on growing their natural search through intelligent SEO automation technology. I was pleased to see our (Netconcepts’) GravityStream technology highlighted in the report as such an intelligent SEO automation technology, and its outstanding performance for Pottery Barn…

“Forrester expects that retailers will continue spending to get more out of existing programs by expanding on size, improving analytics, or automating repeatable processes. VanBoskirk, for example, writes in the report that after three years of fine search marketing results, Pottery Barn boosted natural search results between 1,000% and 9,800% across its sites by investing in GravityStream, a technology sold through its search agency to automate SEO work. ” (from MediaPost)

Redirects and SEO Best Practice

Use of the proper kind of redirects is a matter of SEO “best practice”. Every site needs to have redirects (e.g. for example, from your non-www version of your site to your www version or vice versa). And if you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table. In addition, sites evolve over time and URLs change. And any time you make changes to your URLs — whether it’s to the domain, subdomain, subdirectories, filenames, or query strings — you need to ensure links pointing to the old URLs are still valued by Google and the other engines, and that their voting power gets transferred to the new URLs. You can get very sophisticated with your redirects for SEO purposes and utilize what are known as “conditional redirects” — a touchy subject and a potentially dangerous area that I’ll delve more below.

First off, ensure you’re using “301 redirects” rather than “302 redirects” or the link juice (PageRank) won’t transfer to the destination URL. You can verify that 301s (not 302s) are in place by using a “server header checker” like this one. Only a 301 tells engines the previous URL has moved permanently and thus forwards the page’s link equity to the new location.

When should you use a 301 redirect? Say you change your domain name, move content from one subdirectory into another, or you are retiring some pages. Or perhaps you are changing your content management system (CMS), which will change all of your URLs. The precious PageRank these pages have earned is valuable and you want to pass it along to the new pages. You also want to prevent a few weeks of 404 errors in search engines when no redirect is in place and users click on your listing. You’ll want to do it even if you are “retiring” certain pages to an archive URL (e.g., the current year’s Holiday Gift Guide once the holiday buying season is over—although I’d make the case that you should maintain such a page at a date-free URL forever and let the link juice accumulate at that URL for use in future years’ editions and NOT redirect at all). If you’re retiring a product, redirect the URL of the discontinued product page to that product’s category page.

Duplicate content is a big issue for SEO, and 301 redirects come in very handy in eliminating (or at least ameliorating) that issue. Search engines will aggregate and filter out from the SERPs content that it detects to be duplicate. Worse yet, your pages will suffer “PageRank dilution,” where the votes (links) are spread across all the duplicate versions instead of all aggregating to the one single, definitive, “canonical” URL. This can happen, for example, when tracking codes are appended to a URL (e.g., “?source=SMXad”). A current example of duplicate copies of pages with tracking code appended URLs getting indexed in Google can be found here — ironically, it’s Google’s own site (yes, it happens to the best of us, even to Google!). Or when essential parameters are not always ordered in a consistent manner (e.g., “?subsection=5&section=2″ versus “?section=2&subsection=5″). Or when multiple domains or subdomains respond to the request with the same content but no redirect (e.g., “myonlinestore.com/jcp/default.aspx” and “www1.myonlinestore.com/jcp/default.asp” and “mystore.com/jcp/default.asp”. In all the above cases, 301 redirects pointing to the canonical URL would collapse the duplicates and aggregate PageRank.

<START GEEK SPEAK>

Usually a single redirect “rule” can be written to match against a large number of URLs. This is referred to as “pattern matching,” and it allows you to use wildcards (such as the asterisk character) and to capture a portion of the requested URL in memory and to utilize it later in the redirect. This is possible whether you are running Apache or Microsoft IIS Server as your web server. Consider some of the above-mentioned examples, and how to handle each of them using Apache’s mod_rewrite module (which comes bundled with Apache):

# Changing domain names
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} tiredoldbrand\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newbrand.com/$1 [R=301,QSA,L]

# Removing tracking parameter (but tracked URL still registers in the analytics). Assumes no other parameters.
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^source=
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1 [R=301,L]

</END GEEK SPEAK>

Above I mentioned the “conditional redirect.” And yes, it comes with a warning: it could get you in big trouble with Google. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, advised during his keynote at SMX Advanced that folks not employ conditional redirects due to the risk of a Google penalty or ban. This type of redirect refers to serving a 301 redirect selectively to search engine spiders like Googlebot. Obviously, when you start serving up different content to humans than you do to spiders (and yes, this includes differing redirects), you get into dangerous territory with the search engines. If you’re using conditional redirects, you probably don’t even need them. For example, if you use a tracking parameter in your URLs to differentiate clickthroughs on links leading to the same content, you don’t need to use conditional redirects to collapse the click-tracked duplicates and aggregate PageRank. You can treat bots and humans equally by serving them both up a 301 redirect. The clicktracked URL will still register in your log files, even though it shows up for only an instant.

Intrigued by all this and want to learn more? Then read my full article “Redirects: Good, Bad & Conditional” published last week on Search Engine Land, and also check out my PowerPoint deck from my SMX West presentation on “Unraveling URLs and Demystifying Domains“.

Now and Then – in photos

Ever see someone and think “Geez, that person looks totally different from how I remember him/her”? I just saw MC Hammer at the Ypulse conference last month and thought that. In fact, I didn’t even recognize him until he was introduced. Here’s a picture I snapped of him in the hallway after his session finished. Compare that with the photo juxtaposed (taken from the “U Can’t Touch This” video) in his “Hammertime” heyday, in the early 90′s (gotta love those parachute pants!).

One of my staff was shocked practically out of his seat when he stumbled across an old photo of me on the About Us page of audit-it.com. Oh wow do I look different now. Compare a picture of me now with that one from 10 years ago:

Ha!

Yesterday I got an email from a relative, one of those joke emails that get forwarded around. If you could imagine what a few years and more than a few pounds could do to Michelangelo’s David, it might look like this:

An insider’s perspective on Wikipedia and SEO

I had the pleasure of interviewing a well-respected Wikipedia editor who specializes in Wikipedia articles about search engine optimization. He also happens to be an SEO consultant. His name is Jonathan Hochman. The interview covers a range of things including how to build up your reputation as an editor, how to deal with people trying to delete an article you authored, the Notability test, external links, photos and Creative Commons licensing, the Village Pump, and more. That interview is available as a 40 minute long podcast.

Download/listen to the MP3 » (18 Megs)

I incorporated parts of the interview into my SEO How To article for Practical Ecommerce Magazine last month — “Can Wikipedia Help Your Business?” — so be sure to check that out too.

Some of my favorite tips from the article, some of which come from me and some from Jonathan, include:

• Reputation is everything. Do this by building a solid history of edits that aren’t self-serving.
• Engage with Wikipedians through your Talk page, their Talk page, and the Talk pages of entries you wish to contribute to.
• Create an informative User page to build credibility and boost social networking.
• When someone reverts your edit, seek clarification by asking them what you could do differently.
• Make sure any new entry includes references to back it up. If the entry is for an author, reference their book’s ISBN number to support your case for notability. If the entry is for a company, link to a press mentions page on their website so that Wikipedians can establish level of notability.
• Monitor entries that are important to you by using the “watch” function within Wikipedia so that when you log in you will be alerted to any changes to those entries.
• After adding a new entry, build PageRank by internal links from other Wikipedia pages.

How to Torch Your Links in 3 Easy Steps

Ranking too well in the search engines and want to give your struggling competitors a more level playing field? Then follow these 3 easy steps to alienate those who already link to you and torch your best inbound links…

1. STEP 1: Collect a list of your backlinks and associated anchor text.
2. STEP 2: Scrape WHOIS domain information from all the linking sites. The email address of the administrative contact for each domain is what you’re after.
3. STEP 3: Spam the admin contacts like there’s no tomorrow! Make the email generic so it’s clear you haven’t ever visited their site or that you are aware of any existing business relationship the linker has with you. Make sure the email reads like it’s written by a non-native English speaker (nothing makes a recipient feel more special than the knowledge that they’ve been outsourced to an overseas spam/call center!) To top it off, suggest specific anchor text without regard to whether the anchor text makes sense in the link’s current context.
4. (Optional) STEP 4: Laugh all the way to the bank. Once at the bank, make a large withdrawal and promptly flush that cash down the nearest toilet.

(I figured I had better add Step 4 so it’s extra-clear that I’m being facetious!)

Here’s an email I received yesterday that follows the above Three Easy Steps, from a valued former business partner (I’m sure it’s actually their new SEO agency)…

(Names have been changed to protect the guilty.)

Subject: A request from Widget Emporium
Date: August 5, 2008 5:01:41 PM CDT
To: sspencer@netconcepts.com

My name is Heather Irwin and I am Rep for Widget Emporium. I have noticed on your website page: http://www.gravitystream.com/, which provides visitors with some great Retail information, you have a link to our site http://www.widgetemporium.com which reads Widget Emporium.

Thank you so much for the link — we really appreciate it. However, I am writing to ask if you would make one minor change to the listing so we can improve the brand awareness of Widget Emporium.

Can you please change the link text to Home Decor by Widget Emporium?

Additionally, if you can also change the link URL to point visitors to http://www.widgetemporium.com, we can work together to provide visitors with more relevant results for their search.

Alternatively, you may use the following HTML code to update our link:
<a href=”http://www.widgetemporium.com”>Home Decor by Widget Emporium</a>

Please let me know if the above provides you with the information you need to make the necessary changes.

I can be reached via email or if you’d like to talk about this by phone, my direct number is 480.282.6052.

Thank you for your time!

Heather Irwin

When it comes to link building, it’s all in the approach. The last thing you want to do is relegate this critical task to what are sometimes referred to in the industry as “link monkeys” — underpaid non-experts in link building, usually interns or overseas workers. Particularly if it’s immediately obvious when reading their emails that they aren’t native English speakers.

I’ve suggested in past Link Building presentations to “mine your existing backlinks” for opportunities to improve sub-optimal anchor text (like “click here” or your URL) then lobbying to get the anchor text changed. But you can’t just do this en masse and spam everyone to hell. Be selective about who you target. And when you do reach out, craft a unique message that makes it clear you understand the relationship the linker has to you and that you are familiar with their site. Start a dialogue. Build a relationship. Even consider picking up the phone. (Now I’ve really shocked you!)

I know this is difficult to scale, but “get links quick” schemes rarely work.

P.S. “Heather” (if that’s your real name), I’ll be removing your link shortly.