By 
I've made an awful mistake.
Over the past year and a half of building a new inbound marketing agency, I've been so wrapped up in giving out advice to clients that I've neglected to do many of the things that I constantly advise other people to do.
Specifically, I think it's important to be generous with the knowledge and assets that your business provides you. Sometimes it's great to just be helpful when you can, even if there's no direct reward. I say these sorts of things daily, and help clients win with these approaches, yet as of late, I haven't done a very good job of that for Northcutt. That ends now.
So, over the next 48 hours, I'm laying out a challenge to answer 48 inbound marketing / SEO questions for free. To begin, I'm going to post these answers at random. First on SEOmoz's Q&A boards. If I run out of good questions there, I'm turning to Quora. If that well runs dry, I'm looking at LinkedIn.
And, if you have an SEO / inbound marketing question you'd like some free advise on, send me a link to your question posted on one of the three sites above, posted via the comments below or on Twitter before 11/28 at 10 PM CST, and I'll do my best to answer your questions at no cost too. Once 48 hours has passed, I'll link the answers to 48 of the best, current, inbound marketing-related questions that I could find.
Edit 12/5: Here are the answers! It seems I severely underestimated the universe's ability to deny me time, especially when I make plans for something like this, but it's done. Maybe this post should be renamed "How I shot into the SEOmoz top 150 in a week". Hope that someone finds some answers that they were looking for below.
- https://moz.com/q/one-client-2-domains-same-business-good-or-bad-idea
- https://moz.com/q/unused-css
- https://moz.com/q/restructuring-removing-301-redirects-due-to-newly-optimized-keywords
- https://moz.com/q/forum-signature-links
- https://moz.com/q/client-with-very-very-bad-onsite-seo
- https://moz.com/q/is-there-a-modern-gsitecrawler
- https://moz.com/q/drupal-seo-concerns-about-cloaking
- https://moz.com/q/could-a-html-select-with-large-numbers-of-option-value-url-s-effect-my-organic-rankings
- https://moz.com/q/i-have-a-client-where-every-page-has-over-100-links
- https://moz.com/q/just-want-to-know-if-others-have-seen-simliar-results-with-squidoo-s-organic-visits
- https://moz.com/q/does-search-demand-search-results
- https://moz.com/q/what-is-evttag-used-for
- https://moz.com/q/quality-score-factors-in-pla-ads-schema
- https://moz.com/q/host-sitemaps-on-s3
- https://moz.com/q/domain-issue
- https://moz.com/q/how-do-you-find-old-linking-url-s-that-contain-uppercase-letters
- https://moz.com/q/why-does-google-not-recognize-inbound-links-from-bbb-org
- https://moz.com/q/2-questions-on-avoiding-issues-with-google-and-while-being-right-in-it
- https://moz.com/q/best-practice-to-solve-this-unique-duplicate-page-content-issue#post-132824
- https://moz.com/q/how-to-optimize-an-about-page-for-seo-best-practices-word-count-2#post-132905
- https://moz.com/q/listing-products-with-descriptions-what-order-should-they-be-in
- https://moz.com/q/local-citation-one-stop-updater
- https://moz.com/q/new-tv-show-on-a-e-has-the-same-name-as-my-website-how-to-use-this#post-132913
- https://moz.com/q/i-d-appreciate-help-with-link-building-research-management-tools
- https://moz.com/q/latest-on-how-long-your-dmoz-submisssions-are-taking
- https://moz.com/q/tracking-down-a-bug-that-is-creating-irregular-serps-in-rankings#post-133146
- https://moz.com/q/how-to-stop-pages-being-crawled-from-xml-feed
- https://moz.com/q/more-complete-campaign-reports
- https://moz.com/q/twitter-based-competition
- https://moz.com/q/interesting-page-rank-flow
- https://moz.com/q/copyscape-premium-fails-to-deliver-concern-and-question
- https://moz.com/q/google-love-and-bing-hate
- https://moz.com/q/i-need-help-with-google
- https://moz.com/q/google-phone-numbers
- https://moz.com/q/is-there-value-in-keeping-a-microsite-for-a-business-that-has-unique-domains-for-each-of-their-locations
- https://moz.com/q/any-tool-for-tracking-domain-page-authority-growth
- https://moz.com/q/add-url-parameters-in-seomoz-as-per-gwt
- https://moz.com/q/ajax-server-snapshot-setup
- https://moz.com/q/crawl-diagnostics-report-500-erorr
- https://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/Does-the-country-where-I-host-my-blog-affect-SEO
- https://www.quora.com/Link-Building/What-sites-methods-tools-software-do-you-use-for-adding-great-images-to-guest-posts
- http://www.linkedin.com/answers?viewQuestion=&questionID=1070917&askerID=15930618&browseIdx=2&sik=1354044607164
- https://twitter.com/corey_northcutt/status/274213201250512897
- https://twitter.com/pforiska/status/274218931219210240
- https://moz.com/q/seo-for-com-vs-com-au-websites
- https://moz.com/q/alt-image-tags-not-being-read-by-on-page-optimization-tool
- https://www.quora.com/Link-Building/Request-for-a-link-DOs-and-Donts-What-are-the-best-and-worst-ways-to-ask-for-a-link-via-email
- https://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/Which-is-better-for-managing-multiple-domains-Redirecting-all-mini-websites-to-the-main-site-permanently-or-keeping-mini-websites-with-unique-content-and-using-them-as-a-link-source-to-the-main-site
Just a bit of recap before I wrap this up. Why did I do this? First and foremost, to be helpful, prove some expertise, and participate in the industry's community. In the process, I reached SEOmoz's top 150, gained 43 very high quality Twitter followers, received an extra 14 LinkedIn recommendations on my personal brand, and 5 extra requests for SEO consulting. Are there SEO benefits here too? Of course, but that wasn't the core motive. It's true that I could have just as well have hit any of 100+ great Q&A sites using my little answer site search engine, and built links from a variety of high authority domains. And I probably will at some point.
But I think the lesson to be learned is this: inbound marketing, independent of search engines, still does big things.