I was reading the other days some articles about the new Penguin update, and to be honest, I started to freak out a bit. If it’s going to be like everybody assumes it will be, then we will absolutely lose all the work and time that we have invested in the past following months. Unfortunately, the update seems to be really aggressive, and probably will hit a lot of websites, webmasters and SEO people right below the belt. Fortunately, I have never been that kind of guy that organizes a SEO campaign focused on link-building, and that keeps me far from this new Google update that is meant to destroy everything around.
Do you know why? Because I prefer to promote my projects via social media. From my point of view, in some cases, social media can be even more effective than SEO. Financially speaking, the results are basically the same. With the money that you use for buying links, advertorials, and so on, you can organize an efficient Facebook Ads campaign that will increase the long term winnings a lot. If we have this opportunity, why wouldn’t we take advantage of it?
You can promote your content socially through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can also promote your content socially by using videos posted on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. You can share documents, slides, or even PDF files on websites like SlideShare, Docstock and, of course, AuthorStream. Guest posting is also a really efficient method with which you can improve the number of visitors driven to your website, not to talk about podcasts which can share you content in an audio, much more friendly form.
So why should I be afraid of being penalized by using some sort of gray-ish SEO when I have all this options at my full disposal?