Steven:
Your advice is sound and is indeed prudent in this new reality we find ourselves in. Thanks. . . However, there's an easier way to tell marketers how to sculpt a good link graph - just create lots of good content on a regular basis.
Once I moved my resources away from the technical stuff and into creating more passion-filled, problem solving content I saw the number of keywords driving traffic shoot up 633% and my conversion rates more than double. Hope the angle I took is valuable to your community.
Jay:
Your post is dead on and describes our approach to content marketing to a tee for all four reasons above. What I find funny is that I don't have enough fingers and toes to count how many agencies don't produce ANY content at all, let alone have a strategy for it. Many of those same agencies are using social media w/out any content marketing for themselves or their clients.
Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot, said it best - "Social media campaigns without content marketing are hollow."
Given Google's massive indexing and algorithm changes last year content marketing is the best SEO strategy too. My hope is that folks quit trying to find the "internet marketing shortcut" and commit to content marketing using the reasons you laid out above.