Building links to your website or blog is like putting a little SEO traffic cop at every junction where your prospective customer is.
When done right, these little links will send people directly to you, your website, and your offer. These are qualified prospects who are already searching for what you are offering.
Link building is an important part of your marketing funnel and needs to be done carefully and correctly. Gone are the days when loosely peppering the internet with links in an ad hoc way was king (or queen).
Link Building Strategies
Think of link building as a craft. It is an assertion of soft but controlled manipulation. And a way to encourage people to act in a specific manner that you will result in your business profiting.
Of course you want to be delivering high quality services and products for best results.
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✓ There is a new way to build links. Throw away everything you thought you knew, suspend your beliefs for a few minutes and read on!
What is Link Building?
Here is an example of building the better mousetrap using someone else’s ideas;
Effective methods of doing business on the internet can change on a daily basis. This can mean there are old infographics created and published by someone else that are now outdated.
How Infographics build links and drives traffic
By doing a simple search for infographics in your particular niche you can find wonderfully designed, informative, and helpful designs that are great but now outdated and inaccurate. Why not use the graphic as your muse, update it and re-post it?
Just hire someone to do the artwork for you.
Then, contact all the places that have the old infographic in place and ask them if they would like to post your new updated one.
Traffic will come to you because your website and contact info is on the new infographic. The blog owner might be feeling generous enough to supply you with a live link too 🙂 – Some people offer to pay for the link but that is one of the no-no’s when it comes to link building.
Link Building Tools
You can find out who is linking to these graphics in a couple of ways. One you can use a backlink checking tool like Alexa and others.
OR
Simply take the graphic and plop it into Googles Image Search bar.
First step – Google the term
In the images that pop up, choose one that fits the criteria above (outdated but nice). Download it to your computer.
Second step – drag and drop it into the image search bar. Within seconds you get a list of all the place on the net that have that same image.
~ Ta da! ~
With that information you can contact them directly, as well as use backlinking tools to figure out who is linking to their pages etc.
Tell other bloggers and webmasters how much you like them 🙂
Nothing like a good stroke to the ego to get someone interested in who you are. Be sincere though and BE CAREFUL!
Manual Link Building
Do this with honourable intentions because it can backfire on you with a vengeance if you don’t tread lightly.
Whenever you link out to someone elses blog you create a trackback. Often these are deleted as spam, sometimes they get approved as comments, and sometimes the blog owner will investigate the origin of the link.
When your link is approved as a comment you get a backlink. These are often nofollow and quite weak in the SEO juice, but a link none-the-less.
BUT – if you say something nice, and worth their approval, there is a good chance that they will write a post about your post and link to it.
Now it gets more interesting.
Their post they wrote, about your post, about them, is syndicated to their network. Links on their Facebook, their Twitter, their email service etc.
More Link Building Campaign Ideas
Before you begin to blog about anything you need to research your tribe. This means hang out where they are and get to know them.
Make yourself useful!
Places like Yahoo Answers, Quora, and others all have people that are asking questions about something you know about.
People will naturally be interested to know who you are and once in awhile you will get someone who will link to an answer you have given.
Also these places sometimes allow you to have a public profile that you can use to link to your site.
Be tactful and don’t link out to your own site all the time. That will usually get you banned. But if you keep doing your homework and build your link network, you can link out to other sites and resources that are linking to you. This can be a hub page, or a Facebook post etc. OR don’t link out at all but have your link in your signature.
Hang out in Forums associated with your niche.
Most forums allow for a signature. This means that every time you respond to a question or even start a thread, your signature is seen.
That signature can often be a hyperlink too, giving you a live link for every post.
The power of this expands if you use it as a lead capture mechanism to build your list of prospects.
Forums can be close-knit communities where people get to know and trust one another. After awhile they will want to know more about you and your wares.
Be informative, be helpful, be nice.
Organic Link Building
Think – SHARE.
You can do one thing and put it just about everywhere for links. For example.
1. Write a really good presentation about your best selling product. Include a story about a customer who is successful user of that product.
2. Turn that post into a SlideShare presentation.
3. Turn the SlideShare into a video.
4. Turn the video audio into a Podcast.
5. Turn the webpage into a PDF report.
6. Upload PDF onto file share sites.
etc…
If your post is in interview format you can video your interview with your customer. Do the above and you can bet your custover will also share the video or links to their friends and followers.
Combine this tactic with the others and you’ve got a live linkbuilding bomb blast!
