July 8, 2008

How to get strong links for free

by Brian Turner

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I have never believed in begging for links. I think begging has no place in internet marketing.

And I don’t believe you should ever reverse engineer your competitor links and then try and get links from the same places. Isn’t it better to force your competitors to follow in your own footsteps, rather than be forever chasing in theirs?

An additional danger with following others is also that you also end up with a core set of sites all linking to the same people - a duck shoot for Google anti-spam teams. We saw them take out the realtors that way last year, and the ticketing networks this year. Think “network theory” to avoid dodgy neighbourhoods.

Instead, try and be creative and lateral in how you get those strong editorial links - a good strategy is to try and do things offline that you know will have some effect online.

Giving free gifts to bloggers to review is an old and tested method - identify who blogs regularly in your vertical, then offer them something to review for your own market research purposes and invite them to be brutally honest in their review.

And don’t ask for a link when you do!

Sounds counter-intuitive, but the actual result you get from that is they will review your product, generally try and be nice with constructive feedback (free consultancy - take it and use it!!) - and then also cover your other products they liked better (if applicable).

Ask for a link and you’re more likely to get a lifeless post with a single link as requested.

Of course, blogging is simply one established method, and it works in many B2C and B2B verticals - you’ve probably even read some of these reviews, or been invited to take part but overlooked what was actually happening.

The biggest and most powerful links come from traditional media, though. Sure, not every national daily links out, but there is absolutely no more powerful link building method than to be newsworthy.

Therefore, if you can become a news generator, you will develop linkshare, mindshare and marketshare that should positively impact your lead generation process - which is essentially all link dev is a subset of.

Sure, the links won’t be always keyword targeted - in fact, presume they aren’t - but as I posted earlier tonight, it’s link quality that is of primary importance.

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Story link: How to get strong links for free

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