So Many Ways to Pursue Links and So Little Time

One great way to get lots of links is to launch a massive media campaign. This works particularly well if you are a large brand. What if you aren't? Well then, you are at a disadvantage. Massive media campaigns are great ways to get lots of links, and major brands launch these things without even blinking an eye.

Assuming that this is not an option for you, let's explore the kinds of things that you can do instead and win, anyway. It's one of the great things about the web today. While having a massive marketing budget is a significant advantage, if you are smart and fast, success can still be yours. In fact, you can create a brand in all types of novel new ways on the Internet.

This post will focus on deciding what methods you should consider for developing high value, authoritative links. Successful execution of high value link strategies almost always requires compelling content or tools, so know that going in. If you are not willing to make that kind of investment, move onto the next post, because this one is not for you.

You can't afford to waste a lot of time on strategies that are not going to pan out for you. In fact, if you start on a strategy that is not the right one, the best you thing you can do is fail fast. Why? Because then you can move onto the next strategy without a long delay.

It is critical that you analyze the best strategies to use with your business up front. There are many, many types of marketing opportunities that you can pursue, and each business has unique aspects to it. Let's start by exploring some of the major methodologies for link building (buying links will not be included in this list; for more information on that, see my recent post, I Don't Buy Links).

1. Social News Sites:  Digg, Reddit, Propeller, and other sites like them. Success on these sites can produce hundreds, or even thousands of links. The big things to consider when examining this strategy are:

• What is the demographic of the social news site, and what content will appeal to them?
• Can you produce content that would appeal to that audience?
• Will the resulting links have a chance of being relevant to your business?

2. Online Media Sites: These start with high value sites like the New York Times, Boston.com, and About.com. However, these are very difficult to get on, and most will need to aim a bit lower.

The key question to ask here is what media sites provide coverage relevant to your business? If you offer a product related to diabetes, you might want to appear in Diabetes Health, Diabetes Digest, or Diabetes News.

The key question here is what can you do to earn a place in these magazines? One great thing to try and do is to write an article that they would be interested in publishing. Be aware though, the content needs to be really good, and it needs to contain something new. Rehashes of old topics have a much lower success rate.

Are there online media sites like these for your business? Can you produce content of a high enough quality to get into them? If yes to both of those questions, you may want to consider this type of strategy for your biz.

3. Widgets

• Develop a free and unrestricted application that is designed to go viral. The key here is to develop something that will cause users to want to tell other people about it - let them do the marketing for you. These can be applications that work better with multiple participants, or things that the user wants to show off.
  
  Note that this is a bit indirect. Your application is not going to go viral if you require users to link to you to use it. But, have a widget go viral for you, and the links will follow. One of our clients, ProTrade had a great deal of success on Facebook using this approach.
• Use widgets as a syndication strategy. To do this, embed valuable content that others will want to put on their web sites. Then use a market outreach program to tell people who can use that information about your widget. Since this is a bit more of a manual effort, you can require that you get one or more links in return for providing the content. One client, whom I can't name, has gotten links from over 2,000 relevant sites using this technique.

4. Good Old Fashioned PR: OK, so you can't afford a multi-million dollar campaign, but you can still do this. You can find PR firms that will do pretty good work for a few thousand dollars per month. Using these types of resources is a way of accelerating your online media strategy, and can be quite effective.

Nearly all PR firms will start off their work for you with a whole host of ideas regarding how to promote their business. They also have the tools, the contacts, and the experience to do some things more effectively then you can do those things yourself.

Just be careful to stay engaged with your PR firm. The more active you are in setting direction, the more value you will get. Have some ideas at the beginning of the engagement, and continue to feed them ideas throughout your engagement with them. You know your business better than they do, and they know media better than you do. Focus on leveraging both of those strengths together.

5. University Sites:  This is an oldie but goodie. I am not talking about spamming forums on university sites and stuffing them with links. There are lots of places on university sites where it is possible to get an honest to goodness endorsement for your quality web site, provided that there is a reason for them to link to it.

For example, job sites can approach the career center department of schools and seek to get listed there. There are sites that have accumulated hundreds of such links. If this is a match for you, then this is a great strategy to pursue.

Note that there is no automatic match with getting a link from an ".edu" domain. EDU links end up being good for two major reasons:

• Many colleges and universities have powerful, and potentially authoritative, web sites. This is because of the links they have, not because the domain is an EDU.
• If you have a legitimate match to the needs of their students, these types of sites are usually pretty apporachable.

6. Government Sites:  Another oldie but goodie. The story here is very similar to that of university sites. Determine if you have a match in terms of content to the audience that the government site is trying to reach with a particular web page. Then figure out who to contact.

Note that many government web sites have a published Linking Policy. Make sure you read the policy for the given web site before contacting any one at the site. Otherwise, you might accidentally commit a faux pas, and put the opportunity with that site at risk.

As an example of this, one of our clients, VisualDXHealth was able to get a number of links from the National Library of Medicine. This was part of a larger web site marketing campaign that has moved traffic from about 1600 per day in May 2007 to nearly 20,000 as of March 2008.

7. The Blogosphere:  This really is a sub-segment of the online media campaign. However, I like to talk about it separately, because it has a lot of different dynamics. With a traditional online media person, you want to solve a problem for them. With bloggers, you want to start a conversation.

Here you start by identifying the influential bloggers in your space. There are lots of ways to go about doing this. I know the folks at SEO-PR like to use a tool called Buzz Logic, and that this has worked very well for them. One way to do that is to get your PR firm to do this for you.

The other way to do it is to do some research using tools like Dane Carlson's How Much is My Blog Worth widget (another example of a great widget success story!). You can also use your feedreader (e.g., Bloglines or Google Reader, etc.), to tell you how many people subscribe to that blog with that reader. Better still, use more than one reader so you can get multiple data points.

Focus on the more influential bloggers, because you will get far more mileage there. Other bloggers will follow their lead. Just remember, this starts by building a relationship, and you don't start a relationship by asking them to give you a link, or stuffing comments filled with links back to your stuff on their posts.

Above I outlined 8 methods to use in hunting for really high value links. These are the types of links you just can't buy. But there are more strategies than one company can reasonably pursue at one time. Even if you could pursue them all at once, they don't all fit any given business. For example, some businesses may be reluctant to develop the type of content necessary to score well on Digg.

So, you must choose. The way to go about this is to review all of your opportunities and brainstorm them. You actually start by doing the research on all the different approaches up front. For example, when you are looking at the blogosphere, you would make sure you knew who the most influential bloggers are in your space (you should know who they are, anyway), and assess whether or not you could develop a relationship with them, and assess the impact.

Very similarly, when you look at online media, you go find the major media that covers your space on the web, and determine whether or not you have a shot at earning a link from them. With universities, you might want to look at the universities and colleges that offer education on topics directly related to your space.

Put all of this research together and determine your chances of success with a link marketing strategy, the amount of effort required to succeed, and the scope of the benefit when you succeed. Then pick the one, or a few, that offer you the best chances of success.

Let's face it. Any form of link building is hard work. The good stuff is not cheap or easy. For many people, it pays to set your sights high. Not so high that you can't be successful, but push yourself to get the highest quality links you can reasonably expect to be successful in obtaining. Then, once you get your first win, use that one as a reference in pursuing your next few links.

Then, push closer and closer to the top, as quickly as you can. Extremely high value links beget more links. When you get cited by leaders in your space, others notice. Get cited by enough leaders, and more people notice. Some of the people who go to that authoritative site may be linkers themselves. Now you can start to get links without any manual effort on your part. Man oh man, that's linking nirvana, because you'll be off to the races at that point.

Ultimately, you want to consider all available strategies that you can reasonably execute. Then you want to choose a small number of strategies (possibly one) to focus on, and then be very focused in your execution of that strategy (or those strategies). Remember to push hard enough that you fail fast if you are going to fail with one particular strategy, so you can go onto the next strategy quickly.

Match your content to the target and you will have a much greater chance of success. Then start knocking down those power links and watch your traffic soar.