Link Building for the Little Guys

[Heath]

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-for-the-little-guys

As part of a small business, I always find it very frustrating when I read articles about the ‘best ways to build links to your website’. The same things seem to appear each time: create an infographic, get a video to go viral, write an ebook that people can download, produce some white papers, etc. Now, I’m not saying that these methods don’t work, because they are completely legitimate ways of building links. What I get frustrated about is that if you are a business with very low influence and you create this type of new, unique content, it can be quite a struggle to get it in front of those you wish to see it. With this in mind, I thought I would share the methods that I have found to be most effective for all us ‘little guys’.

Forget Link-Building, Think Relationship-Building

After spending a lot of time trying a whole host of different techniques to build that ‘perfect link’, one thing that started to dawn on me was that even if I were to create the greatest bit of content that anyone has ever seen, if I didn’t have a way of getting it in front of people then it would be useless. On top of this, it is very rare that you will be able to continually create the greatest bit of content that anyone has ever seen. The solution? Focus on building relationships with more influential users within social networks.

As part of my day, I dedicate at least an hour to trawling through content from within the search industry, commenting on articles that I like through the likes of Google+, Twitter, etc, and following new users that share interesting content that isn’t just self-promotion. Alongside this I make sure that I keep all of my RSS feeds organised within Google Reader. This allows me to see when new articles that might interest me are published, without having to take too much time out of my schedule. This kind of basic organisation can not only save you a lot of time, but it will help to give your social following some new, interesting content on a regular basis. One of the best articles that I have read this year was from Pak Hou Cheung and it described how to leverage Google reader for guest post opportunities and blogger outreach. Give it a read and I guarantee it will improve your daily productivity two-fold.

Make the Right Relationships

The next hurdle I found was that, actually, it’s not always that easy to become best buddies with the likes of Rand Fishkin, Will Critchlow and AJ Kohn, just by sharing their blog on Google+ and telling them what you liked about it! When looking to build relationships, it is important to build them with the right people at the right time. What I mean by this is that if you are yet to really make your mark in the industry with your content, then it would be a much more effective use of your time to build relationships with those who would gain a mutual benefit from it.

Whenever I create content I always ask the question: why would anyone benefit from sharing it? If the answer is that they probably wouldn’t gain anything, then you need to re-think the content that you are producing. Start off small; build relationships with bloggers that have relatively low influence, but build much more of them. Look for blogs with less activity on them, where the bloggers are in a similar situation to you and would be really happy if you shared their content or linked back to it. I’m not saying that Rand, Will and AJ wouldn’t be really happy if I shared their content, but I don’t think they’d struggle if I didn’t.

So Why Would Anyone Benefit From Sharing My Content?

One of the most effective ways of encouraging people to share your content is by promoting their content and adding value to it. One very simple method we use at Wow Internet is to create a weekly ‘Search Engine News Roundup’. This involves taking 5 articles that we found particularly useful from within the search industry and giving them a short write up, with a link back to each of the respective blogs. We always try to make sure that we source articles from different authors every week and find articles that aren’t exclusively from hugely popular blogs. Once we have done this, I contact each of the authors through Google+, mention them in a tweet about our blog and send them an email (if I have the author’s email address, which is usually available on their blog).

Full Article : http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-for-the-little-guys

 

[kicker-hp_27]

whats this? lol

first - pay your SSL Certificate
sec - start selling servers and good luck
[SLIDE]http://i.imgur.com/h41KV.png[/SLIDE]

 

[SavkeUltras]

https