As with any marketing activity, the first step in any link building campaign is the creation of goals and strategies. Unfortunately, link building is one of the most difficult activities to measure and control — but that doesn’t mean it’s completely out of your hands.
Here are four ways you can start capturing and building your external-links base.
Get your customers to link to you
If you have business partners you work with regularly or loyal customers who love your brand, you can capitalize on this by sending out “partnership badges” — for example, graphic icons that link back to your site, and that they could share even on social media.
Just as you’d give t-shirts or bumper stickers to your customers offline, these are the best way to accomplish the same feat on the web.
An awesome product with unique customer service is always guaranteed to get people talking. Word-of-mouth and personal recommendations can help you in more ways than just your SEO strategies.
Start a blog; make it a valuable, relevant, informative, and entertaining resource
Blogs have the unique ability to contribute fresh material on a consistent basis, participate in conversations across the web, and earn listings and links from other blogs, including blog directories.
Create content that inspires viral sharing and organic linking
Successful viral content will leverage usefulness, information dissemination, creativity, and humor. Everyone who sees it once should want to share it with friends.
Such high-quality, editorially earned votes are invaluable to building trust, authority, and rankings potential.
Let’s give ’em something to talk about
Earning the attention of the press, bloggers, and news media is an effective, timeless way to earn links and mentions.
Sometimes this is as simple as a giveaway, releasing a great new product, providing an improved service, or even saying something a little bit controversial.
