Picking Your Target

Choosing your target is very important as it will set the guidelines for the rest of your link building strategy. Here are a few quick steps to choosing your target for your link building strategy.

Pick a Niche – the more relevant it is to your specific product market the better your chance will be to gain links. So if you sell clothing, the niche that you should pick would be fashion related. You’ll want to contact blogs, websites, blog carnivals, directories, and list building sites in this niche. Try to be realistic with who you’re going to contact, for instance if you’re blog or website isn’t very well established, you’re probably not going to be getting a lot of links from the NYTimes.com fashion section. Make sense?

Build a Contact List – As you’re finding all of these sites that you want to contact make sure that you’re gathering the sites information. You’ll want a valid contact name, url of the site, email address, and phone number. The phone number isn’t necessary but sometimes it’s nice to follow up your link building email with a phone call to see if the person you sent it to had the chance to look over your email. IMPORTANT!! Make sure you’re saving these contacts in an excel sheet, you’ll need it in that format to pull this all together at the end.

Writing for your target

Alright so you’ve got your target all picked out and your contact list is building. Now you need to come up with a compelling story to write for your target. There are a few things that you’re going to want to take into account when you’re coming up with what type of article to write.

First and foremost, you need to write and article that is viral ready. It needs to be something that people are going to want to share with others. It should evoke emotion. Humor generally does really well and if it’s really funny it can spread like wildfire.

It has to be relevant to your target market. Top 10 lists, Top 100 lists, generally work very well.

Emailing Your Target

When emailing your target, you want to be short and to the point. People are going to decide within the first 5 seconds of opening the email whether they want to check it out or move on to the next email. Bloggers especially get a lot of emails. IMPORTANT!! Subject line is very important. Here are a few Email Subject Line Tips. It also doesn’t help to stroke their ego a bit (see below) but be specific so that it looks like you’ve spent a good amount of time looking into them otherwise you’ll get spammed.

Here is an Example Link Building Email:

Hello (Contact Name),

I’m Jenny from FashionistaWorld.com. I was checking out your site and I really your article on winter coats (insert link to their article here) I have the green jacket you were talking about and it is delightful! I also have a fashion website and I’d really love it if you’d take a look at this article I posted (Post Title Here). I’d love to get your opinion on it and if you’d like to link to it I’d really appreciate that as well.

(Insert Link to Post Here)

Thanks for your time (contact name),

(email signature here)

END EXAMPLE

When you’re contacting these people and stroking their ego make sure that you pull out a little tidbit from the article and give a quick sentence or two on something specific from their website. If you don’t, you’re just going to look like a spammer and they’re never going to even look at your article let alone link to it. (Note when contacting a big number of people you

Pulling It All Together

So now you’re ready, you’ve got your article written, your contact list made (in excel form) and you’re example email all ready to go. The thing that brings all of these together is created a simple emailing script using excel to plug in the info for the contact name, the URL of your ego stroking talking point, the talking point about the article, and their email address. Make sure you test it a few times on yourself before sending out the email.

If you don’t have any programming capabilities, then you’ll have to contact each person individually. I’ve done it before and it does take some time but it is well worth the effort. Taking the time to put all of this stuff in the excel sheet makes it easier during the emailing process to just copy and paste it into your email. We also offer this service as part of our link building package and SEO packages.

This strategy does work, I’ve used it TONS of times and seen great results.

*I’d like to give a shout out to my great friend Brian T. for teaching me the strategy, and helping me to implement it when I was just starting out. Please take the time to check out his latest project Funny T-shirts there are some really funny tees on the site and they are completely customizable.

The Big Three

1. Business Connections – In your years as a business owner I’m sure that you’ve made valuable connections with other business people and organizations. For instance, maybe you’re a member of your local chamber of commerce. Contact these places and ask them for a link to your website. Relationships matter in business and it certainly helps if you have a few friends that can help you get off to a good start in your link building campaign
2. Donation Links – If your business is anything like our small business you get hit up a lot for donations from local charities. Giving is a great thing and I encourage every business to do as much of it as they can. It doesn’t hurt to request a link to your site from the charities site in exchange for the donation. Most of the charities would be more than willing to link to your site, especially if your donation is lucrative.
3. Press Releases – From both the past and the future. If your company has gotten any press in the past, go back and make sure that the story links to your website. In the future, whenever you get requests to do a piece on your company, or send out a press release make sure you ask them to link to your website as well. Online press is the best kind of press because it allows you to reach more eyes for a longer period of time and often will help your link building and SEO efforts tremendously.

Link building is a tough and tedious task. Many people choose to outsource their link building to other companies because of the amount of time that it takes. There are pros and cons to both ways of doing it. On the one hand you’re saving yourself a lot of time, on the other hand you don’t know how legitimate the link building strategies might be if you outsource the work. Whichever strategy you take, make sure that you don’t forget about link building. It is the most important part of SEO, and SEO is the most important part of online marketing, especially if you want any longevity out of your online business.

Step One

Go to google and perform the following searches -

“Daily Link Roundup”
“Weekly Link Roundup”
“Monday Link Roundup”
“Friday Link Roundup”
“Link Roundup”

Step Two

Find Blogs that are similar to your blog and contact the owner with some of your best content attached. Make sure you spice up the email a little bit with some information about their site, and maybe even comment on a specific article of theirs that you read.

By Buttering them up a little bit I can 100% guaruntee you that you will see more responses than if you were just to send them the content. It makes them feel good because it makes them feel like people are paying attention to them, and really care about their site.

Step 3

Go to Blog Carnival and find some blog carnivals that are related to you topics of discussion and submit.

Not only will you start to see an increase in traffic, but each piece of content that you get in either one of the daily link round-ups or a blog carnival is a solid link back to your site. It’s the perfect way to start getting more easy traffic to your site.

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Example:

Top 10 Most Beautiful Autumn Wedding Flower Arrangements

A wedding is the most intimate and personal and beautiful ceremony that a bride and groom will have in their lives. Wedding flowers should reflect that. Autumn is a season of rich and elegant colors and for that reason it is one of the most popular times of the year to get married. Choosing the best wedding flowers you can is a big decision and a tough one. Take a look at the top 10 most beautiful wedding autumn wedding flower arrangements and hopefully you’ll feel a little more inspired.

Hopefully after seeing some of these flower bouquets and arrangements you have a little bit of inspiration as to what you are looking for in your own Autumn wedding bouquet. These are just a few of the samples from a wide variety of choices that you can choose from. Stop into your local flower dealer and ask them to show you a few samples of their own. Determine your style and they will work with you. Remember choosing flowers for your wedding is a big decision so make sure you are getting what you want and go to a place that is willing to work with you to get you the flowers that you have always dreamed of.

END EXAMPLE ARTICLE

This is just one of the many styles of link bait articles that you can use to help attract link. Let’s break this one down: Who am I targeting with this article? How am I targeting them? How can I get them to link to me? These are all questions that you should ask yourself before writing a link bait article. Now I’m going to answer the above questions by breaking down the entire example article.

Who am I targeting?
Well the obvious answer in this one would be Brides who are getting married in the fall. But take a look at the title. I have made this article a Top 10 article. There is an entire subset of people on the internet who are just Top 10, Top 50, Top 100 addicts. They love to see lists like this. By choosing this format I have hit not only my target market but I have also opened up to those Top 10 list lovers as well. That will give me the opportunity to get the article out to more people and attract more links.

How am I targeting them?
As discussed above I am targeting the Top 10 people simply by making an interesting Top 10 list. But I also am targeting a specific type of Bride. A fall bride? Why did I choose to do that? Because fall really IS one of the most popular times of the year to get married and by targeting just this one specific group this time, I could also do a top 10 winter, spring, and summer article as well. But moreover if a bride is searching for wedding flowers and she is getting married in the fall, she probably is going to be searching for autumn or fall wedding flowers. This article title and subject matter will give me a better chance of showing up in the search results for those brides and will increase the click through rate from this group of brides.

How can I get my target audience to link to me?
This is a BIG one. You need to know how you are going to get links from the article or you have just wasted a lot of time. With this specific article I would likely post the article on some bridal forums, email some other bridal blogs, and I would even try to find some of these brides on some other bridal social networks like say The Knot. Link bait marketing is just like normal marketing. You have to advertise the article in places where brides can find it, just like a flower dealer would advertise his services in places that brides can find it.

I hope this has been a lot of help. If there are any questions go ahead and leave them in the comments and I will respond to them as quickly as I can. If you have any ideas for things that you’d like to see me write about just let me know Email Me and I will try and get something up to help you out. Thanks everyone I’ll see you next time.