Effective Sales Pitch Techniques For Your Link Building Strategy
In a previous post we covered, Three effective steps to link building for your SEO strategy. This article serves as a continuation as you learn to develop a greater list of websites and pages for your desired links. Often times web-masters run into difficulty in locating contact information and opening the opportunity for a conversation.
At this stage, you will have to hunt for ways to reach the owner. Often (not always) there maybe a contact page that results with potentially a phone number (very lucky), e-mail address (lucky), contact form (let’s hope they read it), or even a physical address (don’t bother – last resort). And if all else fails, then you will have to search deeper and look through domain records. For record locator’s, we recommend and utilize WHO.IS (http://who.is). This information uncovers data on the name, address, and email of the domain owner. This data is publicly available and we advise that it be utilized with proper and professional intentions.
If the aforementioned fail, then you may have to become the borderline ‘investigator.’ Search through the website to find all possible links to the websites Twitter, Facebook, or other relevant social networks. This method may establish a connection and open the opportunity for a relevant link.
Formulate a Sales Pitch
Why should the website owner give you the link? Unfortunately, there is no ‘one-pitch-fits-all’ template. Each pitch must be customized to the website and written on a personal level. Otherwise, please don’t expect a response.
For Blogs: Most Bloggers are happy with content submission. A well-written, thoughtful article that is related to the industry and blog may be accepted. Within the article, you may include anchor-text links to your website. Bingo!
Direct Pitch: Webmasters are constantly working to improve their personal web presence. That is why it can be beneficial to be very straightforward with your request.
“Hi I was reading an article on jxw.com website that was discussing Nike Air Shoes. I was wondering if you could link to my website page so your visitors know where to purchase them?”
Product Trade: Often providing the product to the website owner (outreach program) is a benefit in itself of achieving links from the proposed website. At this juncture, many factors must be considered prior to making such a decision. The product value ($10, $100, $1,000) and the authority of the website and its following. The data uncovered within the initial search is important to calculate if the give-away will provide a positive ROI from the links.
Refine & Conduct a Post-Mortem
Most digital strategist and Internet marketers overlook the post-mortem concept. Spend the extra time to calculate the number of website owners that respond, and the numbers of those who accept your deal. Determine which pitch strategy based on the type of website (i.e. forums, blogs, general websites, etc.) has the highest conversion rate. Repeat, rinse, and re-use the most effective strategy.
There you have it, five effective steps to expanding your link building strategy for SEO. Contact us for your search marketing campaign. We have the experience to build your web presence.
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Three Effective Steps To Link Building For Your SEO Strategy – The Free Way!
Link building strategies are one of the most prominent discussions amongst Internet Marketers today. As a search marketing professional, I have been working on search optimization campaigns before it was even considered a career. In fact, I am so old school, that the time I started it was considered pre-software for SEO and keyword analysis. This post can easily serve as your way to link building success.
Essentially most of the software for link building submits queries for search engines, which will be defined and taught to you throughout this mini-series post. These queries help identify possible link partners and probable websites that may help enhance your web presence.
Step 1: Website Strategy
Before you even start the process for link building, you need ‘keywords’ first. It is critical that you analyze industry focused keywords that are relevant to the websites products/services. This information provides invaluable information on the commercial value for ranking such relevant keywords. To gather this information, Internet marketers utilize real-time Pay-Per-Click data, such as costs and conversions. The data can be gathered through Google’s keyword tool. This data alone can help you to draw the right conclusions on your campaign goals and objectives.
Step 2: Advanced Search Operators
To help you better understand, I have narrowed the scope by providing you with the following example, for Nike Air Shoes. This is a very competitive keyword with over 61 million websites working to optimize in reaching the first page for search results.
The best place to find websites that Google considers relevant for the keyword is well, Google itself. Are you surprised? A simple Google search for our keyword ‘Nike Air Shoes’ returns the most relevant websites that Google algorithms have decided as worthy for primary organic position. However, these websites are considered competitors, which would be considered difficult when attempting to secure a link. That is why we utilize advanced search operators that help us discover the websites we can obtain a link from. Here are a few examples of such operators.
Start by searching for your keyword ‘Nike Air Shoes’, then follow up with the inurl: operator. This operator provides listings of the websites you may get links from by category of blogs, forums, sites, and fans.
KEYWORD inurl:blog
KEYWORD inurl:forum
KEYWORD inurl:site
KEYWORD inurl:fans
This search will provide a dozen or so potential linking partners. Once you have this data, export the date into an excel spreadsheet of the keyword, landing page URL, and the sites domain name.
Allintext: operator searches for websites that contain the keyword text within the content of the page.
Allintext: KEYWORD
Site: operator or -site: operator searches to restrict the query to either a certain domain, type of domain, or excluding a certain domain. The purpose of this is to discover sites that have certain TLDs such as .edu, .gov, .info, .me etc. that are either going to be high value links, or in some cases not very likely for your brand website that will allow for you to obtain target links.
Intitle: operator allows searches to find pages with the keyword present in the title. You may also add quotes to your search to force the query to present exact titled pages.
Kick It Into Ninja Gear
Now lets focus on narrowing our scope and combining search operators. This can be an effective way of locating golden websites.
Here are a couple of examples:
+“Nike Air Shoes” +inurl:blog +intitle:review
+”Nike Air Shoes” +buy +purchase +inurl:forum
These combinations may allow you to discover many more web pages as potential links to your website.
While gathering each landing page as a potential link, consider obtaining further information on the following such as: Google page rank, Alexa rank, and other metrics such as Tweets and Facebook likes that will help you to prioritize the list of what may be of importance. There are various toolbars that can make this job easier:
If you are a PC user you are in luck. Here is an excel add-in, which will allow you to gather information effortlessly.
Step 3: Make Contact With Each Website Owner
At this stage you are ready to start contacting website owners. You will have to find ways to reach website owners, and more often than not its not easy (are you really surprised?)!
Often (not always) there may be a contact page that will result in a published phone number (very lucky), email address (lucky), contact form (let’s hope they read it), or even a physical address (don’t bother – last resort). And if all of the above fail, then you will have to search deeper and look through domain records.
For record locator’s, we utilize WHO.IS. This information uncovers data on the name, address, and contact information of the owner of the domain, most of the time its an e-mail. This data is publicly available and we advise that you utilize such information with professional courtesy.
If the aforementioned fail, then you may have to become ambivalent in your quest. Search through the website to find possible links to the websites Twitter, Facebook, or other relevant Social Media networks. This method may help you to establish a connection and open an opportunity for a relevant link.
There you have it, three effective steps to expanding your link building strategy for SEO. Contact us for your search marketing campaign. We have the experience to build your web presence.
Spread The Word Through Internet Marketing – Small Business Marketing 101
This series includes:
Small Business Marketing 101
Step 1: Position and Plan
Step 2: Create an Identity
Step 3: Spread the word through Internet Marketing
Step 3: Spread the word through Internet Marketing
Step 5: Measure your Social Media ROI
Our small business marketing series has informed you about understanding and positioning your brand to your core target market. We followed up with an in-depth understanding of your branding efforts, and the most critical points to take into consideration.
Let’s start with the basics. Internet marketing is also known as digital marketing, web marketing, online marketing, search marketing, and/or e-marketing. It is the general promotion of products and/or services on the Internet. It is a broad term that encompasses more than just Internet based marketing. It also includes both e-mail marketing methods and wireless media (mobile marketing, etc).
You have to start with a blue-print of your business. This is likely going to take time, so please allow yourself at least 45 minutes (given that you have all the data on hand, otherwise this will take longer) to formulate a direction for your business. Let’s get started!
There are several ways for you to market your business. As you read through the list, do not be concerned with the fact that you may not have an understanding of it. Simply, consider it as an avenue of strategy. Should you feel this may create an impact for your business, go deeper into your understanding. Without further a-do here is the list of Internet marketing avenues:
Search Marketing
Search engine marketing, (SEM), is a form of Internet marketing that promotes a brands website by increasing visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of the following: paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.
This can be done through various avenues such as Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter. Each one of these will allow for marketability on the top search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.
Our agency Creative Intellects, provides the following warning to our clients: Search Marketing, is basically bidding on a position for rankings, and depending on the advertisements click-through rate, you will be awarded higher rankings for lower bids. It is a science, and a part of this concept is a gamble. We have heard many stories of organizations that have used up much of their funds as they were either misguided or did not take careful measures to avoid such matters. Start with a small ancillary budget, and learn to utilize the tools that are the most effective, and only move forward once you have fully tested your campaign.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines through “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. An Internet marketing strategy carefully crafts SEO as an essential component to any successful traffic generation program.
To give you insight, SEO involves two basic components. The first is on-page optimization (40%) which is keyword relevance within the HTML and body content. These elements include, Title Tags, Alt tags within images, Headlines, paragraphs, and meta data. The second is the off-page optimization (60%), which is the process of achieving back-links with anchor text pointing to your domain. Through both of these processes, SEO can help you to naturally increase organic search listings on major search engines.
Our agency Creative Intellects, provides the following warning to clients: SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be far more effective, depending on the brands goals. This includes paid search advertising, which has its own version of SEO called ATO (Ad Text Optimization). A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic, that is achieved through optimization techniques and not paid advertising, to web pages. It may also involve the use of the following: paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade your audience, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their success, and improving a website’s conversion rate. SEO may generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals.
Social Media
Social media optimization, or SMO, is a form of social media activity with the intent of attracting unique visitors to website content. Social media provides features that allow you to syndicate content, including, RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user ratings and polling tools, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos. Promotional activities through social media include: blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating within discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles. SMO’s primary focus is to drive traffic from sources other than search engines, while also improving your natural search rankings.
Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. A corporate message spreads from user to user and presumably because it is coming from a trusted, third-party source, as opposed to the brand or company itself.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is can be defined as the use of any mobile medium where communication of a message occurs. This can be syndicated through numerous avenues such as: text message marketing, mobile applications, mobile enabled websites, and mobile applications embedded with advertising (to name a few).
These various types of mediums, allow for advertisers to achieve unique engagements with their select market based on specialized interests. For example, a game that incorporates car racing may have suitable advertisers within the automotive industry and/or other psycho-graphics associated products/services. Mobile marketing is changing at a very rapid pace, which means that brands can communicate with their market quickly, and that is far more effective than e-mail marketing.
With the aforementioned, Internet Marketing is a crucial science of finely crafted strategy that utilizes each medium in a creative and meaningful form. These verticals: Search Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Online Media, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing are mere examples to help you to get onto the right track of understanding what is suitable for your brand. Be sure to utilize each platform in a cohesive manner and decide where your efforts should be placed.
Stay tuned as we are going to be giving you Step 4 of this series in Small Business Marketing 101. If we can help national brands with their marketing strategies, who says that our agency cannot help you? All you have to do is take notes, and if you really want to be a step ahead, make a small investment in our eBook. Both of these tools and resources will serve as the perfect guide in establishing your mark.
Happy Marketing!
