There is practically no limit to how creative you can be with your online marketing and people will constantly evolve new ways to create links. Here are a few ideas for ways to keep it interesting, to be a bit creative and to get some good quality links back to your site.
Be a Reference for the Media
A link from a media site – whether national or local – back to yours is a great link to have and there are several ways that you can work towards getting them. One way, which takes a bit of media relations effort, is to get yourself recognised as an expert in your field, so that when a member of the press chooses to write about that subject they will call on your for a quote. The story may be published in a local paper but generally speaking it will be replicated online as well, often with a link back to your site.
The other way is to respond to press requests. Journalists will post briefs on sites like Response Source and others saying that they are looking for stories on, for example, ‘office romances’ (which is a terrible example but the only one I could think of off hand so please go with it). If you have a current office romance going on you get back to them, they write about it and they link to your site – though let’s just hope that their topic is slightly more relevant!
Be Nice! Give Testimonials
Believe it or not, saying nice things about people can do more than warm your heart, it can boost your rankings! If you always use a particular product because you think it’s great, or you call on a certain trades person regularly because he’s reliable then write a short ‘thank you’ from your company to theirs, e-mail it to them and invite them to use it as a testimonial on their site. They’ll be pleased, they’ll add it to their site and they’ll link back to yours – bingo.
Publish Data
There are statistics everywhere so we’re not suggesting that you need to spend time coming up with new ones – it’s what you do with them that counts. If you know of an organisation that researches and is a source of numbers – the number of searches for a particular keyword phrase in Country X as opposed to Country Y, to pick one of a possible million and one examples – then reinterpreting these and publishing them with conclusions, or even just in a visual way – in other words, taking a few seemingly bland statistics and publishing them in a colourful chart – will make you a source of something interesting and referencable.
You should always quote your original source but when someone embeds your chart or quotes your qualitative findings they will then reference you as the host of that information, linking back to you as an expert on the topic.
