Having a great product has never been a way of guaranteeing success. Having a great blog with brilliantly written content is the same thing. The difference between being a winner and an also ran is more often than not, marketing.
There’s a lot to blog marketing and we’ll be covering all the key areas in future posts, so you may want to subscribe.
This post will however touch on one of the most difficult areas – Link Building.
You’ll need know about SEO if you’re going to succeed
With Google being such a dominant source of free organic traffic for bloggers and brand owners, SEO is a skill we all need if we’re going to succeed.
For those of you who are new to search marketing, the Google algorithm is heavily weighted towards links from external websites being the determining factor in deciding whether a domain or a page within a domain should rank highly. This means that everyone needs to acquire the ability to attract links from relevant and influential websites.
This doesn’t give you license to go out and buy a container load of links or submit your site to thousands of directories in the hope that you can crack the Google code. Bigger and better bloggers have tried and failed because Google is a reassuringly difficult nut to crack.
Forget cash, you’ve got words
So forget throwing cash at the problem, you have something way more powerful up your sleeve. Words.
The key to ranking success is getting a wide variety of sites to write and link to you without cheating or gaming the system.
It’s this challenge that separates the successful bloggers from the less successful, and brands that can rank at the top of Google from those that struggle. Note that I did not say the good bloggers from the bad, as there are loads of great blogs that don’t get read because they’ve not been found! Yours may even be one of them.
It’s this puzzle that I want to help you crack and catapult your blog or brand to stardom by capturing your share of natural search traffic and followers.
The answer that works for everyone is a link building method the search industry calls ‘link bait’. In simple terms it is simply content that would inspire another blogger to write about and reference in a post of their own.
Creating posts that inspire other bloggers to write about and reference you takes a little thought. Good starting points are posts that are useful resource e.g. top 10 list, newsworthy, contentious, funny, opinionated, thought provoking or a combination. A good resource and example of good link bait is on problogger called 20 types of blog post, another good read is a post called link baiting strategies on SEOBook. In a recent post I really liked from CornwallSEO, it discussed how you sometimes need to think outside the box when creating content to attract links.
You’ve also got reach
Writing great content that inspires others is also not enough. Other bloggers need to be alerted to it before that can consider writing about it. So how do you reach out to hundreds or even thousands of bloggers in an attempt to not just get them to read your blog post, but to write about it?
Making friends with bloggers that share your interests via direct contact, comments, twitter, and other social networking sites are tried and tested methods and a good but time consuming investment.
SeededBuzz was created to supplement this direct method by putting you amongst a community of like-minded bloggers with the same objectives as you. Once accepted, members are encouraged to promote their best work to other members of the network in the hope of inspiring further blog posts.
So what’s the nugget of advice in this post you should take out?
- SEO is one of the best free ways of getting readers and link building is key to SEO.
- Regardless of what stage of marketing your blog or website you are at, to catapult it to stardom, knowing how to write content that inspires others to write about it is a key skill you’ll need to learn fast.
- Having a plan for getting it into the hands of other writers may not come naturally but it’s as important a skill as being a talented author.
[...] tough to build link for so you need to think outside the box. An area touched on in this post about how bloggers can build links. Here’s the details of a campaign idea that worked well for [...]