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Part 4 of social media marketing: increase your linkability
April 11, 2008
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Rohit Bhargava created a post that kicked into gear the “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO). Since he wrote about SMO in 2006, the rules have increased to 17. Many other marketing gurus, including Larry Weber and Ben Willis, have written about the best ways to succeed at social media marketing and it's taken on a life of its own in discussion forums around the 'Net. This, of course, makes me happy since I find SMM (social media marketing) interesting and exciting.
Part 4 of my series is about increasing your linkability and rewarding inbound linkers. I've discussed links as part of your web strategy before and today I'll take it a step further.
As a small business and/or a retail store, you've got a website that contains products, information about your business, where you're located and possibly (hopefully) some relevant content (articles, how-to's, blogs, etc.). On the pages, you've got links from one page to another, and maybe some links to other sites. As part of your search engine optimization strategy, you already know that links are important to the search engines and being a useful resource to other sites is key. So how do you kick it up a notch?
1. Create an affiliate program
2. Re-read your content and link within the content (example: notice my links in this blog)
3. Write relevant articles or use content that others will find useful, and therefore will link to it from their site
4. Reward sites that link to you*
5. Create a page of links that you recommend (ensure they're applicable to your site. Listings that aren't applicable to you can penalize you with search engine rankings.) TIP: if you participate in someone else's affiliate program, you can make extra $$$.
How do you reward sites that link to you? First, you can link back to them. Second, you can offer them a coupon or a freebie from your business, or third, create an affiliate program where they make a percentage for referring business to you. Be creative in your awards program. The more people/sites feel appreciated for helping drive traffic, the more traffic they're drive to you.
Part 1: research & evaluation / benchmark what people are discussing | Part 2: ensure your website is visit-worthy | Part 3: create bookmarks & tagging for your content | Part 4: increase your linkability & reward your inbound links | Part 5: evaluate the online channel strategies | Part 6: work to build your community & participate yourself | Part 7: promote your company and yourself | Part 8: measuring your progress | Part 9: improve the benefit and the experience | Part 10: help your content travel | Part 11: use the 22 psychological needs to make a difference | Part 12: social networking tools
Posted by Suze Bragg on April 11, 2008 | Comments (0)
