Give Links to Gain Authority Status

It is quite possible that I have found a group of people who are more paranoid about linking to competitors‘ sites than internet marketers!

Believe me, the stories I have heard, like the above post on Lexblog, along with excuses as to why some people just will not link to other sites, even if they are not direct competitors at all, defies logic.

Get This: You are not marketing online unless you link to competitors.

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Heresy Alert:
I’ve stated at least 100 times that you are not marketing if you don’t have a blog. Rather, you are not in existence if you don’t blog because your site, products, services, whatever you hope to achieve with your site is irrelevant, obscure, and lucky to have any traffic at all.
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So you, of course have a blog. (Let’s assume that fact while some of you are running over to the Authority Site Center right now to get a blog to keep from being left out of this, and every other marketing discussion on the web today.)

One of the hardest things we have to teach at the Authority Site Center is linking tactics for the new web.

In the old days I never linked to competition. But then I had static sites and the “captive audience” thing was crucial in order to move product and get list signups.

When blogs came around, the marketing world got turned upside down and the top bloggers actually started getting more traffic and better rankings for doing the unthinkable: linking to their competition!

Under the old rules I shouldn’t be linking to guys like CopyBlogger or ProBlogger.

They teach a lot of the same things I do here at FTR. Am I insane or crazy like a fox?

Let’s look at the facts:

1) I enjoy more traffic to this site than I have gotten to any site without joint venture mailings, Adwords, and all the other marketing tactics we’ve used for years to get traffic. And it is far more regular and far more repeat traffic than I have ever gotten to any site I’ve owned in the past.

2) I currently have a 37.8% return visitor ratio. For all the traffic I work so hard to get, a full 37% come back over and over for free and no further expense in time to acquire them other than writing good content.

3) My advertising rates continue to go up because advertising today is based almost completely on page views. I get new visitor page views, but remember the 37% return visitors? My advertising is affected by that greatly.

Why do people keep coming back?

Because when there is a resource out there that does a good job of conveying or supporting a point I am making, I link to them.

Citing your sources and supporting evidence is something professional writers have done for a wee bit longer than the internet has existed.

Yet most people still don’t do this online, mostly because they’ve never been taught offline to cite their sources and supporting evidence.

If you didn’t go to college or learn elsewhere how to write professionally, how would you know this?

Yet it is crucial to the “street cred” of any blog site, especially since the mainstream media dislikes bloggers so much for taking millions of their regular readers from them.

They will do anything and everything to discredit bloggers as unprofessional and untrained (biased) “reporters” and we certainly give them plenty of fodder to make this point!

Open Up Your Niche To Your Visitors

This blog works really hard to open the web up to visitors and link to every pertinent, important site in this niche and visitors totally eat that up!

Rather than the old idea that you’d lose visitors forever to another blog, which on some small percentage I just might, the real eye-opener is that people never seem to forget who showed them all the cool stuff in the first place.

And they come back for more.

This philosophy of linking not only does wonders for gaining [tag-tec]free targeted traffic[/tag-tec] and repeat visits, but it forces you to stay current, relevant, and on your game because you’ve risen to the task of being as good as your competition.

Your visitors have come to expect quality and, in order to keep them coming back, you can’t slide.

When you open up your niche to your visitors like this, you are saying “I’m confident enough in my ability to wow you over and over, day after day, with killer content and resources that I don’t mind sending you here or there because I know you’ll be back.”

You don’t have to accept this as a theory for your niche and “try it to see if it works.”

It’s a fact in the blog world. If you aren’t linking outside of linking to affiliate products, you are irrelevant in your niche.

Every killer blog you read knows this and practices it.

Bite the bullet and link to the players in your niche to gain authority in your niche!

Then come back here and tell us all the good that has come from your new campaign. You might just help someone else to get out of the link paranoia syndrome.

In the blog world, “You link, therefore you am.”

Tagged as: getting links, getting targeted traffic, lexblog, linking tactics