Some of us remember the days when all you had to do to get a decent link was send out an email asking for it. It was about 5 days in 2000 that this tactic worked like gangbusters.
What is amazing is that people still send out those lousy link letters from time to time. In 2009!
That’s what I call phoning it in. In case you didn’t already know, that’s not how the pros do their link building. A link is a valuable thing. The right link can turn the most obscure little site on the web into a bastion of chatter, followers, sales, ad clicks, and bright prospects for the future. Namely, never having to ask for a link again!
Here are 4 of the most coveted types of links you can get for your site in order of importance:
- The biggest guy or gal in your niche links to you from their site in the context of a great post they’ve made. And they used your best keyword in the link.
- The biggest site in your niche includes you in a list of links they thought were great that day.
- Someone with a big following links to your latest post on a social site like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed or StumbleUpon and sends you scads of traffic. (And Google picks it up from FriendFeed and other places their mention gets syndicated to.)
- Authority links from news sites, big interviews, or other “respected” media.
Some links are truly life-changing. Or at least business-changing.
There are countless stories of people getting their products or sites written about, just by TechCrunch, who went from obscurity to big time overnight. I read in an interview with Michael Arrington last year that two guys fly to his hometown from another country, knocked on his door unannounced, and had as their only goal of the whole trip to get him to write about their product!
Those guys knew the value of a well-placed link.
So how far would you go to win the link lottery?
Who is on your short list of sites that would be the most important to get a contextual link from?
To what lengths would you go to get links from them?
Would you fly across the country or to another continent to attend a conference just to meet those people?
Would you become their biggest fan and support them by giving great comments on their posts regularly?
Would you make “traffic sacrifices” for them? (Be an evangelist for their site and send tons of people to them through social media and your own blog.)
How about, once you know they know who you are through your support above, you develop a product inspired by them, give them the credit, then try to get them to get behind it with their sphere of influence?
The developer of the little plugin called “What would Seth Godin Do?” did a fine job with this tactic. He even put his target in the name of the product! It’s one of the more popular plugins for WordPress to this day.
Stack The Odds In Your Favor
Once you know the true value of high-level links and what they could do for your visibility, you can plan on the sacrifices you need to make to get those links to become a reality. You might spend months on a campaign to grab the attention of a key link target in your niche. If the outcome would be very profitable for you, you could budget that into your ongoing marketing campaign and justify the effort with the expected outcome.
And here’s the kicker:
Landing a major link makes all the work everyone else does (sometimes for years) to work their way up to the same link disappear for you. I call it “leap frog” link building. All the other links you would have worked for over a long period of time by working your way step-by-step up the ladder will backfill after you get a link from one or two of the biggest players.
Once the big dogs in your niche start linking to you, all the others will fall in line.
People you’ve seen burst onto the scene in any niche with a big review or even a soft mention from a big player – they did the leap frog method. Most of the time without ever knowing how big what they did was and how much time and effort they saved themselves.
One or two key links can change everything.
Having a strategy to capture the attention of a big player, impress them, and make them want to link to you is important. It should have its own timeline and plan right along side your daily marketing activities so you never lose sight of your goal of winning the link lottery.
Every little thing you do in this regard is like buying another entry in a lottery with far better odds than Power Ball. Because a good plan will stack the odds in your favor!
