Building links without your computer
As I dig around the web on a daily quest for information, I’ve found an immense amount of information on tactics for building links. Email requests, linkbait, widgets, and many more ideas are sprinkled all over the web and are certainly excellent means to build links. But for a lot of small businesses, their staff is not always in front of a computer. This, however, does not mean you can’t still be building links.
Heresy? Hell no. Think about it for a second. All you need to do when you’re at a function is try to find the active web users. Whether it’s someone who’s active on Twitter, blogs regularly, is in the media or has a media contact, or has control over a website. Then what do you do? Make an impression! This can be as genuine or (if done properly) as contrived as you want to be.
If people don’t know about your company, you have a chance to get yourself noticed, and by proxy your company. Rand Fishkin, of SEOMoz fame, doesn’t need any further help in building links, but his fashion statements most certainly land him all kinds of links. For those not in the know, Rand became known for his brighly colored footwear, and with his outgoing personality ends up generating links to his site whenever he’s at an event.
Yellow Pumas, my brother will be jealous.
If you’re headed to an event about a certain topic, try to develop some unique content beforehand that relates to the event and offers some sort of unique value to those in attendance (some nifty tool, interesting picture, article, etc.) and then pitch it while you’re there! Ask for other people’s blog addresses and Twitter accounts because you’re interested in following them, and then tell them about your content - and tell them why they need to see it. It doesn’t hurt to write the URL of your resource on the back of a business card, either).
In a lot of ways it’s just good old fashioned networking, but it’s about seeking out the right people who will follow up and build links with you. You don’t need to be annoying or disingenuous, you just need to be interesting and persistent. So turn off your computer, get out there and build some links!
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Tags: how to network for links, link building, link building without a computer, offline link building tactics
November 13th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Dan