Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

I don’t know what everyone else’s client roster looks like, but for us it’s all over the map, both literally and figuratively.  Not only have our clients allowed us to fulfill our dream of manifest destiny (almost), but they range from billion dollar corporations to one person start ups and everything in between.  Obviously, the means and the goals of these types of businesses are drastically different, and from our standpoint they each require us to use different “SEO muscles”.

For our smaller clients that don’t have the budget or resources to do consistent content development, a large burden falls on building links through relationships.  Now there’s nothing I hate more than people talking about “relationship building”.  It makes my skin crawl.  It reminds me of this financial planner I met recently who was so obviously phony, but just kept saying “building relationships” until you either got sick of him or decided to buy into his shtick.  I chose the former.

But as much as I hate this cliched term, there’s definitely something to be said for it when it comes to effective link building.  It can be so easy to fall into the trap of thinking about links transactionally.  Do what you need to do to get the link, then on to the next target.  This is a pretty limiting approach for both you and your client, however.

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of this type of work, and particularly in the world of small to mid sized business, there’s a lot of education that needs to take place as you approach link targets in adjacent markets.  People want to know why you want a link and what the value is.  If you’re experienced in the game, you can likely give these folks a fairly canned but convincing response get the link and move on.  However, I’ve been pushing increasingly to help educate my targets as to what I’m doing, the benefit for my client, and the benefit for them.  Most often, I find that they appreciate the knowledge passed along, and in some instances, it even opens the door to opportunities for gaining a new client, either the link target themselves or one of their business contacts.  Even without that benefit, I’ve found some of my targets become increasingly willing to refer me to other good link targets, and having established that relationship makes gaining that next link that much easier.

This is terribly fundamental, but sometimes fundamentals are the easiest things to forget.  I played a basketball game the other night and halfway through the game we were really struggling on offense and we called timeout.  Everyone started throwing out ideas of what to do and someone finally said, “Why don’t we just run a pick and roll?”  One of the oldest and simplest plays in basketball.  We all shrugged and agreed to give it a shot.  The result?  The easiest two points of the night.  The moral of the story?  Sometimes revisiting the fundamentals can really reap some great rewards, and I think that definitely holds true for link building.

I am constantly scouring the net in search for new ways to discover and build links for my clients.  It can be a frustrating and often times tedious task, but when it gets results, it’s all worth it.  I’ve never been a huge fan of sharing every last tidbit of insiders knowledge, but after a recent string of very fruitful efforts, I thought it would make sense to share my newest muse.

Local news sites.

Yes, you can bomb the local news stations/websites/blogs all you want with press releases, but that is far too easy for editors to ignore.  So why leave the submission to them?  Many local news sites are now offering the ability to create your own username, and wait for it…blog.

Yes, I know you’re tired of blogging already, and you might maintain six of them that you’re using for links (quick note: this is overkill 99% of the time), but there are some real benefits from this route.

1. A lot of smaller news sites haven’t gone the nofollow route for their blogs, allowing you to get some highly relevant local dofollow links.
2. HIGHLY targeted audience.  Hey, even if the site’s nofollow, if you’re promoting a local business, local news sites will likely provide one of, if not the most trafficked site(s) in the area.
3. Extra mileage!  A lot of local news sites will re-use blogs in other, more prominent areas of the site, and if you write in a “newsy” fashion you might just find yourself contributing more often than you think.  Now THAT is an opportunity to get some extra mileage out of your writing efforts.

Okay, that’s all.  Start scouring for opportunities!