Link Building Strategies for Small or New Websites
Small sites or new websites rarely have the budget to roll out a big online marketing and link building campaign, nor do they have the resources to expand aggressively during the first months of their existence. Webmasters should fully consider, then, how to best optimize their limited resources in order to receive high quality links and drive increasingly more traffic to their websites.
The best link building strategies involve planning how you will create your content beforehand, as nobody will link to an empty webpage. You will need frequent updates with articles, pictures, graphs, etc., at the start, but schedule them regularly so that early readers will notice consistency from the very start. After a certain point, you must consider mentioning important individuals, perhaps flattering them, so that they want to guest post on your website. After accumulating enough content, you should think of deploying a dynamic graph or modified contents page in order to stand out and highlight your achievements thus far.
Next, you must identify your link target audience, whether it’s middle-aged SEO bloggers, stay-at-home moms or anybody else, in order to fine-tune your strategies. For example, certain demographic groups react better to e-mail subscription calls, while others prefer to seek out links themselves. It pays to communicate with the authorities in the niche and notify them of any updates on your website. If you pay their ego enough lip service, you might win one or two authoritative links.
Engaging your audience and colleague writers or bloggers is also a sure-win strategy to build links. Asking for question and answer sessions over the Internet, or inquiring about the opinion of an influential writer on a topic, will secure you both a relevant topic for a new article as well as an honorary mention on the writer’s website. Alternatively, introduce a simple reward scheme for contributors to the website, and allow rewards to be embedded on other websites via a link. Not only will this motivate contributors, but it will also create valuable backlinks to your new website.
At this early stage, the website could, and perhaps should, invest a significant amount of time and resources into making extremely viral content, also known as link bait. It could be a visual representation of all data the site has gathered so far, a catchy video, song, etc., which will aim to be an instant success. Nobody can guarantee hit after hit, and link baits actually only work around 20% to 25%of the time1. It is not a sustainable practice then to aim only for link baits, but nevertheless, small websites are still looking for their audiences and have nothing to lose. Additional ideas include are dynamic content, adjustable models, and 3D graphics.
Another strategy is to guest post on a more established website or work together with another author on an article. That way, you will access a whole new audience relevant to your industry or niche, will acquire a powerful backlink and even improve your relationship with a fellow writer. Insist that all your details are featured in the guest post, preferably with social media profiles and of course, your own website. You can quote some of your past articles for more link juice, but be careful not to go overboard.
Finally, the creation of the website should be paralleled with the creation of a reader community on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. This can be done via an easy-to-see “Like” button on your page and a link to the company page. You should also engage the community with polls, contents and discussions so that they share your articles on many different websites. Releasing a new article piece can also be combined with a status update.
References:
- http://www.trafficoptimiser.com/blog/2011/08/22/is-my-infographic-worth-2000/
