Link Building Success – Building Relationships With Bloggers
Link building is crucial to any SEO campaign but it is also the most time consuming and frustrating. One of the best ways to get inbound links is from blogs that are in the same niche as your business and these offer some great benefits:
- Solid inbound links often within the body copy of the text on the blog
- They help your business reach out to a new audience
- Blogs can drive new, relevant traffic to your site
- It may lead to more exposure and natural links through social media sites like StumbleUpon, delicious and digg.
Like a lot of SEO techniques the key to success in link building with blogs is building relationships. Before this can be done you need to identify influential bloggers that write about topics that are related to your business.
Finding influential bloggers
There are a number of ways of finding influential bloggers within your niche and these are some of the techniques I use:
- Go over to Google and search for the blogs that are using similar keywords to you. The blogs don’t have to be an exact match to your business – be creative and look for blogs that have similar ideas and concepts to your business.
- Make a list of the ones that you like the most – obviously the number of blogs yo0u choose will all be based on how much time you can give to the project. Set up a an Excel spreadsheet with the name of the blog and then it is time to do your research.
- Check the Page Rank of each blog – this isn’t the greatest way of measuring the popularity of the blogs but it is a good starter for ten. Remember the more trusted the blog the more link juice will be passed down to your site if they link to you.
- Run each blog through the Hubspot Blog Grader
- This is a great way to find out the quality of the blogs you are researching and it will show statistics like traffic, authority, frequency of posts and blog engagement. Pay particular interest to the traffic the blog is getting and blog engagement (twitter mentions, facebook likes and comments) as this will help you build traffic to the site as well.
Through some basic research you should now have found a number of blogs that you will want to get a link from – for both SEO purposes and for exposure of your business. It is now time for you to get the link and this is the difficult bit! As the title of this post suggest you have to build a relationship with the blogger in order to become successful in getting those killer links.
Building relationships with bloggers
- Most bloggers have Twitter accounts so begin by following them – everyone like to see their numbers of followers go up!
- Retweet their Tweets and comment on their Tweets. Don’t overdo this as you may come of as a bit of stalker let it develop over time so they start to recognise you. Tweet the occasional link to one of their posts.
- Comment on their blog posts saying how much you enjoy them. Make sure you have read the posts and comment accordingly.
- Link to the posts that interest you the most. Link from a post on your site or blog that is relevant to something they have written about.
- Locate the blogs that they post on and post a few comments there as well.
- Connect with them on mybloglog.
- After a while you can send them an email asking a question or making a comment. If they recognise you this could lead to a few emails back and forth – and if you haven’t pushed it too hard you could possibly ask about the possibility of them writing a post about your fantastic business or product.
If you put the time and effort into building relationships for your links you will find you suffer less rejection. Bloggers are more likely to link to you if you have been participating in the community.
They key to success in getting links from bloggers in to give and then give some more and only ask for that link or review when the time feels right.
Follow these links for more information on linkbuilding:
Updating your Inbound Linking Strategy
How To Write Link Bait In Five Easy Steps
+++Wayne Barker+++
July 2nd, 2010 at 10:28 am
Great post Wayne. People sometimes forget that blogging is another form of social networking and that a lot of bloggers are one man bands who are simply looking to connect with their peers and build a community. If you take the time to build that relationship you’re far more likely to see successful results – you only get what you give as they say!