Can You Build Links Without Getting Personal?

One of our clients is fortunate in having an intern who really gets social media. He has plenty of creative ideas for linkbuilding, and many of them involve getting dug into communities.

Linkbuilding isn’t all about relationships, but it is to some extent about relationships. Participating in forums, reaching out to friends and followers at social media sites, gaining visibility as an expert in your field — all of these things are great for linkbuilding.

Our client is concerned, though — what about when this intern leaves? If it’s all about personality, will the company lose the benefit of his work?

We have some concerns about that, too. Our social media maven is quite effective at online networking. When we get comments on her work saying how adorable she is, though, we wonder whether her charm overshadows the value of our services — or at least skews our traffic.

We have another client who just doesn’t want to put himself out there, and he doesn’t have any minions to delegate the task to, either. Can he promote his site effectively without giving up his privacy?

We’re not going to pretend that personal charm and skill at networking is unimportant. It’s important at the Rotary Club, and it’s important online, too. The gregarious, friendly soul who never met a stranger can be an asset to an organization online or off. But that’s not all there is to linkbuilding.

Getting links requires skillful identification of sites that are relevant to your website, and where you’ll have something to offer. You need to be quick at research and highly accurate in order to get the best ROI for your linkbuilding efforts. And effective link requests rely as much on logic and skill with language as they do on charm.

Good linkbuilders are highly analytical, articulate, and creative. Look at all the ways you can build good links that have nothing to do with personalities:

  • articles
  • press releases
  • niche directories and listings
  • on site link bait
  • business pages and profiles
  • company blogs
  • white papers and e-books

So the good news is that there is plenty of useful linkbuilding you can do as a company, not as an individual. Of course, the other good news is that you can hire us (including our adorable social media maven, but also our skilful writers) to do this stuff for you.


Posted

in

,

by

Tags:

Comments

5 responses to “Can You Build Links Without Getting Personal?”

  1. Susan Idlet Avatar

    We are so psyched to get going with our linkbuilding campaign! In fact, I’m hoping to present a workshop on this to our whole sales force at the annual meeting in April. Maybe even use it as the theme for the entire awards banquet/meeting. After all, good sales is all about building relationships – linkbuilding! Thank you for the excellent training session last week! Now, if I could just figure out how to get my oh-so-cool gravatar on this comment…?

  2. Susan Idlet Avatar

    We’ll I’ll be – my gravatar showed up. Must have done something right.

  3. Rebecca Avatar
    Rebecca

    Look at you!

    I’m so glad to hear that you’re excited about your linkbuilding. It makes such a difference to the performance of your website. And you guys are smart and creative, so I expect to see great things!

  4. Josepha Avatar
    Josepha

    The adorableness maybe only matters in video or photographic building.

    I mean, during standard, beginner linkbuilding, you seldom think to create 30 second shorts.

    Though maybe you should.

  5. Rebecca Avatar
    Rebecca

    True, we only get those “You’re super cute! call me ;)” comments (to quote one that came in this morning) on the videos. Those are the ones that make me think we may be getting traffic that doesn’t benefit us. However, I think that a quick adorable comment at a forum might get more response and more click through to the site than a staid, boring one.

    We could test the theory.

    The main point, though, is just as you say: a whole lot of foundational linkbuilding can be done without any personal input at all.

Leave a Reply