It seems very ironic to me that most small business owners refuse to ask their friends and relatives for links to their Websites. You probably have no qualms about asking your friends and relatives to mention your business if the opportunity comes up. But when it comes to asking for links, the people most likely to give you those links are the people you are least likely to ask for them.
Asking other Website owners to give you links is a perfectly valid reflective marketing method. For some insane reason, many people have taken up the wrong-headed notion that your links MUST be “relevant” to your site. I have tried to argue away this nonsense several times in the past (even earning many good links in the process) but it seems that popular fear outweighs scientific reason every time.
The problem with irrelevant links is that people who rely on easy-to-get, search-spammy links confuse those with all “irrelevant” links. A link may or may not pass value on the basis of its relevance to the destination, but relevance is not determined solely by whether KEYWORD is in both the linking anchor text and the destination URL.
Your friendship makes you relevant to someone else’s lifestyle. If that means you want to write a blog post about their new business site, you’re free to do that. Of course, if that business site just happens to get 200 blog posts from “friends” all explaining how great the new business is, that will look sketchy in just about any algorithm, including the one running in your head.
Step 1: Ask Your Family for Links
How many close relatives do you have? Some families may have as many as 20 children but most families have fewer than 10 children (who reach adulthood). So the chances are better than even that you have fewer than 10 brothers and sisters. And the chances are still better than even that you have fewer than 100 cousins. So out of your fewer than 10+ brothers and sisters and 100+ cousins, how many are likely to have Websites? Probably no more than 10-20. Now, Facebook accounts don’t count as Websites. I mean real, bona fide, open to the Web, indexed-by-Google-and-Bing Websites. Out of 100 close relatives the average person probably can point to no more than 10-15 Websites, if even that many.
Let’s assume you’re on speaking terms with half those relatives. Let’s assume that half of THEM will actually give you a link. That’s a 50% estimated rate of return on asking for a link. In some families the success rate will approach 100% and in some families it will approach 0. But most people should be somewhere in the middle.
So, let’s see how this adds up: You can send out 100 emails to random strangers with “relevant” blogs and expect at best about 1% rate of success or you can ask 12 relatives with Websites and get 30-70% rate of success. That’s a pretty tough call in my book but I’m going to say that blood is thicker than random strange email.
So here you are with a handful of relatives who are willing to give you links. They’ll inevitably ask, “How do I do that?” Or, worse, they’ll say, “Sure — I’ll put it up the next time I blog.” And then you wait and wait and wait….
So what you should really do is set up a blog party (if you can get them all into the same room) or schedule some quality Skype time with them so you can walk them through the process of posting the link for you. Better yet, do your homework and help them write some content that matches whatever they put on their sites and which is still “relevant” to your Website.
Step 2: Ask Your Friends and Co-Workers for Links
So having exhausted the family marketing resources you can now turn to your friends and co-workers. Dunbar’s Number says you are probably closely connected to about 150 people. We just eliminated 75-110 of those people by dealing with your family. So that means you have another 40-75 people whom you can consider asking for links. If you’re the boss and your co-workers are employees then you probably need to exclude those people from your list of potential linking partners. Trust me, you do NOT want to put your links where true friendship won’t protect them.
So your 40-75 friends and acquaintances are NOT employees, students, or other people over whom you wield some sort of authority. They are your peers, the people whom you CHOOSE to associate with and who choose to associate with you. Of these people, you should be able to find another 10-20 who have Websites. Again, most of those sites probably won’t be updated often. But if you look at their sites and create content for them that really matches the sites you can probably persuade your friends and acquaintances to give you some links.
If you know and/or are related to 150 people then 15-20 of them should have Websites. You should be able to get 6-10 links from that group of friends and relatives pretty easily. You may think 6-10 links is not much but it’s a start, it’s an easy start, and it gives you an opportunity to shape content around the links that adds value to your friends’ and relatives’ sites.
That content creates the context which makes those links valuable to both the other sites’ visitors and your own site. You don’t want to just drop a link in a blogroll — you want your friends and relatives to proudly tell their 3 monthly visitors about your site in as compelling a way as possible.
Step 3: Leverage Your Own Network
It’s a rare small business owner who has 10-15 Websites — except for those domaining wonders who manage to buy and build 50-100 Websites targeting all their community-name keywords. These are the businesses most likely to get their sites penalized for spam.
If you’re going to buy 100 Websites to promote your business at least make them interesting and distinctive. That’s really not hard to do. In fact, that is the foundation of Reflective Dynamics’ business model: we can make 100 distinctive, interesting Websites (in fact, we’ve done that many times over). You don’t have to fall prey to cookie-cutter SEO strategies.
With 100 distinctive and interesting Websites you can gradually build out content on each site to create interest in your primary business through simple advertising, custom articles, small promotional widgets, or other means. You have complete control over the design and structure of your own Websites. You should also have reasonable goals for them. But you’re allowed to tell your visitors to your Shoe Website that you also sell Pumpkin Patch tickets every October on some other Website.
The question is, are you going to do it in some cheap, smarmy spammy fashion or are you going to make the link relevant, informing, and helpful to your visitors?
The wrong way to do this is to put a sitewide link on 99 of your sites all pointing to the “real” site. You don’t want to add a footer-from-Hell to every page in your network that “tells” your visitors about all your other sites (they won’t read the footer, so we all know the links are really there for the search engines).
Frankly, if you cannot justify telling visitors to 100 Websites about another Website then that Website does not need 100 links. Period. If the Website you want links for is so bad, so boring, so unworthy of highly prominent, content-rich links on your own network, why are you trusting other people to give you healthy, high-value links?
Ultimately, You Want All Links to be Friend-and-Relative Quality Links
Imagine that every link you earn has to pass the friends-and-family test. You might be able to put some spammy links on their sites but in reality you want to give as good as you get, so you should be helping them improve the quality of their own sites while they are giving you links. You should do whatever you need to do to ensure that random strangers will appreciate your site enough to link to it because they feel the link is good for their own visitors.
It doesn’t matter what business vertical you’re in. If you’re trying to get customers through your Website then you MUST make an interesting and compelling Website, and THAT will eventually bring you some links that are not as easy to obtain as the links your friends and family will give you.
Just think about that.
Read More about Search Engine Optimization
How Long Does It Take SEO To Work?
Guest Post Link Building: Why It Hurts the Web
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness for Non-expert Websites
On-Page Optimization SEO Checklist
SEO Metrics Online: Which Measurements Should You Use?
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