Lee Odden of the Online Marketing Blog is in London for the SES Conference in London and he’s graciously sharing with us the highlights from the session Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions.
He reports:
Link building is a chicken/egg situation. To get the links you need content but to get the content found and linked to, you need the links.
When you have excellent content you need to kickstart it – get it out there. There are both free and paid methods of doing this.
Free methods include: Social bookmarks, Usenet, company newsletter, blogs, forums. Be sure not to spam forums and blogs. (Does that mean it’s ok to spam social bookmarks?) 🙂
Contribute to the forums and blogs before you start recommending specific content. (emphasis is mine)
Um… excuse me but a speaker at an international event has to remind audience members to CONTRIBUTE TO THE FORUMS AND BLOGS BEFORE YOU START RECOMMENDING SPECIFIC CONTENT?!?!
In other words, when you ask the lady out on the first date, don’t extract the condom from your wallet and begin to apply it before she has a chance to accept or decline.
Course example? Yes, but it’s an effective word picture.
Even if your goal for the date is to end with a romp between the sheets, you still don’t lead with that proposition!
The same is true when you try to utilize… not only forums and blogs, but also social networking sites as well. It seems to me that this is merely a matter of common sense and we should ALL be encourages to apply a healthy dose of common sense to our online marketing efforts.
The problem with online marketing is it’s "easy" to forget that you’re communicating with other human beings. OK…maybe forgetting that marketing is merely another form of communication it’s not just a problem with online marketing…. maybe it’s a problem with ALL marketing and advertising.
Remember the customer…. maybe that’s the key to marketing made easy.
Hi Kathy,
I think this post is excellent! And very true. When it comes to what we do (creative design, web development etc), most clients do not know what to look for to see if the actual service and end result is of high quality. They only really rely on how your customer service was and what they get from the project they paid for. The fact that their new website is coded beautifully and everything works flawlessly is not what they will remember their experience with us from. They will remember the service , the phone calls and various other aspects of the development process when deciding their level of satisfaction with our company.
You just have to continue to keep the quality high AND the service high and hope they appreciate both!! 🙂