one link at a time
by Michael - July 2nd, 2008 11:06 am
A few years ago I wrote an article for a no-name web site with very little traffic to speak of. The article was good (if I do say so myself), but nothing Pulitzer worthy. I didn’t even get paid for it if I am being honest. I just did it out of the kindness of my heart, because this struggling site, owned by a friend of mine, needed quality content.
Five days after the article went live, active traffic to the site went through the roof and no one knew why. It wasn’t until they looked at the traffic logs that they realized a writer at a major news network’s web site had included a short mention (with a link) to my article.
On the first day that article yielded over 5,000 new visitors to my friend’s fledgling ecommerce web site and though that was at least three years ago, it still brings in an average of 700 clicks per day.
That’s when I first realized the true power of the link.
WordPress has a snazzy name for them – trackbacks – but I’m old school, yo. I remember when the Internet was nothing but bulletin boards and 1400 baud modems because I’m street like that. Today we have lightning fast connections and near instant responses.
Before I go off on a tangent, let me just say that in the world of ecommerce and Internet marking, links are important. They increase credibility and the right ones can send your new traffic into the stratosphere.
While inbound links are most often the result of happenstance there are ways you can increase your ecommerce web site’s potential for grabbing them. By writing content that is timely and useful (an article that references the current state of political affairs in the U.S., for example), you are offering information that can be easily incorporated into content on other sites while simultaneously raising your rankings in the search engines – since Barak Obama and John McCain are two of the hottest searches of the moment.
See what I just did? I mentioned politics, Obama and McCain and now the search engine spiders are going to love me for it.
Now when I write content that I think may be particularly useful for visitors of another web site, all I have to do is drop them a quick email mentioning the piece. While not every such email will result in a link, some will. Consider it a form of online marketing. Sales people don’t get a sale for every contact they make, but when they do it makes it all worthwhile.
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