SEO Link Juice – How to ask for a link from your competition

May 4th, 2010 by markus | No Comments | Filed in Business, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing Success

One of the fastest ways to get your blog or website noticed is to seek inbound links — also known as SEO link juice.

When you get a dozen or so trusted and authority websites linking to your site, you're going to see your search engine rankings rise quickly.

Having more people link to you is good, however your efforts won't pay off nearly as much until you attract your first 12 or so backlinks.

And get this, you might be surprised to find out it doesn't matter how accurate the link anchor text is… what really counts is getting other websites that are trusted to pass a direct, one-way link to you.

I'm just one of literally billions of website owners willing to send you my link juice to your site. Yet surprisingly, very few people have asked me for a backlink. Yes, all you have to do is ask and odds are good that I'm going to send my SEO link juice your way.

As a person that both receives and seeks link requests, I'm in the unique position to know what both sides want from each other… and I've created a sort of "link juice cheatsheet" to help you get a large percentage of requests looked at… and most acted upon. Here's what I personally look for in a link juice request:

High value
Do you have a cool website? How about a Top 10 list? Do you have a nifty lookup tool? Have you published a unique 600-word article? If so, just contact me and odds are good I'm going to link to your site in less than a week.

Skip the ads
Whether it's fair or not, most bloggers and site owners don't like linking to webpages with ads. This is especially true for "noncommercial" social media sites (like Digg and Reddit) and authority .edu and .gov sites. That's why you might skip the ads during your link juice campaign, and then once you have a dozen backlinks, quietly add sponsored ads and links to monetize your site. (By the way, ads don't bother me one bit when I link to your site).

Consider cash incentives
Roughly half of those who link to my webpages do so without compensation. But the rest are automatically approved into my private affiliate program. That means each webpage they link to ultimately pays them a commission over the long term. Can you tie in an affiliate program offering to your free content?

Fresh is good
Given a choice between an ebook that's been available for 10 years (and everyone knows about) or one that's just released, most are going to be more excited to promote the new stuff.

If you've got a title or a lookup tool that's well-known to the marketplace, don't fret. Just change it up a bit — perhaps make it niche specific or offer an update for a quick makeover.

And if you're able to time your ebook or tool to a current event or breaking news, you're going to have an easy time getting site owners to link to your site.

Send a short email
The best way to contact me or any backlink source is by email. My online support system automatically sends your message to my personal email address (which I check every morning — even weekends and holidays).

Most email fail to get my attention because they obviously didn't invest a single nanosecond getting familiar with my blog or website. Whatever you do, invest a few moments to see what a site is all about… it's almost always VERY worth the 10-minute investment of your time.

To begin, start off your email with rapport. Next transition with how you offer a unique, free resource. End it with a call to action…  the next step – that is what you're looking for the receiver of your link juice request to do next. This is a very simple formula that gets great results.

Here's an example of an email I just sent to a university… they have a resource directory about internet marketing, and I desperately want a backlink from this trusted directory (with a Page Rank of 7):

Subject: re: your internet marketing directory

Message:

Hi Betsy,

I just found your internet marketing directory
and was quite impressed.

I found myself taking lots of notes –
that AdSensePro Jen blog was amazing.
I tried her suggestions, and I'm already
seeing more money from AdSense.

And Kampyle.com was just awesome.
I never knew how valuable feedback was
until I tested it.

By far my favorite source you mentioned was
your link to the "Search Engine Ranking Factors" -
I'm glad to see these experts agree
about the importance of the webpage title.

Speaking of great sources,
you might be interested in this:

http://www.marketing-ideas.org/Blog-Post-Title.php

My subscribers tell me it's the best tutorial
I've ever written. It reveals how to
write the perfect blog title…

… A lot of bloggers struggle with this.

Would you be interested in linking to it
from your resource directory?

If so, the linking code as at the bottom of the webpage.

Cheers,
Markus Allen
"Chief Marketing Junkie"

http://www.marketing-ideas.org

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Viral Marketing Strategies – Tips to get free leads to your business

February 2nd, 2010 by markus | No Comments | Filed in Business

"Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." It's a great saying. If only it were true.

Getting leads to find out about your blog or website isn't easy.

I've seen stunning sites with amazing content get less than 10 visits a day for years.

Getting a lot more visitors to your site doesn't have to be hard. All you need is to borrow my viral marketing strategies below.

The fastest and easiest way to participate in viral marketing is to create a PDF report.

There's no need to create something slick or fancy. Just create a document that solves a common problem or frustration of your typical prospect.

Successful viral marketing campaigns all have the following in common:

It's easy to pass around – Adobe's PDF format continues to dominate the electronic book space. It's easy to include your PDF report as an email attachment. And printing a PDF is super simple… just hit the print button. It couldn't be easier.

Competitors recommend your report – When written the right way, it's easy to have your competition actually recommend your report to their prospects and customers. It's true.

Web 2.0 loves viral content – Users of social marketing sites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Digg aggressively seek out free PDF reports to help their friends and colleagues find free treasures of information. And once featured, the copycat effect kicks in… it's not unusual to have your report passed around over and over again in just minutes (even seconds) after showing up in a Twitter post.

Getting your report to spread virally is the easy part…

… But writing your viral report is a bit harder (especially if you're like most and hate to write).

Here are a few viral marketing examples to use to help you create your next viral report:

Success stories – Your prospect and potential customers LOVE to read about successful case studies. Whether you're selling saunas or software, nothing beats a great story.

Here's the best part… finding success stories is a cinch — just scan your testimonial file.

If you don't have many testimonials, don't fret. Simply scan message boards related to your business and cherry pick testimonials that are general in nature. For example, if you sell a weight-loss product, create a viral report showing before and after pictures. These are very inspiring.

Or if you sell a stock-picking newsletter, you might grab case studies about how a successful stock picking customer banked a profit using a widely-known technique.

Yes, it's best to use your own case studies unique to the product you sell, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Guest authors – You're going to be AMAZED how easy it is to find popular authors willing to write content for your viral report.

All you have to do is ask. Most will reply with, "Yes!"

You can easily get 5 to 10 experts in your field to send you up to a 2,000 words of wisdom by simply asking a few simple questions.

Imagine that… creating an amazing viral marketing ebook and you'd hardly have to write it yourself.

And the best part is when you're ready to promote your viral ebook, you have a built-in salesforce ready to promote it for you… just give your guest authors a copy of your new PDF and watch your viral report spread very quickly.

Answer popular questions – Every business gets the same basic 10 or so questions asked time after time.

Answer these popular questions and you've just created a very special report. You've also helped slashed the number of customer service requests at the same time.

Tell 'em what to do AND how to do it – Marketing "experts" (notice I wrapped the word "expert" in quotes) suggest teasing your audience that tells the reader what to do, but not how to do it.

I find people are catching up on this scheme and growing tired of it.

I suggest the opposite. Tell 'em what to do AND how to do it at the same time. Your viral report is going to stand out from the crowd, get passed around a lot more often and ultimate generate more leads for your business.

The insider's secret to find hot-button topics – Finding what to write about is a cinch. There's no need to guess. Instead, let your marketplace tell you EXACTLY what problems keeps them up at night.

Here's my nifty little secret: visit a popular message board in your industry and scan the titles of each post… specifically looking for pain points within each title.

For example, the words "frustrated" or "problem" indicates an obvious pain point.

Copy each of these "painful" titles into a word document (line by line) and sort by pattern.

Another hot place to find pain points is a search at Twitter. Simply search for a phrase and append the word "problem" or "frustrated" within your search. In nanoseconds Twitter displays real-time, live discussions based on your search topic. You're literally getting inside the mind of your prospects — seeing what they're upset about.

For example, if I'm searching for "internet connection"… I'd append the word "problem" and search Twitter for "internet connection problem" or "internet connection frustrated".

When investigating the pain points for bloggers, it became instantly obvious — bloggers HATE to write their blogs. So I've created a lot of free blog writing content to help them out.

Viral marketing is great. It's totally free (except for your time), it scales out exponentially as your competitors pass it along to their prospects… and puts your lead generation on autopilot.

Final tip – There's no reason for you to struggle with promoting your website or blog. If you're ready to use the power of viral marketing to attract leads to your site, you might want to grab these best viral marketing tips, techniques and methods.

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