SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Earning Links & Mentions (Great Tips!)
Just before the Holiday’s SEOmoz released a Whiteboard Friday video (entitled Whitebeard Friday) – LOL! Get it? And the information contained within it is indispensable if you’re looking to get a kick-start on the new year (or any other time of year for that matter).
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The video focuses on ways to get links and mentions for your own site. Here are some of the tips that Rand offers:
- Give away your writing! Guest post for others by doing a search in Google for “guest author or guest writer or guest blogger or guest contributor” – it’s also helpful to include your keywords as well to find sources you can write for. ”Guest Blogger + Dog Training” for example. Also, Rand suggests using Google blog search and Google discussion search. Both great resources for places to promote your writing.
- Give away your videos. In this video Rand recommends Wistia which actually gives you details on what your viewing audience is doing (a must have when you want to know if someone is bored to tears or if they have to keep going back and forth to re-watch something). What Rand doesn’t mention in the video is that you must be certain your videos are branded. Whether you use Wistia or another service such as YouTube, your brand must be somewhere on that video so that others can recognize you.
- Give away your product. If you give something of yours away you can ask others to cover it or talk about it. Be wary of saying “Hey, here’s my product, could you link to it?”
- Similar to giving away your product is giving away your time. Offer to do something pro-bono and you could have not only a very happy client but someone who will sing your praises, link to you, and mention you quite often.
- Give away your contact details. So often you’ll see folks post helpful information, whether in forums, blog posts, on Facebook, Twitter, etc., and yet, if the person is interested in what you have to say, there’s no way for them to contact you. Make this as public as possible!
- Be sure you allow your images to be used. You can add a creative commons license to them, etc. But just be sure you’re getting the credit. (This is really paraphrased – the video will give you more details).
- Within your RSS feed, you have the ability to publish only partial feeds or full ones. Choose the full feed. Contents of feeds get used quite often and it’s best to have the full feed available for someone. Also, when you do link within your own feed, use the full url including the http:// portion – otherwise that republished content won’t link back to you.
- It’s likely you’ve collected data on your site visitors, etc. This data may be extremely valuable to others. But, you won’t know until you ask. Refer to the end of the video for more details on this but suffice it to say, you can reach out to others whom you think may find your data valuable and then see if they’d be interested in receiving it.