Link Building Strategies

If you are an ecommerce business, quite likely you already know the answer to "what is link building?" You know that effective link building will help you reduce your reliance on pay-per-click advertising. But how does one go about building links? If you are a beginner at link building for your ecommerce website, here are some basic methods that you can implement right away.

Get Yourself Listed
There are many places where you can get yourself listed. Just like the physical world has the concept of Yellow Pages, there are many places you can get yourself listed online:

• General Web Directories
  
• Niche Web Directories
  
• Classifieds Sites
  
• Chambers of Commerce
  
• Local Listings
  
• Listings in maps

Please note that each link from such listings sites is not too valuable in terms of benefit for search engine optimization. But the benefit does add up over a period. Given that most of these are free or low-priced listings, it makes sense to get yourself listed.

Be the Expert
Surely, you are the expert at something. If nothing else, then you are the ultimate expert at informing people about your experiences with running your ecommerce website.

Find opportunities to get mentioned or quoted wherever relevant. Here are some methods to gather fame for your brand and also build links:

• Write Guest Articles
  Many sites, online publications, and blogs invite guest writers. Locate some that are relevant to ecommerce, or your specific product category. Make sure that those sites are not mere sponges for free content, and write high quality content for them. In my experience, after you write a few dozen guest articles, some of them will turn out to be gateways for highly qualified and relevant traffic, not to mention great links that influence search engine rankings.
  
  
• Get Interviewed
  If you are an eloquent face of your website, there will be several people who would want to interview you. In addition to building your brand, such interviews will usually include a link to your ecommerce website too.
  
  
• Write White Papers
  If you have something to say that is of great importance to ecommerce in general, or a niche topic / category within ecommerce, write a formal white paper about it. Then make this available for free distribution on your website. In addition, make online and offline media outlets aware of this white paper. If it interests some people, they may download it, and place a link referencing your site.
  
  
• Distribute Press Releases
  If there is a development in your ecommerce business that would be of general interest to professionals in the ecommerce industry, you are a good candidate for creating and distributing press releases. Given that distributing press releases online has become so easy, many media outlets have started ignoring emailed press releases. But there are some that will still give them a cursory look; and if they are valuable, they may publish them.

Capture Attention
In a sense, all the link building strategies mentioned in the earlier part of this article are attention-grabbing strategies. But they are subtle. You could consider blatantly screaming from rooftops. For example, you could come up with promotions or offers that will get written about. Here are some brainstormed ideas:

• If your pet dog is called Aristotle, then how about selling dog care kits, usually sold at $99, for a mere $1 to pet dog owners whose dog is called Aristotle! Of course you could restrict this to the first 10 people who order, or to those who order on your dog's birthday. Though the cost of this promotion would not be too high, word could spread like wildfire if it captures the imagination of even a few well-networked dog owners.
  
  
• You could run a contest where customers click photographs of themselves receiving the goods that they ordered from your ecommerce website. And every month, the customer who looks the happiest in the picture she/he submits, could have their money refunded.
  
  These are just two of the ideas that I brainstormed off the cuff. You know your customers, and you know what your brand stands for. Keeping that in mind, come up with promotions that will grab attention. In addition to mileage in the form of branding and increased sales, you will quite likely end up developing a few valuable links too.

Leverage Social Media
With the increased proliferation of Facebook, Twitter, and other social destinations, your ecommerce business cannot stay away from social media. I will separately talk about social media marketing for ecommerce. For now, let me focus on the link building aspect of social media.

To begin with, you can set up brand pages on the most popular social sites. That itself should provide you a few links. Then you can try and get your audience involved in your social effort. An example of audience involvement could be that they could vote for the happiest looking person in the contest mentioned earlier.

Conclusion
Link building is an important constituent of your online marketing efforts. Make sure to develop a sustained link building strategy.