On one of my old news aggregation websites, I’d have content publishers contacting me on a daily basis. They wanted to know how they could get their news on my website and they were all more than willing to link back. You don’t want to be emailing publishers all day every day, so sooner or later you’ve got to turn the tables. This is a great technique and it’s completely free to implement. So what made them email me, instead of the other way round? Think of a roller coaster, it might seem like a struggle climbing up in the incline, but once you get to the top, ready for the fall, it free-flowing, the momentum will take you from there. This is how it works with this technique. You start off by sending emails to news publishers, telling them about the benefits of being listed on your site. When they realize it’s a great deal (free traffic for a simple link back to your site), they’ll be on board. It’s important you do this for a fair few sites to start off with. Then, you’ll start to get the emails pouring in… How did this happen? It’s because the news publishers competition has seen the link back to your site. They think they are missing out on something (and they are!) and they want in on it to. So what did they do? They race over to your site and look for contact information. The harder it appears to get listed, the more valuable and desirable they’ll find it = a very good, long lasting link back to your website in a prominent position + a new fan of your site. If people feel they are a part of something that not everyone can be, they feel special and will stick around.
David, thanks for sharing this good technique. This has to be supported with some nice traffic on the site to start with. But I can see that many publishers might be keen on having their news published in yet another source and may not mind giving a backlink.
Good explanation of how to "get the ball rolling" for a site like this and the psychological basis of getting people to actually want to contact you so you don't even need to go find them. If everyone thinks they're missing out on something their competition has, maybe they'll even want to pay you to jump on the bandwagon.
does this work for a wordpress blog? since my site is a lead capture page were I don't have anything but my advertisements on it
Nice. I've had other publishers taking my content and linking back to me, but this way seems to make more sense. Now just to build up my brand enough so they want to be on my site.