How to jumpstart natural, self-perpetuating linking.

Many of you seem overly focused on link procurement.

Force-feeding links by directory, online press release & article submission, as well as blog commenting & social bookmarking are only effective upon launch. What are you going to do after that? Buy all of your links? Ask authority sites to link to you for free?

I would suggest that you should re-examine your business model, assuming you are in it for the money.

I'm going to use Twitter as an example. Granted they haven't monetized yet, but the concepts still apply:

Twitter: Lets look at the name first - the brand. It is the sound that a bird makes. It evokes images of a punctuated communication & it gave birth to the term "Tweet", which means both "to communicate" & "a communication." It's a noun & a verb people are starting to use in everyday communication. Kind of like Google, eBay or Bing - "Google it - eBay it - maybe Bing it (we'll see)." Branding (the name of) a website is critical. A good domain name facilitates free word-of-mouth advertising and ultimately cultural acceptance.

Next, consider your target market. Twitter first appealed to Broadcast Media Personnel (TV, Radio, News) & Self-Promoters. It gave News networks just enough for a headline & a link. Perfect. And by their usage & self-endorsement (ie "Follow CNN on Twitter!" - "Check me out on Twitter"), the general public became curious & now accept Twitter as a news feed, social networking & communication tool. Twitter first appealed to people who it's founders knew would spread the word (newscasters & self-promoters), hence the sites exponential growth in traffic & links. This is called Viral Marketing, and done properly, in a non-cheesy, non-spammy way, it works beautifully.

 

'tweet' has been in common usage for hundreds of years, as far as I know. "Is that the tweeting o' the lark? Or doth it signal thy doom, sweet prince...'

 

Good thread!

My avatar (piece of cheese in a Ghostbusters "no parking" symbol), is our branding!

We are definitely getting our message out to the public in a "Non-cheesy, non-spammy" way (as OP puts it).

 

Great post. I continually think along these lines. A website must be built for people to link to it rather than have a website already made and then attempt to get links to it (as is the VERY COMMON practice).


Hopefully we can come up with some innovative ideas on the subject of how to build a site that naturally calls to be linked to!

 

Interesting read - its tough though to do that with all types of online business - twitter got lucky in a way because of the terrorist attack in Pakistan - that one event propelled it into the popular media as a buzzword - until then nobody in the street had heard of it, or could see the point of it.

 

nice share. i agree with the tweet thing..

 

Give me some examples of businesses where branding & viral marketing isn't possible.

 

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ThaX for the informative thread.