Duct Tape Marketing’s 7 Ways to Acquire the Right Kind of Links to Your Site

One of my favorite small business marketing websites is Duct Tape Marketing. The website provides extremely practical marketing advice and guidance for small or expansion stage businesses. Their most recent post, 7 Ways to Acquire the Right Kind Of Links to Your Site, hit the nail on the head by explaining how to get the “right kind” of clicks on your website.

Here are Duct Tape’s 7 Ways with my thoughts:

Write a blog

Ducttape says: Without question, creating a blog and consistently writing keyword-rich content is the number one SEO activity for the small business. 

Corey says: Absolutely! At OpenView Labs we believe strongly in the value of consistent blogging about relevant, keyword-rich content. As part of our content marketing strategy, every member of the firm blogs about issues relevant to their work on a weekly basis. By doing this we increase our SEO and also demonstrate our thought leadership in the expansion capital space.

Guest post on blogs

Ducttape says: A variation to writing on your blog is to seek out other blogs and offer to write content that is useful and relevant to their audience.

Corey says: OpenView Marketing Associate, Amanda Maksymiw, does a great job of this. She posts as a guest blogger on the Content Marketing Institute’s blog on a monthly basis. 

Submit posts and articles to directories

Ducttape says: Article directories present a great opportunity for acquiring links. 

Corey says: I recently joined Junta42‘s content marketing community. In the content marketing community, guests can upload their content for others to view — check out a link to one of my previous blog posts here: Podcasting 101. Posting in a community like Junta’s gives bloggers an opportunity to have their content distributed to a wider network.

Write social press releases

Ducttape says: Consistently writing news releases for even seemingly minor announcements is a great way to build up some extra traffic and links.

Corey says: Press releases are a great way to keep interested parties in the know about your company. It gives you content to post on your social channels and draws additional content to your site. Check our our latest press release here.

Leave lots of relevant comments

Ducttape says: Leaving relevant comments on other blogs does a number of things for you. In some cases, not many though, you may actually benefit from a link to your site, but the real value is that you may get the attention of other readers and the owners of these blogs in ways that could prompt them to point to some of your content via a blog post. 

Corey says: Thought leadership is increasingly important and leaving comments on relevant websites, blogs or communities is a great opportunity to do so. Backlinks are a great way to draw good clicks to your site!

Create profiles

Ducttape says: There are hundreds of places you can create social profiles on the web and most allow you to place numerous links back to your site. You can even use a service like Knowem that will create hundreds of profiles on lesser known networks.
Corey says: Distribute your content on as many relevant channels as possible to increase your SEO. Sites like vimeo perform extremely well for us, not just the top tier channels like YouTube.

Use social bookmarking

Ducttape says: Social bookmark sites such as delicious, digg, reddit and StumbleUpon offer great ways to create valuable links and search engine juice.
Corey says: Another great way to distribute content to a wider network. Heavy social media users are likely to use these sites and will likely re-post relevant content to their networks.

Question of the Week:  Are you using any of these channels to increase links to your website? Which ones are working the hardest for you?