Link building is important to the success of your online business because it will create a long-term way of drawing customers to your web site from all over the internet. Links that are permanent or semi permanent will be much more effective than quick blasts of marketing on social networking sites or forums.
Local link building is also important. This ensure that you reach local people who are interested in your business so that they will support you instead of an out of town company or large corporation. Here are some tried and true creative local link building techniques for promoting your business to your local community.
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Interact With Local Blogs
Local blogs provide a great platform for promoting your business through link building. If the creator of the blog lives in the same geographical location as your business or works there, you already have an affinity with this person and can easily discuss common interests or pursuits.
Take an active interest in what these blogs are posting about and add interesting and meaningful comments. Don’t spam or your comments will probably be deleted. Just casually drop a comment that makes sense and has something valuable to say. This gives you the opportunity to leave your web site link in a non-intrusive way.
Another way to take advantage of local blogs is to ask if you can write a guest post. Whether you write about your business or something else entirely, you can easily create a link to your site by adding it to your byline or short biography at the top or bottom of the blog post.
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Interact With Local News Web Sites
What newspapers service your local area? Make a list of all the local newspapers, and even magazines, that you can think of and then see if they have web sites. News web sites often give readers the opportunity to comment on stories and interact both with the site and other users.
Try to find news stories that either relate to your business in some way, or that hold a special interest to you personally. This gives you a genuine reason for commenting, which is always far better than simply saying something random and slapping your link on at the end. People are far more likely to click on your link if you have something interesting to say.
You might even be able to contact the newspaper and find out if you can write a piece about your local business, or get a reporter to do so, in order to gain even more exposure. Many local newspapers readily support community businesses.
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Donate In Exchange For Backlinks
Donating to local charities is a great way to both help others and promote your business. Not only can giving money to charitable causes that are important to those in your community improve your business’s reputation, but it can also provide you with a great opportunity to get your name out there.
Many charities will happily provide a backlink to your web site if you donate. Contact the charity after you have donated, because it can look stingy if you only offer to donate based on getting something in return. Also, be friendly and interested in the cause so that the charity can see you are an honest, reputable person.
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Match And Exceed Competitors Citations
A business citation is a mention of your web site or company found elsewhere on the internet, usually mentioning a brief description of what you sell or do and providing contact information.
Finding competitor citations and then matching and exceeding their abilities, offers, reputation, etc. is one of the best creative local link building techniques. Our Hyper-Local Citations service can help you do this by eliminate overlap, creating a custom citation master list and providing very specific niche citations. To find out more you can visit: http://www.marketerscenter.com/hyper-local-citation-service.html
All of these techniques will do more than just link building too—it will grow your reputation and virility around the internet so that you stand out from the crowd as the very best in your business.
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Submit To Big Data Aggregators
This is an important step in link building that many small businesses overlook. You may think that there’s not much point in submitting your details to these databases of information because there is too much competition amongst all the big names and large companies.
However, it can still be an effective method for link building. When people are searching for a business or product, they may only choose to use larger web sites to find what they need. If you are not already listed there, you have removed yourself from their field of vision, making it impossible for them to even consider you as an option. Our Big Citations service can assist your business in submitting your details to data aggregators like Infogroup and Acxiom. Visit http://www.marketerscenter.com/big-citation-building-service.html for details.
These are merely a few creative local link building techniques that can really help you market and grow your business for more customers and better sales.
