It is no secret that links are critical to search engine rankings. If you have ever tried to develop links for a website you also know it is very hard. Currently paid links provide the best ROI because you pay once and receive online advertising and a boost in the search engines. Your marketing dollars are doing a great 2 for 1 job.
What if some search engine that controls over 50% of the market share (not going to name names) says you can no longer buy text advertisements because their algorithm has a weakness and they do not want to fix it. They want you to change how you spend your marketing dollars. Since they control over 50% of the market share you are going to be forced to change. What is the next best ROI after paid links?
Based on my experience social marketing is the next best strategy. Social marketing is not cheap and has a high amount of flops but the success of the few outweigh the losses of the many. If you are not familiar with social marketing, it is when you make your idea so interesting the public will spread the word for you. A good example of this is the “Will It Blend” videos on YouTube. Those videos are so interesting millions of people have watched them and many have even linked back to the site.
By making your idea interesting the people will temporarily surge traffic to your site and in the long term they will link to your site. If 5000 people are exposed to your interesting idea in a day and 1% link back to you from their blogs you just gained 50 links. In case you are wondering these are the types of links that money can’t buy.
How do you do social marketing? There are countless ways to do it wrong. If everything is not perfect than it will never catch on. Even the experts of social marketing have a hard time predicting what will be interesting to the public. If you are doing this yourself expect a failure rate of over 90%. If you want to hire someone to do it for you, you better grab them now. The good social marketers have at least a 1 month backlog and some have up to 3 months.
