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So, your company developed some on-site content…and it’s awesome. Your creative aesthetic is spot on. You’ve put user engagement above all else. Pats on the back, all around! But if your killer content isn’t getting the exposure it deserves…well, you’re going to have to build some links.
Sure, a behemoth like Red Bull dominates in the strategic marketing realm, a gigantic company like Virgin Atlantic or General Electric might have a great Instagram, Beats by Dre churns out awesome videos – but these are household names already, with practically unlimited resources.
If you are a highly recognizable brand, people already talk about you, regardless of whether or not this digital “talk” is translated into live links (if not – check out this tutorial for finding any new mention of your brand). Many of us just need to get our names out there; we need to get our content in front of the right sets of eyes. Smaller, mom n’ pop companies can benefit from the lessons in content creation and promotion laid down by these titans of industry.
We all know “content” encompasses far more than simply blog articles. For this post I’ll be focusing on images and videos, in particular. Let’s take a look at a couple examples…
The quality of your website’s graphics, particularly if you’re an e-commerce site, is paramount. Let’s say you sell kitchen supplies. Even if your company isn’t near the scale of a Williams-Sonoma, we can learn a lot about putting user engagement first from simply scrolling through their blog.
It’s not about pictures of the products they sell; it’s all about what you can do with the products they sell. But again, if you’re not a corporate frontrunner, how can you build great links using your images?
- As an “image source” credit. Find people who are using your photos already, without giving you any attribution. A reverse image search can do the trick. Furthermore, make it as easy as possible for others to use your images (with full credit, of course).
- If you have the opportunity to work with other blogs and publishing platforms, dropping a photo of a delicious looking dish or a sizzling wok into a post you’re writing isn’t egregious – it’s necessary. We all love enticing visuals. And that goes double for social media.
- Sticking with the “kitchen supply” vein, your photos could be a good fit in a variety of niches: recipes, health & fitness, parenting, party planning… If makes sense and offers value to like-minded humans, you should attempt to build a link there.
Including high-quality multimedia on your website, videos in particular, increases the amount of time a user spends on your page. Ideally, branded videos should pique an emotion. If you can make a promotional video as funny as Dollar Shave Club’s, you deserve every bit of the free press that’s headed in your direction.
However, what if your company is creating amazing videos, but they aren’t getting as much attention as they deserve? There are certain technical elements you can optimize for: getting your meta data, titles and H-tags in order, or making sure the videos are easily sharable or embeddable.
But you can also get the word out by building some relevant, first-rate links…
- Find suitable blogs and websites, within the larger realm of your industry, and outreach to these webmasters and blog owners directly. Your video is awesome, right? So, assuming it’s relevant to their audience, they’ll want to throw out a link to it. They just need to know about it first.
- There are plenty of legitimate, high-quality sites that focus on sharing videos. This isn’t, “Spray your video out to a bunch of directories.” Heck, naw! But you’d certainly want to pass it along to a site like Vimeo, or any industry-relevant page you deem appropriate.
- Worth noting: a link back to your YouTube channel is still a decent strategy for increasing brand exposure and traffic, but hosting the video on your own site means people will be linking directly to you, giving your website the traffic boost (instead of YouTube…they’re big enough already). Assess your needs and act accordingly.
These tips are a bare bones introduction to the world of complementary marketing, content promotion and link building. The world is waiting to see your killer content. Give the people what they want!
If you’re looking to learn more about adding link building to your roster of digital marketing methods, our white paper, The Future of Link Building, is a great place to start. In the meantime, keep up the great work! We’ll see you in the trenches…