Jul 31 2008
Link Scouting to Buying
When building rank, finding the right websites to link to yours is crucial. It’s no easy task finding quality related websites offering link advertising. Some of the best links you’ll purchase is from site owners who don’t even mention text link advertising anywhere within their website. Listed below are a few scouting tips to follow when building your best collection of inbound links. Explanation on how to put together a quote request will follow.
Scouting for a link purchase:
- Website must relate to yours in some way if not in all ways.
- Does the site rank well for it’s own targeted keywords in Yahoo and Google?
- Website must not contain clusters of text links. Each external link on a web page shares link juice. Forget the pint, we want the pitcher.
- Take a look at the amount and quality of incoming back-links to the website. Remeber 4000 backlinks from the same website don’t necessarily mean much. I’d rather have 100 unique backlinks. You can check backlinks by typing link:www.yourwebsite.com on Yahoo
- If the website’s backlinks also relate to your website, this is a plus.
- Check the traffic, you can get “an idea” of how much traffic a website gets with tools online like compete.com and alexa.com
- What is the website’s purpose? If it’s selling the exact same product or service as you they probably wont link to you. There are websites selling products while others are providing product information. The ones discussing product information will more likely work with you.
Making an offer to a quality website:
Many people approach link buying the wrong way. Dont send an email saying, “Hey, do you sell text links?”. When I get these emails, as a publisher I often ignore them. It feels like I’m about 5 emails away from either making a deal or receiving a low ball offer for advertising their website.
As an advertiser, on the other hand, I personally don’t even use the word “text link” in my first email to a potential publisher. I guess I don’t want to be viewed as someone just concerned with page rank. I wan’t them to know I like them for more than just their “Link Juice”. Before contacting the site owner I like to get to know the website and site owner. If it’s someone Im going to buy advertisement from, I might as well make a buddy out of it if I can. The more friends the merrier. If the site owner has a blog I may share my opinions on blog posts for a week to get to know the owner. I prefer doing this without adding my website link to the comment. If and when you do decide to make an offer for advertising, you and the site owner may already be friends.
The Contact Letter:
An email I received; I now advertise for this business on another website:
Hi,
My name is Justin from relatedsite.com
After perusing your website, yourwebsite.com, I am interested in purchasing advertising space on it to promote our business. Please let me know if you are interested and I will send you further information
so we can begin advertising on your site.
I hope to hear from you soon and we look forward to working with you and your company.
Thank you for your time,
Justin
justin@relatedsite.com
555-555-7777
An email I sent at one time:
Hello,
Congrats on the success with your site. I’m looking to advertise with a few good websites
within the next two weeks. Im interested in a 6 month campaign to start. If you would like
to advertise for us please send us the rate for 6 months of placement and we can go from there.
Thank You,
First and Last Name
My Email
My Phone
People love advertisers who buy months of placement in bulk. When I make an advertising offer, it will be presented much like the two emails shown above. If I’ve actually been commenting within their blog, I’ll make sure the site owner knows who I am when I make the initial contact. Since I’ve been actively providing content through comments on their site, they might like me for who I am and be more open to working with me. When building links making good friends along the way will put you ahead of the game. I’ve made a few good friends online. Some have a couple oneway “dofollow” links across a couple or my smaller websites.
Guess the episode, “Save My Horse!“
