A chamber of commerce is usually a local organization of business owners that promote business and further business interest in the community. Some Chambers of Commerce are local to their city, county, statewide and some are even national.
All Chambers of Commerce also provide many opportunities for networking and community participation. Because of this, there may be many opportunities to build links through participating in your local chamber.
Link From the Chamber Website
Many Chambers of Commerce maintain a website that frequently lists their business members names, contact information, and web addresses. Inclusion onto this list should result in a link back to your website from the Chamber of Commerce’s website.
In some cases a Chamber of Commerce may even maintain a business directory for the general public which would also include links back to each businesses website.
If you are joining your chamber of commerce just for the link building opportunities it may be smart to check their website beforehand to verify that links to business websites are present and seo-friendly.
Don’t want to do the link building work all by yourself?
Links found on the chamber’s website are not the only opportunity for links from the Chamber of Commerce. Other opportunities to build links through the Chamber of Commerce may come from other business members that have their own websites.
You can take advantage of the chamber’s networking events to meet other business owners in your area that also have websites. In situations like this you can develop relationships with business owners that run complimentary businesses to your own where adding link to your business on their website would add value to their user experience as well as providing a value-add for your users if you were to link to them from your website.
This type of cooperation among business owners can be started by attending Chamber of Commerce networking events and other events in the community that put business owners in touch with each other.
We’ve already discussed how to build links using strategic guest posting. With that strategy you find other websites that will allow you to contribute content as a guest blogger so that you can build links back to the content on your own website. The same process can build more links by implementing it in reverse.
Reverse guest blogging is when you seek out high-profile bloggers to contribute to your own site or blog as a guest blogger.
A successful reverse guest blogging campaign can garner a lot of attention towards your website and attract lots of links.
The central focus of this strategy is to empower those with strong personal brands within your own community or communities that run parallel to the topic that you are interested in.
For example if you sell dog food you might try to get a well-respected veterinarian or a well-respected dog trainer to write a guest column on your website’s blog. Having someone with a strong personal brand in a community of people that would be interested in your product or service will ensure that your website is shared among that community of potential customers.
But to further ensure that links are being built to the guest post you should also select someone that has a strong history of blogging and attracting links to their own website. Here are some tips to finding the right person to attract both links and attention to your website.
Search for Successful Bloggers
In order to make this strategy work effectively it will be important for you to select bloggers that have the ability to attract links. Two indicators that a blogger can attract links to their content is, their existing backlink profile and their presence in social media. You will want to examine both of these things when selecting the perfect guest blogger for your site.
You can begin your search using tools such as buzzsumo.com and sparktoro.com to find high-quality bloggers within a certain topic. Or you can examine search results for queries such as “<topic> blog” where <topic> is the subject of content on your site.
Examine Backlink Profile
The most obvious indicator that a blogger can attract links to their content would be their existing backlink profile. If their articles and websites are attracting high-quality links now, it is likely that they can also attract high-quality links to the content they write for on your site as well.
You should pay attention to not only the links that they have attracted to their own website but also the links that they may have attracted towards publications that they write for.
Examine individual articles, as well as links that point to their social media profile pages and other web assets that they have control over. Also look for other guest posting opportunities that they have done and if there are any links pointing to those as well.
All of these can be great indicators of whether or not they will be able to attract links back to your website after they have written content for you.
Examine Social Media Presence
A very good indicator if a blogger will attract links or not is how engaged are they on social media. Many bloggers have social media accounts and some of them have a substantial following. However engagement is the true key to growth beyond the individual platforms or profiles.
If a blogger is engaging people on social media through dialogue and comments back and forth, it is more likely that they are attracting links because it means that the people on social media are invested in their personal brand enough to follow along with the content they produce. Many of these people may also be the type to create their own content and are likely to link as well.
Engagement on social media goes beyond superficial metrics like the number of followers a person has but rather how many comments does each one of their posts get?
How often do they respond to comments?
All of these things will indicate whether or not a blogger has an engaging social media presence that builds relationships that in turn builds links.
Make The Offer
Most successful bloggers and especially the type that attract backlinks do not seek out guest posting opportunities. This is because there is more long-term benefit in creating content for their own sites than for other websites.
Consider it this way, if you could create content for your own website that would attract lots of links, then there would be no reason to write guest posts on other people’s websites that would only attract one link at a time.
Therefore, many successful bloggers only write for other people’s websites if there is an incentive. In many cases the incentive may be paid compensation, or an exchange of services. Either way you’re in offer it should be clearly explained that you are offering an incentive.
Make sure to be direct about the details of what you are offering in exchange for a guest post.
Make sure to be direct about the details of what you are offering in exchange for a guest post. They may respond with a counter offer that you can decide to negotiate with or not. But it’s important to make sure they understand that you are willing to incentivize them in some way in your initial offer.
It is also important to clearly explain your expectations for the content they will create for your website. Make sure they understand what the tone and the topic of the site is. Also if you are interested in them promoting their content in their social media profiles you need to make that clear as well.
Many successful bloggers consider the content they broadcast in their social media channels to be an extra asset. Therefore if you do not explicitly mention that you would like them to share the content within their social media profiles it is likely that they will not.
Consider that what makes them unique and valuable isn’t only the content that they contribute but also their presence within their community. Be clear of all of your expectations in the very beginning and follow up at the end to make sure that they have followed through on everything you have both agreed to.
Don’t want to do the link building work all by yourself?
If you’ve managed a website for any extended amount of time, you are probably already aware of the fact that many other website owners tend to copy content from other websites and use it as their own. In some cases website owners may do this sparingly where they may directly copy and paste content from one of their competitors or a related website once or twice.
However, in some cases website owners will automate a process that copies large volumes of content from others. While this practice can be detrimental for everyone involved in some cases we can use this behavior to our advantage to build links that point back to our websites from those that are copying our content.
Many colleges and universities have alumni associations that allow them to fundraise from their former student population, and also can provide powerful networking opportunities for alumni that are members. Many of these organizations are given a special section of the University’s website for information about alumni or the activities of the organization.
If your company has been successful at building a strong brand name within its industry then it is likely that many publishers have mentioned your brand in the past. These types of brand mentions can be helpful for SEO because it establishes authority and authenticity within the algorithms. These brand mentions can also provide a natural conduit for link building. In many cases brand mentions come in the form of a backlink back to the brand’s website.
However in some instances a publisher may mention a brand name without linking to the brand’s website. This may be happening for your brand as well.
These un-linked brand mentions can be an easy way to acquire links to your website. In this article we will show you how to discover un-linked brand mentions across the internet and how to perform outreach in order to get these mentions linked to your website.
Guest blogging for links has gotten a bad reputation for low quality content and irrelevant links. This happens because most people approach this tactic without fully thinking about the best way to execute.
The highest quality links are found inside high quality content and the link itself provides value to the user and inspires them to click. Because of this, links included in guest posts should provide value to the user and inspire them to click.
Getting links to point to your website can be an extremely difficult task. That’s why before you start the hard work of getting NEW links you should first make sure that you are currently getting the most out all of the existing links pointing to your website.
One of the most overlooked aspects of link building is ensuring that all of your existing links pointing to your website are passing value on to the rest of the site.
