Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 205

creating generous content, such as the crowdsourced post, in detail in Chapter 6.
The bottom line is that to earn links to your website, you need to start giving out some
“link love” of your own. Be generous with your website by quoting others and referring
your visitors to pages you like. Make sure that you let people know when you link to them.
Step 4: Create content worthy of a link
Great content provides assets that people want to share with their network. Create
outstanding content, particularly on your blog, that people link to because it provides
tremendous value. For example, a bank that wants to attract prospective homebuyers might
build a free and easy-to-use monthly mortgage calculator. If others find this tool useful,
they will link to it and improve that bank website’s standing in the search engines.
Step 5: Publish primary research
One powerful way to generate links is to publish primary research: new research that you
collected yourself. Because primary research can be difficult and time-consuming to
create, it’s valuable and rare. Solid primary research is in great demand and often leads to
high-quality links as people cite that research on their web pages.
Step 6: Keep up with the news
The last step is creating newsworthy content and publishing it as the topic in question is
trending. To do this effectively, keep an eye on industry news. One of the best ways to do
that is to use social media, particularly Twitter, because Twitter tends to be the nervous
system of the Internet.
Be ready to produce content about your industry at a moment’s notice or find creative
ways to relate trending, newsworthy topics to your industry. This is tough work, but being
one of the first people to create content can have a big payoff: You’ll be one of only a few
sources of information about something, causing other people to link to you as the story
develops. But before you jump the gun, make sure that you can verify the news story or
risk the embarrassment and damage to your reputation for publishing inaccurate
information.