Without question, business is all about building relationships rather than taking shortcuts. Of course you want to find more efficient ways of doing things, but it’s hard to take shortcuts when networking. Believe it or not, you can network your way into getting more backlinks to your site. The objective of this post is to teach you a simple formula that I use regularly.
1. Social media presence
Let me break down social media in simple to digest bites. People use social media to connect with existing friends and family and to make new friends. You need a social media presence. I get asked a lot about the most important social media sites. While there isn’t a right or wrong answer, you can’t go wrong with focusing on the big 5.
What are the big 5 social media sites? They are:
- Google +
- and LinkedIn
2. The art of networking
The goal of networking on social media sites is to advance from a textual relationship to a more visual and hands on relationship. First, you need to utilize search tools to find the people you’d be most interested in connecting with. That could be bloggers, search engine optimizers, twitter freaks, CEO’s, etc.
Make the conversation about them and ask them questions. Bring up wanting to meet them and get to know them better. The best way to make this happen is to get a webcam at your local walmart and download skype. Give them your skype ID and 2 times that would work for you. Ask them which time would work best for them.
3. What do you do on the skype call?
Same as before, but in much more detail. I use the F.O.R.M. technique. That stands for family, occupation, recreation, and message. Get to know them. At some point the other person will turn the conversation to you and say something like, “What about you?”
After a few minutes, turn the conversation around and begin asking them questions about their online business and their story and why they’re online. Mention to them that you’re a blogger and frequently do guest posts on other websites. Ask them if they’d be willing to have you put a guestpost on their site.
4. A word about guestposts and link structure
This is a phenomenal to get backlinks and boost your search engine rankings. Too many bloggers let the webmaster determine the link structure. Take an extra step and tell them what kind of link you would like to have. The search engines currently love to see links that are both naked and random. They are cracking down on bloggers using anchor text links that are keyword rich. Here are some examples:
- Examples of a naked link would be: https://johnchow.com and www.johnchow.com.
- Examples of a random link would be: click here, visit this website, see more, and etc.