TECHGUIDANCES
In the days predating the Internet, classic marketers used to say it requires seven impressions or touches to make a sale. If you are trying to build your reputation to the point where someone might link to you, you need to be prepared to mount a campaign, and not expect everything to happen just because you reach out to a stranger and ask for it.
Even in the case of guest posting, which is a methodology that provides a relatively direct way (in some cases) to get a link, the real benefit—getting exposure to other people’s audiences—is likely more indirect, On the left side of the diagram is a publisher who writes high-quality articles on several different high-quality sites. Each posting provides him with exposure to OPA (shown in the middle), and some of the people who see his articles are media people or blog owners.
Over time, they may see many of his articles, and eventually, they decide to go check out his site. If the content there is of good enough quality, they might start linking to some of the articles there or sharing them in their social media.
You can see how this process of building a reputation works. This same concept applies to participating in social media, speaking at conferences, sharing videos on YouTube, and engaging in many other types of activities.
By being active in communities related to your market space, you build your reputation and visibility, and over time, some of the OPA take an interest in your site and actively engage with your content. While this can be a long process, it is a very powerful way to look at your overall content marketing strategy.
Leverage Influencers and Influencer Marketing
The term influencer refers to someone who has the ability to influence a large number of people. This may be because she has a large social media following, she has a very popular blog or broadcast show, or she’s very well known for other reasons.
PR firms have understood the power of influencers for a long time, which is why you see so many celebrity endorsements for products in TV commercials. Associating a brand with a highly popular personality has been a good strategy since long before the Internet came to be.
Online, the process is a bit different, in that an influencer’s endorsement works best when it has not been paid for, or at least appears to not have been paid for. This endorsement may take the form of the influencer sharing a link to your content, linking to it directly, letting you write a guest post for his site, liking or +1-ing your content, or otherwise helping make people aware of your site
Influencer marketing is the process of developing relationships with influential people that can lead to their assisting you in creating visibility for your product or service. This type of marketing depends on your producing great noncommercial content that would be of interest to the influencer’s audience, but that’s the second step. The first step is to build a great relationship with the influencer.
Last word
However, the benefit is much larger than that. Let’s say you have 100 followers in your Twitter account who shared a piece of content, and this results in 20,000 people seeing what they shared. This may result in 20 additional shares and 10 links to your site.
