Stop getting links

You read that subject line right.

Stop. Getting. Links.

Until you evolve your thinking about what “links” REALLY are, you risk wasting your precious time and resources on work that will lose its value in the long run.

Ever since Google invented Page Rank, human behavior has determined what websites were really “about” and which ones were more relevant than others.

Page Rank did this by giving webmasters and site owners the ability to “vote” for the sites they liked with their links.

But now, with things like social bookmarking and content tagging, EVERY web user gets to vote on the relevancy of content – not just webmasters and site owners. Anyone can Digg, anyone can StumbleUpon, anyone can blog.

And that’s a great thing for marketers.

After all, it’s the PEOPLE on the web that we really want to reach anyway. A spider program will crawl any and all links it finds, but it won’t ever take out a credit card and BUY anything.

PEOPLE won’t just click on any and every link. But they WILL click on the ones that are meaningful – the ones that promise value on the other side – the ones that are recommended by respected members of their online communities.

So with that in mind, the REAL “home run” link building campaigns from now on will continue to focus on the usual stuff: anchor text, deep linking, page rank, all that.

But successful campaigns are ALSO going to focus on finding and engaging these “tribes” wherever they are, and using your links to connect them with content that is VALUABLE to them.

So STOP GETTING LINKS…

…and START BUILDING CONNECTIONS!

When “tribes” form on the web, they do so more or less to gather around a theme, or topic, or idea. They gather to talk about it and collect links to resources that are of common interest.

Your goal is to find and participate in those conversations.

Contribute and provide REAL value, and in the process, you’ll garner attention to yourself. Of course, you can then use that attention to get traffic to your sites, get subscribers to your lists, get readers for your blog, etc.
What will happen is that you don’t just become a participant in these conversations. If you provide real value, and solid resources to these tribes, you will become a TOPIC of conversation. Members of your chosen tribe will talk about YOU, and talk about YOUR resources.

Now, enough theory – let’s get into some real-world examples of how you can start putting this to work in your business starting today.

We talked about blogs earlier. Now it’s important to understand what kind of role bloggers can play in their respective tribes. The bloggers are the noisemakers – they initiate discussions, distribute news, and act as a kind of general mouthpiece for their tribes.

As such, they can be a valuable asset to leverage in getting attention for your own offers, right?

So if you want to make some inroads into a particular tribe you’ve identified, find the people who are blogging on topics relevant to that tribe’s interests.

Read their stuff. REALLY READ IT. Then comment.

Make it a BIG comment. Add value. Did you agree? Did you disagree? Can you elaborate on anything they said? Can you refute anything they said? Remember, we want to focus on ADDING VALUE to THEIR website.

Only THEN is it going to be “okay” in the eyes of the tribe. Posting a worthless comment will get your work either quickly deleted, or if it’s a moderated blog, it won’t show up at all. If you can comment and come up with a REALLY GOOD reason to link back to one of your own resources, THEN do it. Otherwise, prepare to get nowhere fast.

How do you avoid wasting time? There’s a “sniff test” I like to recommend to people when considering whether you SHOULD link back to yourself from a blog comment.

If you left out ALL link text and your link ONLY said “read more” – would it actually provide value? Would it be a continuation of the conversation the blogger started? If so, cool! Post that link.

If not, don’t quit!

Go to your site/blog/store and MAKE a resource or post that WILL continue and expand that conversation. Let their post be part one, and your write part two on your own blog.

Does that make sense? This is what I mean by PARTICIPATING in the conversation.

Let me give you a real-world parallel. Say you’re a blue widget vendor, and you’re at a widget convention and you have a booth at the trade show. It’s the end of a long day of exhibiting, and the show is winding down. People are collecting into their little cliques and maybe deciding where to go to dinner or whatever, but you overhear some chatter about your own product, blue widgets.

These people are your target audience, they couldn’t possibly be a more appropriate tribe for you to try to speak to about your offer.

So how do you approach them?

Do you just elbow into their conversation circle, business card in hand, shouting “Hey! I sell blue widgets! Buy blue widgets from me!”

No, of course not. It’s rude. You’ll get ignored at best, and told EXACTLY where to put your blue widget at worst.

So what’s the right way?

“Hey guys – did I hear you talking about blue widgets? Awesome! Did you know they are 99% more effective than red widgets of the same size? Yeah! I read that just last week in a report my company put out. You can find it on this website if you want to have a look. The URL is on my card there. My name’s Andy, by the way. Nice to meet you! I look forward to talking more about widgets with you next time I see you!”

See?

Not so hard, and you get this crowd to like you by PARTICIPATING and EXPANDING their conversation. By contributing a valuable resource that is relevant to what they were ALREADY talking about, you can actually BECOME a new topic of conversation.

So, now you should have a better idea about how to tactfully make headway into tribal conversations when you find them.

But I bet I know what you’re asking… how DO you find them?

Of course, you can do Google blog searches, or crawl social bookmarking sites looking for relevant tags. And that’s great, you’ll find a lot of potential conversations there.

But let’s not forget. This might be “Web 2.0″ but some things remain necessary in any link-building campaign. You MUST focus your efforts efficiently, so you should spend your time and resources on sites that will give you some good old fashioned SEO benefit AND get you involved in your niche’s tribes.

So that means you have to go in and scrub your list of potential comment targets for factors like high PR, cache date, Alexa rank, etc. – all the things you would normally look for if you were purchasing a link, right?

More importantly, when we’re talking about blogs, you need to make sure that comments aren’t automatically nofollowed.

And of course, that’s very tedious and time-consuming. You need to keep a spreadsheet, and collect all that info from various toolbars, you need to check out their source code to find out if their links are rel=nofollow. Now, even though it’s a pain to do that work manually, I guarantee you it’s worthwhile to identify the 20% of sites out there that will get you the 80% of the possible benefit.

Now, here’s the part where I work a whammy on you and tell you about some spanking new product that will save you all the backbreaking work and time spent on researching these blogs. SURPRISE!

(Not really).

Yeah, I DO want to tell you about a tool that will make this super simple, and super fast.

BUT before you go grumbling off in a huff – don’t sweat it. It’s f-ree – 100%. AND it’s from a trusted strategic ally and colleague, Jason Potash.

A lot of you have probably heard me speak about (or even with) Jason on the subject of articles and syndication for the purpose of link building. Jason’s been in that game for a long time, and has built some of the best and most-used software to help with those methods.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t using at least one of the tools he’s developed in every single one of my businesses.

And now, I’m going to start using THIS one – it’s called “Comment Kahuna” and it will prove to be a LIFESAVER when you get serious about using blog comments in your “Web 2.0″ linking strategies.

He’s got a sweet video on his site showing exactly how it works, but I’ll give you the quick version.

1. Type in some keywords.
2. Find some blogs that match those keywords.
3. You’ll know which ones will pass link juice, AND how much (the software sniffs for nofollow tags and PR rank).
4. Automatically post your comment on those blogs right from the software interface.

That’s it. No cross-referencing a bunch of statistics, no time wasted on blogs that won’t pass on value. Plus, there’s easy and quick posting, letting you move onto the other parts of your business that need attention.

Now, I have a warning for you. This tool COULD allow you to become a comment spammer, but I’m not giving you this resource so you can go out and tick off all the bloggers out there.

These bloggers are potential allies - if you help their websites be BETTER by contributing good stuff, they can become evangelists for your cause. There is no better form of word-of-mouth than when the tribal noisemakers start singing your praises.

So PLEASE – use this tool responsibly. In fact, you shouldn’t use it exclusively to link back to your own stuff. Identify ways to build connections between related tribes. Strengthen those contextual and semantic connections. Improve the sites you comment on by strengthening the network of links between them.

Why on earth would I want to waste time working on some other site’s links, Andy?

Good question. If you increase the value and authority of sites like these by linking them to each other, your OWN links to your OWN stuff become even more valuable.

If you’re commenting on all the blogs your tribes frequent, and you’re cross-linking your comments, you start to spread that traffic around. You get a chance for repeated messaging, and you increase your chances of saying something that will really resonate with individuals.

Now, you don’t even have to find an existing niche. You can actually start to link together a cohesive and highly populated niche simply by effectively connecting these related tribes together.

Does that make sense?

Now, if Comment Kahuna didn’t make this stuff so easy, I wouldn’t recommend you waste ANY time on this advanced cross-linking stuff. You simply wouldn’t have the time.

But that’s the beauty of this tool. It is so fast at doing the grunt work, it allows you to REALLY get creative in the way you distribute your messages and offers to your audience.

Think about how you discuss things with members of your own tribes. Are you a member of any niche communities – based around hobbies, or maybe even a professional network? How does your tribe discover resources? How do you share them?

Answer those questions, and then figure out how you can get your taget market’s tribes to discover YOUR stuff and make your stuff WORTH sharing.

Stop getting links, and start building connections.

What do you guys think? Have I given you some food for thought? Here’s your chance to take a crack at this. Why don’t you comment on this post and CONTRIBUTE! (I mean, you ARE part of our tribe, aren’t you?)

And if our “tribe” isn’t in your niche, that’s cool. Go get Comment Kahuna from Jason’s site and find your own conversations to politely “butt-in” on.

Until next time,
Keep Stomping
~Andy Jenkins

P.S. Don’t forget to go grab Comment Kahuna - if you’re into
building links through blog comments, I know it’s going to save you a lot of time and headaches. Let us know what you think of it.