Link building for saturated industries

[Sukh Singh]

HI All,

Excuse my rookie-ness, but I am link building for a particular client who deals in management training. I have found that when seeking out websites to place my link on they are for the most part sort of spammy, and just one of a million other websites offering training, remote and in class rooms at low prices.

This industry seems really saturated with cowboy training companies and the return on submitting link requests has been so low that I've been forced to rely on the most part on directories, blogs, articles, and "loosely"-related sites to place links on.

Now honest opinions please, am I just not looking hard enough/is this an amateurish problem, although I think I am, or in this case would I just need to focus on other ways to gets links away from bespoke ones?

I appreciate your opinions.

Regards,
SUkhy

[internetmarketingservice]

Getting links on direct competition websites is darned near impossible, spammy or not. Who in their right mind is going to agree to put the link of another management company on their own website? Instead, you should focus on getting links on sites that are related but not in the exact same business. Quality business solutions software sites, sites that deal with human resources, career planning sites, etc. Those are likely to be higher quality and not in direct competition so you are more likely to get approval for the links so long as you are not trying to just exploit their website to gain a link.

[lesterj]

I would stick with creating great content other forms of link bait and building a good social profile.

[nichibocars]

Good points Kurt, I've got my own blog that I post content on relating to my industry. But sometimes feels like I am losing when so many competitors are ranking higher by posting to multiple article submission directories wither higher PR than my blog. What is your recommendation for competing with that kind of strategy?

By the way I am happy to have found your blog as I've been reading through most of your latest articles and have found it quite a good read. Great work.

[janeth]

With all the methods available to us today we shouldn't have to ask for links

Think about it!

I can create an account with Squidoo, use my site name or main keyword for my profile name and then create a lens and stick an article on it. I can create a really good article, link it back to my site and get traffic from both Squidoo and the search engines.

I can do the same thing with HubPages. I can get one link back to my site for every article I write. And I can link my article to internal pages so I am able to rank the internal pages on my site as well as the home page.

I can create a wordpress hosted blog from wordpress. Again, use my site name or one of my keywords as my URL. Then place one of my articles on this site along with a link back to a page on my main site.

I can then move on to Blogger. A blog entry doesn’t have to be a full article, it can be a one liner about a product or service I am offering.

Now that I’ve got Blogger set up I can move on to Wetpaint.

I can set up and get links from sites like:

http://www.squidoo.com/
http://hubpages.com/
http://www.wordpress.com/
https://www.blogger.com/
http://www.wetpaint.com/
http://www.gather.com/
http://www.43things.com/


Once I get my articles online and set up I can use Pingoat, autopinger, or pingomatic. Just pick one and go there and enter the RSS feeds from your above blogs, hubs, lenses and other things that you’ve just created.

Then do some blog commenting, linking Back to your articles.

All blog comments need to be relevant to the article you are commenting about, no trash comments. Spend a couple hours doing blog commenting and then do some social bookmarking.

Start with Digg and sign up and bookmark a couple of your blogs, post, articles and everything else you’ve just put online.

Use your logo as the image in your profile. After that use twitter and make a couple tweets about some of the articles you just wrote.

Now use Yahoo Buzz & Technorati.

But don’t just link to your stuff, link out to any really cool stuff you find anywhere on the web. And do a couple per day, don’t try and bookmark all your sites at once. Sign up at each site and bookmark two or three sites per day changing up the anchor text and sites as you go. And don’t forget about Delicious or Kaboodle, as well as Reddit they are all really cool sites.

Reddit is a lot like Digg where users link out to content that they want to talk about.

Slashdot is for geeks.

Clipmarks allows you to clip pieces of content and post them. If you run across a couple good lines in your articles then this is where you want to post them.

Furl is really cool because it stores the web page, so even if the content changes latter you still have a copy.

Newsvine is all about the news. So be careful what articles you post here.

Faves is another good one because all the content is organized by topic and not popularity.

Dzone is a news site.

Blinklist is a good place to bookmark everything, even your bookmarking sites so you can keep up with what you have.

From here you continue to post four articles per day to each of your websites and hubs that you created.

This is Squidoo, Wordpress, Wetpaint, 43things and Gather.

You want all to bookmark all of them. But you don’t want any articles to have links coming from all of them, with the exception of Blinklist.

From here you want to start befriending people on the social sites.

Comment on their articles, and try and make friends with them while at the same time continuing to add articles and links to your sites.

Read what is being talked about and respond accordingly, but do not spend all day leaving one comment.

Comments are one of the most read sections, so a cleaver comment with a link back to your site or one of your properties, could mean a ton of traffic if done correctly.

With social media sites you get the power of the link as well as the traffic from the people you befriend.

You can create more social media sites using other topics associated with your main sites and using those keywords for your user name, URL and anywhere else you can put it, when setting up the accounts.

Use your stats to get an idea of what terms people are searching for.

[internetmarketingservice]

Excellent post janeth,

I would add that all the bookmarking can be automated if you use wordpress and don't forget the links you can get by using your individual posts and pages and converting each one to an RSS feed at Feedage.com. You can create a new feed for each post you do and submit it. Then create blends from the individual pst feeds. The combinations are endless and results in getting your content indexed almost immediately.

By using the methods you outlined, you have full control of your link building and the articles will go a long way to gaining authority in your niche.