32 White Hat Ways to Build Inbound Links - Expanded

This article expands on Hubspot's "32 White Hat Ways to Build Inbound Links" written by Corey Northcutt by adding a few more ideas to what Corey discussed. Oh, and, if you don't mind, please tweet a few snippets from this blog post. If you do that, we may then be able to afford to buy Loraine in the cube next to me a new ficus tree since she killed yet another one .....sorry, long story. : )

Building inbound links to your blog or website is the most important way to bring more visitors to your site and to influence search engines to rank your page higher.  If you can add inbound links without trying to pull the wool over Google's eyes, then Google will reward instead of penalize you.

Get your blog on

In this section of Corey's article, he outlined several ways to use your blog. I would add the following:

Use Tweetable quotes in your blog content to get readers to tweet
In your blog posts, put tweetable snippets with a Twitter share button displayed on them. Your readers are looking for tweetable content. If you provide short, simple content for them, they'll be much more motivated to send out that Tweet. Don't take up the full 140 characters though.  Leave room for them to put in their own hashtag or re-tweet text.


Link to other blogs and your own blog, from within your blog articles
Linking to other people's blogs will encourage those blog owners to repay you the favor by linking back to you. But, don't forget to link to your own blog articles as well. This type of interlinking will encourage readers to click through and read more articles on your blog. This decreases the abandonment rate on your blog.  The abandonment rate can be considered by search engines who rank your page. If users stay on your blog website for longer, it makes your blog look all shiny and sparkley and stuff. Google loves shiny, sparkley things.

Write guest blog posts
Write a guest post blog on someone else's website. Your content will be posted on someone else's blog which means their readers will become familiar with you and visit your site. Sign up to be a guest blogger on myblogguest.com. It's a great place to find a guest blogger and to list yourself as one too.

Invite another blogger to write a guest post on your site
If the author has a decent social following of her/his own, you can expect that she will use social media to promote the article which also drives traffic to your site. This is a great concept, but don't overuse it. You should author your own blog and then have a few guest posts from time to time. You can apply to guest post on this blog here.

Create content beyond your blog

In this section Corey encourages you to invest in more than just blog content. I would add that from within your ebook, you should create hyperlinks to your own blog content, post short, and add tweetable quotes in the ebook to encourage readers to tweet the content.

Create an infographic and post it on Pinterest 
Infographics are insanely popular. Click on the image on the left for an example.
When you create one, post it on your blog page and then on Pinterest. The link on the pinterest page should point back to the blog article url which will serve to further drive traffic to your article. Place social share links on the infographic and supply the html code for others to be able to post the infographic on their own websites. Don't forget to write text on the Pinterest page that uses your keywords. This will help in your search rankings.

Tweet your infographics with [INFOGRAPHIC] in your tweet 
Once posted on your blog or Pinterest page, tweet the infographic and include [INFOGRAPHIC] in your tweet. People recognize this and will click through to view.

Create custom graphics for your blog image
For your blog posts, first pick out a good image using Creative Commons that has no usage restrictions. Again, if you don't use an image on your blog, Google will pout about it because all-text is not sparkley and shiny whereas text with an image is all pretty-like. Then, using the image, create a graphic and place text on it that will entice viewers to visit the link like the one below. The image should be posted to your Pinterest board.  Since viewers of Pinterest will also see the sparkley text prominently on the image, they will click the image. The link on the pinterest page should point back to the blog article url which will serve to further drive traffic to your article. And, while you're at it, you should add your logo to the bottom of the image you've created. That way, if people repin your image to their Pinterest boards, your logo will always be present.

Create a meme image and post it on your blog article and Pinterest page
Meme images are those funny images you see moving around the internet. They too are all sparkley and shiny, and make people giggle. You can highjack some of these images for your own use. See below for an example of one that was posted to a blog article about how to double your Gmail inbox placement rates. And here is the same image posted on our Pinterest board. The link on the Pinterest post points back to the blog article. A free tool to help you find and build your meme image is memegenerator.net. There you can pick from hundreds of meme images and write your own text on them.

You can follow Corey Northcutt on Twitter at @northcuttSEO

Why can't I do email marketing with Outlook?

Why can't I just use outlook to send bulk emails?

Let's start out this article on the right foot, shall we? Outlook sucks for sending marketing emails. Why? Because you are missing so many components that will make you successful. Outlook is fine for communicating with your customers and co-workers, but don't expect it to double as a "free" email marketing tool. Here's a list of some of the reasons Outlook won't work for sending bulk marketing email:

• Poor HTML! - Outlook uses Microsoft Word to create the html necessary to send out a nice looking email. The problem is that Word's creation of html is so bad that your email can get flagged as spam by the receiving email server which is looking for poorly formed html as a sign of a spammer. That's right, even the quality of your html is judged by spam tools.  Use a real email marketing product that forms proper html to avoid getting flagged as a spammer.
  
• No tracking of clicks or opens - If you don't know who is clicking and opening your emails, you don't know who your "engaged" subscribers are. Not knowing this important fact will get your emails blocked.  How? Email receivers automagically monitor how many of their customers are opening and clicking YOUR email. And, if not enough of them are engaging with your email, they start blocking you even if these recipients are double opt-in subscribers who love you dearly, and have sworn allegiance to you as Grand Poo-Bah. You should remove subscribers who are not engaged in the last 90-120 days or so. Outlook won't give you this info.
  
• No automatic bounce removal - how much time do you have on your hands? I have so much time on my hands that I write this blog during a time that I should be asleep.  In case that was too subtle, I don't have any free time.  And since time is not available to me, I certainly don't have time to manually remove every hard bounce that comes back to me, or every person that replies with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line.  That's why I use a real email tool that handles all that for me.
  
• BCC email looks like spam - if you use Outlook to send bulk email, and BCC a bunch of email addresses, receiving email servers greet your email with a nice, cheery, "Hello, you are spam, welcome to our spam box" greeting.  It looks like spam so it's treated like spam.
  
• No authentication - when you use Outlook to send your email, you are getting no email authentication.  What in the heck is email authentication?  These are technologies that tell the receiving email provider who you are, that you are announcing your identity and domain, and are doing so such that you couldn't possibly be a spammer.  When you use a real email marketing tool, they provide you with authentication technologies like DKIM, DomainKeys, SenderID, DMARC, and SPF.  Sometimes you need to also have your website guy do a little tweek to your domain record, but your email marketing tool will give you instructions on how to do this.  Let's put it this way, if you don't use email authentication, a huge amount of your email is being blocked at this very moment.  Your email isn't even reaching your subscribers.
  
• No control over unsubscribing - Not only do you have to manually handle unsubscribe requests, but your customers have no subscription preference center to opt in and out of the different emails that you offer.  What customers want is to see a pretty little webpage where they can check cute little boxes to indicate which bulk emails they want from you and which they don't.  If you're not using a real email marketing tool, your customers can't do this, and they pout profusely about it.
  
• No personalization - Finally, using Outlook for bulk email, how are you going to send an email that has personalization on it so it can say things like:  "Dear Mikey, as a kid, Life cereal was your favorite, and now it's Super Fiber Overblow, we'd like to offer you a 15% discount on your next order..."  Every field in red represents data from your database now being displayed as a merge field which would be automagically filled in with the information you have stored about your subscriber, Mikey. Think of how powerful this email message is instead of sending Mikey an email that says "Dear Customer, we use stupid Outlook to send bulk emails which means we can't personalize your email even though we know your favorite cereal, and so we can't offer you a discount on it."  If you use Outlook for sending marketing email, you get no personalization.

Hopefully you see the folly of doing email marketing with Outlook.  So use a real email tool instead. Take a look by signing up for a free account.