The Opportunity
Inbound links are referrals from other websites to yours. These referrals help you both directly and indirectly:
- The direct impact occurs when internet surfers click on referral links at external websites and follow them to you, which adds to the number of website visitors that you can influence and convert. For example, if 1,000 referral links point to your website, and each link attracts an average of 4 click-thru visitors per day to your website, then you'll get the chance to influence 4,000 new visitors every day who were referred from other websites.
- The indirect impact occurs when referral links at external websites act as "votes" for the worthiness of your webpage, which improves the ranking of your webpage in search engine results. That's because search engines such as Google measure the quantity and quality of the hyperlinks that point to pages on the internet. When several relevant and high-quality websites "vote" for a webpage at your site by linking to it, Google gets suitably impressed and rewards your page by ranking it highly in search engine results for relevant search terms. A ranking in the top 5 at Google, Yahoo, or MSN for a popular search term will drive a lot of search engine users to your website. For example, if one of your webpages were ranked at the top of Google's organic results for the search term "mitt romney" or "abortion rights," you would be in position to influence hundreds or thousands of voters per day with your perspective.
If you have helpful content at your website, you will be rewarded with a modest amount of unrequested inbound links. Like-minded fans will link to the content they like via blogs, forums, articles, and social media websites. However, these natural inbound links won't be enough to achieve or sustain a high ranking at Google or Yahoo.
Instead, you must pursue links by:
- Step 1: Intentionally creating provocative content (known as "linkbait")
- Step 2: Proactively seeking inbound links to your content from popular, highly-relevant external websites.
Those two steps are collectively known as an "Inbound Link Campaign."
Convincing a high-traffic website to link to one of your webpages can take a lot of effort. However, your initial investment of time can pay-off indefinitely. Inbound links from highly relevant and popular websites will support your higher search engine ranking and will continue to direct well-qualified visitors to your website every day, without any additional cost or effort on your part.
On a semi-personal note: To me, book chapters are like children. I invest myself in them equally, so it's difficult when asked to choose favorites. However, since you rely on me to "tell it like it is," I will: Inbound Link Campaigns is the most important chapter of the book. If you have time to read only a few chapters, read and re-read this one three times... and somehow borrow time away from other activities to read the closely related chapters, Copywriting for Search Engines and Internet Buzz Marketing.
