During the acquisition phase of your link building project you will receive many rejections. Because the majority of your rejections will occur through non-response, it’s vital that you grow any written “no” you receive by email into an opportunity to educate yourself. These written rejections represent an opportunity for you to improve your site’s content, your future link building efforts and to better connect yourself to your media space influencers.

In the process of uncovering their main objections you will find yourself building a relationship that will help you in earning links in the future…

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In many cases your cold link request email is an unsolicited criticism of your link prospect’s website.

How so?

It’s unsolicited because your link prospects didn’t seek you out and ask you how to improve the value of a page on their websites.

It’s a critique because you imply that your link prospects’ omission of your link forces their site visitors into a substandard experience.

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Customer acquisition costs more than maintaining and growing business with customers you’ve already won. The same goes for your link acquisition efforts and expenses.

It’s helpful - and ultimately more profitable - to see any new link acquisitions as the beginning of a relationship rather than the end. Remember - by linking to you they have acknowledged that your site is valuable to their visitors. Exactly how you grow the initial link relationship will depend on how you bring value to the community.

1) Send A “Thank You for Linking” Email
Always send a “thank you for linking” email. Avoid smothering your new linker - a few lines are plenty. Do ask if they can think of any ways that your two sites could benefit each other. Also, consider asking this linker to connect with you on Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc if you operate profiles on these social media sites.

2) Request an Interview That Highlights Their Expertise
If you have writing resources and a publishing platform on your site consider asking for an interview with one of their experts. This quickly puts them in your debt and is likely to secure a link back when they publicize how they contributed to your site.

3) Design Widgets that Target Your Current Linkers
Target your existing linkers with a creative widget (personality quiz, survey, test, etc) that resonates with their passions. When possible, ask them for input on the widget you’re creating. When it’s done send it to your current linkers first.

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Q1: Why does your link prospect operate a website?

A: He’s providing value to his site visitors either for his profit, his passion or both.

Q2: Why should your link prospect STOP his current task - obviously related to providing value to his visitors - and add your link to a page on his site?

A: Because by including your URL on his page he INCREASES that page’s value to his visitors.

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Here at ontolo, we have been working for the past several months to solve one of the largest difficulties in search engine marketing and online marketing in general: Link Building.  Some of you know that I have been brainstorming this service for over 5 years and was hoping to one day be able to put something like this together.

Today, after spending the last six months designing and developing this solution, we are making this service publicly available.

This link building service is a large-scale market research tool that crawls the internet based on keywords and industries.  It assigns value to those pages based on the value, relevance, and potential.  It then categorizes approximately 75% of the web pages it finds as blogs, social networks, forums, press releases, etc…any number of over 50 web page classifications.  This makes it not only a link building tool, but also a PR, outreach, news, and social media research tool.

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Hundreds of thousands of people create new links every day to explain, illustrate and share the ideas that are important to them. Links remain a central measurement that search engines use to make decisions about how websites should rank for search terms because people continue to use them to lead others to valuable information. On every web page (URL) with links there are many measurable data points that help search engines decide how much influence that URL’s link should have on the rankings.

We have assembled a sampling of some of the URL data points that we have found to influence the link value search engines assign. This is by no means a comprehensive list of factors, but for those engaged in link acquisition it provides a framework for analyzing the link value your site is likely to receive from a target link prospect.

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This is our first of our weekly posts.  Perhaps there will be another this week!

Ben