Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [198]
Thousands of visitors followed the link on StumbleUpon to find this article, and in finding the article, many voted on it (or stumbled it) and referred it to others. In doing so, it perpetuated the branding of the site and the article. The exposure grew to the article and in doing so put the brand in front of thousands of people who may never have seen it before.
Sales/Leads
The article was linked from a few other sites. One in particular was iEntry, which provided an excellent source of leads. Visitor referrals from iEntry tended to produce contacts and inquiries.
By having this site link to the article, it may not have provided any boost in rankings, but it did produce business and immediate leads for the business, based simply on the link to the article, which resonated enough to cause visitors to fill out a lead form and start a conversation.
Building Relationships
In evaluating link visitors, it is also beneficial to see who is linking to you. This is an opportunity to build another relationship in your industry or in your niche, especially when your website catches the eye of a noted expert or popular source of content. In this report, I found that Eric Meyer (of http://meyerweb.com), a noted expert in CSS programming, had linked to the article. This opened the door to having many conversations with Eric and resulted in gaining a new friend, a trusted resource, and helpful information. Another result is that as content is generated in the future, the potential for additional links between our sites is increased, because there is now a trusted relationship.
Use Context and Competition to Develop Engagement
Two specific factors determine the engagement of visitors from various link sources: context and competition. The value of the author of a link providing context is a critical factor in developing high-value visitors from their initial visit. When visitors come from a source of news with high credibility, that credibility is shared with the destination of the link. In addition, the article is about a specific product, company, or market, so the link is in the context of the article, and the informational value is very high. The competition for the reader’s attention is very low, because the article is about a specific subject and the link is in the article (see Figure 16-9). Typically, the links within an article or a news source are limited to the relevance to the story (see Figure 16-10). When the link is in the article, the content is directly related to the link, and the competition for the reader’s attention is extremely low. These two factors create a highly engaged reader to your website.
Figure 16-9: Context and competition determine visitor engagement by source.
Figure 16-10: Links from news articles, such as this one on TechCrunch.com, carry high context and credibility.
Blogs share this same type of engagement relation. Bloggers link to other articles, stories, and news sources. Because of this, the context of the subject matter is very high, and the link competition on the page is very low. However, blogs in general tend to have many more outgoing links on a page, linking to blogrolls, advertisements, and other calls to action. There is typically more competition for the reader’s attention in comparison to a highly authoritative news source.
Blogs also provided another unique aspect of information in this analysis. Once a blog links to a website as being a source of information or recommendation, the chances of that blogger linking again and directing more people to the same website is much higher. Of all of the links that brought visitors to the website, not only were the links from blogs providing high-quality visitors, but they consistently brought them over greater lengths of time. Most other link sources would direct a good number of visitors to the