If you are looking for ways to build your backlink profile, you have probably considered many options.
However, only about 2% of marketers are using crowd links despite their effectiveness, making them a hidden opportunity for creating an effective marketing strategy that builds traffic for your content. When you consider the tens of thousands of niche forums and communities dotting the internet, many of which attract large, interest-specific audiences, it’s easy to see why crowd links can be an extremely effective way to reach consumers who are interested in your content or your brand.
Here are a few of the reasons that you should be thinking about crowd links as you build your linking strategy:
- Crowd links appear natural and organic. Because crowd links are generated within communities of interest and posted by other users, they appear authentic and organic. The result is that such links enhance the appearance that your content is trustworthy, credible, and authoritative.
- Your links may appear in a variety of places. Targeted marketing campaigns tend to place links primarily in the same type of content—blog posts, for example—which tends to reach the same audience more than once but can become routine. Crowd links often appear across a variety of mediums such as social media, forums, blogs, and review sites. This diversity helps to enhance your backlink profile, expose your content to a wider variety of people, and provide the impression that your content is widely respected and commonly linked to.
- Reach more active and engaged users. When your link appears in an article or blog post, most of the people reading it will likely be passive consumers of content, and the click-through rate will consequently be low. However, when your link appears in a crowd link context, you are tapping into a group of people who are already actively engaged in the content and are posting and participating, not simply consuming. As a result, the engagement rate for links posting in this context are often much higher, generating more traffic for your site.
- You could always go viral. Posts that become popular have the chance to go viral, and when that happens, your link will go out to an exponentially larger audience. This is especially true for social media posts, which can easily surpass millions of views when one strikes a cord and goes viral. Viral posts are also more likely to see users engaging with the content.
- User-generated content. If you have interesting and compelling content to share, then the community linking to it may engage in a conversation about your content and begin building on it with further posts and discussion, including reviews and endorsements. This kind of engagement can boost your credibility and trustworthiness.
Crowd-links are an effective way to build your backlink profile, but more than just driving traffic, they can help to create a community around your content that can become self-sustaining. This will benefit you in the long-term as your users and fans help to market you on your behalf.
