Link Building for Dummies

I am fascinated as to what drives people to my website. I think I write in a digestible manner and also think that I do all the right things to get people TO my site. This is called link building and I've found a pretty "dummies" way to do it.

Social Sharing FTW

If your site doesn't have social sharing functionality, then you're missing out on a basic link building tactic. 

Yes, you're probably liking and tweeting your blog posts. Are you pinning, stumbling, redditing, tumbling and Google plusing your stuff?

If not, then you're missing out.

I've been watching the traffic that StumbleUpon drives to my site and it's consistent in terms of high volume and high value. So, of course, I'm doing more of it. Same with Reddit (though, you can ping the service as frequently as you can StumbleUpon).

Pinterest just for the ladies? Think not. Pin the images in your post and be sure to write a description that is searchable so people will click on it.

Scheduling and Revisiting

Use social tools such as Hootsuite to schedule posts is a smart way to avoid being one and done. You can't expect people to see your stuff the minute you publish it. There's so much content floating around that you HAVE to schedule posts across social networks in order to expand your reach over time.

Revisit some of your more popular posts. Check the analytics on your site and see what's popular. Why not do another round of marketing on those posts. They are popular for a reason so inject that popularity with spreading it over more social channels.

Source Your Content

Sourcing your content is important. Linking back to sources that you're leveraging for your content will go a long way. Not only are you liking to sites that might have more authority than yours, but it also gives a virtual "nod" to that site owner that you consider them a viable source. Hopefully, at some point down the road, they will do the same with your content.  

Same goes for images. Image search is a big driver of traffic to my site and it helps to name your images appropriately and source where you got them from.

There's More

There's a ton of other link building strategies that most use, including guest blog posting; leveraging writing communities like Technorati; and, pitching sites and basically begging them for back links (which rarely works).

The easiest way to get back links, however, is leveraging creative content (see the Die Hard infographic post I did last week).

What link building strategies do you leverage? Are they working?