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Using Corporate Events & Govenance to Generate Links
I’m a big believer in enabling offline marketing and online marketing to work with each other in tandem. While some small businesses may not have active involvement in scheduling corporate events, mid sized businesses often throw a couple of events every year for ther suppliers, customers, or community.
Throwing such events can increase brand awareness, sales, and even help upsell current customers and find new ones through referrals. Aside from the obvious benefits of planning events, they can be a great way to build relevant local links to your website as well.
What Sort of Events Can be Used to Build Links
- Charity Sponsorship - Pick a community charity website to link back to yours.
- Local Youth Club Sponsorship - Use a similar idea to sponsor a sports team or something to that effect.
- Annual Conferences Onsites - Ask your clients and suppliers to link back to you if they have blogs.
- Trade Show Involvement - Since you’re just establishing relationships, write a company blog post linking to all the interesting people you met. Then send them an email, and watch reciprocity take its effect.
- Client and Partner Events - Set up a clients and partners page and then call your partners to let you know you’ve linked to them. Tell them you’d appreciate a link back as a sign of good faith.
- Every Print Invoice and Communication - Add a ‘call to action’ for your customers to visit your ‘link to us’ page in every direct mailer, invoice, and communication. Adapted from SEOMoz
How To Ask For Links
- The Plain Ol’ Contract Terms - Event sponsors get to ask for all sorts of nifty advertising like having their brand names on banners, table cloths, hats, and other chatchka. Make sure that a link back from the sponsored organization is mandatory to your sponsorship.
- Ask Nicely - Ask for links in good faith. SMB’s don’t usually understand the what and why of linking to each other, so position yourself not in terms of SEO, but rather in terms of bringing offline partnerships online.
- Don’t Ask At All - Do good things for your customers, suppliers, and community and watch the links come back to you. As time passes on, links are the new citation, reference, and hat tip.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Michael D 09.23.08 at 11:32 pm
There are some advantages of posting event information such as hyperlocal and granular related posts that tend to index well on longtail industry terms.
I posted event related data for my industry today (have done so for years) and while I don’t get many links (industry is link shy) I do get targeted traffic.
onewayseo 09.24.08 at 4:00 am
good to come up with different methods of link building but who knows for how long this will be important. with rumours of google changing their algorithm itll be interesting to see what the emphasis is placed on next
ebay auction tool [Please use a real name next time] 09.25.08 at 10:11 am
These are impressive marketing tactics. Through big events and offline marketing, it is highlt possible to build a ton of backlinks and dominate the SERP’s. Thanks for the info.
Diamond Bracelets 11.01.08 at 2:16 pm
Event sponsors get to ask for all sorts of nifty advertising like having their brand names on banners, table cloths, hats, and other chatchka. Make sure that a link back from the sponsored organization is mandatory to your sponsorship.