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11 ways to make email marketing work for you

Posted on by Nandita Raman
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Want to maintain a good relationship with your customers and clients? The best way to do that is by constantly keeping in touch and updating them.  Email is perhaps the easiest way to do this. Email marketing is the best resource for both start up and established companies, especially e-retail ventures. According to studies, the total number of worldwide email accounts is expected to increase from nearly 3.9 billion accounts to over 4.9 billion accounts by the end of 2017. In a 2015 study from BlueHornet, over 77% of consumers buy products and services from marketing/advertising emails at least once a month or more. So make sure you include email marketing as part of your marketing plan. Here are a few tips to make email marketing work for you. We also have a detailed checklist for emailer marketing.

1. Make it personal

Personalization increases response rates tremendously. Whatever be your vertical, your customers would rather want an email personalized to them than a bulk mail. Use names in email messages to grab attention. Make sure you spell the names right. You don’t want to send out an email with the wrong spelling. Tools like Mail Chimp make it easy to do this. You can read about their “Merge Tag” feature here.

2. Use interesting subject lines

People get a lot of emails every day and most of it goes unread. In order to get the attention of people, you need to write catchy subject lines.  Make sure the subject line is not too long either. As per Marketing Sherpa, subject lines with 9 to 10 words are the most ideal. Mailchimp also has some tips on Subject Lines.

Food Panda, an online food order website/app has mastered this concept well.  They promoted a ‘Buy one, Get one free pizza’ in a unique way.  The challenge for them was to make people open the same email with the same offer and same creative one day after another. So they used creative subject line such as:

  • Pizza, Oh! Pizza, I love you, Pizza
  • All you need is Love &…. PIZZA!
  • Invite your friends today – It’s Pizza Night again!
  • Did someone say free pizza?
  • Pollard’s throwing bats, we’re throwing offers!

 

pizza

3. Send a welcome email

If you have a prospective client or a new client, it is a good idea to send them a welcome mail. Introduce them to your brand and tell your story with the very first email you send them. If you start with sending new customers promotional emails, you won’t develop a lasting relationship with them. It is the first email they receive after subscribing so it is important to make an impression that counts. According to Yourstory.com stats, subscribers who receive a welcome email show, on average, 33% more long-term engagement with that brand.

If you are using wordpress, Gravity Forms can be an effective tool to send out automated emailers to new customers or new leads.

Here is an example of an ecommerce company, Nykaa that got the welcome email right. The brand not only gave all the information required but also personalized every email.

nykaa

4. Write exciting content

People do not want to read long boring copies on their emails. So open your email with compelling text or some great offer.  It is also a good idea to send them useful content from your blog that they might be interested in. Not all the time do your clients want to know about offers and products so make your copy easy to scan by using short sentences, simple language and bulleted lists.

5. Create a comprehensive data base

In order for your email marketing to be successful, you need to have a strong database. Build your own consumer database by gaining consumers’ permission through your website.  To build this, you can use tools such as SumoMe’s List Builder, which help in converting one-time visitors into lifelong readers and email subscribers.

6. Know your spam rules

The biggest problem about email marketing is the risk of spending all that time in creating the mail and it ending up in the spam folder. So before you start sending emails, read up on the SPAM rules. In India, there is no law as such but the closest thing that regulators have come is certain provisions in the IT Act. Under section 79 of the IT Act, Internet intermediaries must take care and diligence with regard to the services they provide, which read together with section 43A of the Act (compensation for failure to protect personal data from theft), can ‘indirectly bring into play a data privacy law’. To know more, read this article, which gives you more details on the dos and don’ts.

7. Have a strong Call to Action (CTA)

When it comes to email marketing no email is complete without a Call To Action. Always include a CTA button in your mailers. Customize the CTA to your audience and provide multiple links throughout the email to make it easy for users to take action. A CTA button will increase click-through rates by making it clear to the reader what the next step they should take is. So while designing, make the CTA button prominent and use enticing words on it to encourage your readers to click

8. Social links 

Adding your social media accounts in your emails is a great way to promote your social media platforms.  It will give you a chance to expand your community and connect better with your subscribers. Do not stop with just connecting with them; make sure you engage with them actively on social media.

9. Make the email responsive to all devices

Considering that many users will be opening the email on their mobile devices, you need to make sure that the email is responsive to all devices – similar to your websites. This is a common mistake we see in emailer campaigns where a promotional image is sent out – but these images are not responsive so the text becomes illegible.

10. Test

Different devices display emails differently. Send a test email to your friends and colleagues with different devices and test it out before you send it. Test reveals design mistakes and can predict whether or not a campaign will get caught in a spam filter. You could even set up accounts with a few different email services for easy testing.

11. Use email service providers

Email service providers are ideal for sending bulk emails. You can build email templates, personalize emails, send and track your campaigns on a larger scale. Here are two most popular service providers in the market that you can use:

Mail Chimp

MailChimp is the best tool for email marketing campaigns. They have a strong policy against spam and offers strong analytics package, full auto-responder functionality, and makes it easy to build, track, and segment campaigns of any type. Mailchimp accounts start at Free for up to 2000 subscribers.

SendGrid

SendGrid offers tools to make it effortless for developers and marketers to craft, segment, test, and successfully deliver emails.  It is a cloud-based email infrastructure that eliminates the need to build and maintain a system in-house.

Email marketing is a vital step in creating the perfect lead nurturing strategy. For more information on how to create a customised lead nurturing plan for your brand, don’t forget to check out our in-depth video

How to use Pinterest for your Brand

Posted on by Krithika Ramani
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Building a successful marketing strategy for your business depends on choosing the right marketing mix and implementing plans that drive results. According to a recent study, marketers are expected to further increase their marketing spends this year, of which digital might consume up to 35% of their overall budgets. With digital marketing gaining more importance, it becomes inevitable for brands to think beyond Facebook & Twitter and explore new opportunities.

pinterest-for-your-brand- socialbeat india

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing digital platforms with more than hundred million monthly active users, currently. This popular social bookmarking or photo sharing website allows users to create, discover and save media content related to their favorite topics, interests or hobbies. Thus giving brands, the perfect platform to curate relevant content and amplify it to reach the desired audience. Pinterest along with platforms like Instagram, Snapchat & Periscope are going to be growth drivers in 2016 so try them out to stay ahead of the curve.

How Pinterest works

Have you ever enjoyed window shopping at a mall or maintained a scrapbook with clippings and articles you love or find useful? Pinterest works on a similar model where users can find, share and pin (read as ‘save’) visual content pertaining to a wide range of topics and interests. It allows users to create ‘pinboards’, organized based on themes / topics where the pinned items get saved.

Launched in 2010, Pinterest was summarized to be a ‘catalogue of ideas’ for people looking for inspiration. Be it a DIY project, a chocolate cake recipe or a wedding gown inspiration – wide range of visually appealing content is sourced or uploaded by users all over the web. They have also recently launched their advertising platform, which can enable promoted pins & boards.

How to use Pinterest for your brand

Big or small, businesses can use this highly visual medium to showcase expertise and disseminate content to reach a wider audience. In order to build a strong customer base and eventually some loyalty, brands can market their products and drive traffic to their website.

Pinterest is not only the second biggest online network to drive referral traffic, but also the one with a higher shelf life. Even pins that are two months old can drive significant amount of traffic, with visually appealing images and keyword rich descriptions. In order to effectively use Pinterest to build your brand and achieve marketing goals, please find below some tips:

1. Set up your account

With the growing user base and average time spent on this platform, Pinterest seems to have become the new favorite for marketers around the world. In order to get started on this platform, sign-up for the business account that provides exclusive features to help you grow and monitor results.

Mashable_Pinterest

Business name, category, website and bio are all you need to create your presence on Pinterest. It provides analytics, rich pins and advertising in terms of promoted pins which are not available otherwise. In case you already have a personal account for your business with good fan-following and referral traffic, Pinterest allows you to convert it into a business account without losing any data.

2. Plan your approach

Visuals are the most powerful medium for brands to capture the attention of its target audience and communicate better. Good and compelling visual elements tend to perform better for brands and result in higher engagement.

Retail brands should showcase relevant, high quality and vertical images of their products for users to like, repin or follow your account for more. Even brands with intangible products or services can benefit from Pinterest with the right content and strategy in place. Businesses that belong to healthcare, finance, education and other sectors can creatively modify their existing content into visual elements or share new content that is relevant to their business and target audience.

3. Create boards and pins

It is ideal to start with 8-10 boards with content categories that are relevant to your audience and business. Instead of just promoting your own products and speaking the brand language, look for relevant keywords or topics that are most searched by your target audience. Curate content based on user interests and create boards for broad themes & categories.

Mashable_Pinboards

With Pinterest being the second largest social network to drive referral traffic, make sure you pin images, videos or infographics with links to your website. These backlinks can be included in the descriptive copy or photo caption for higher click through rates. You can see the profile of one our clients, Gehna over here.

4. Engage with your audience

In order to be easily discoverable as a brand and engage with your audience, repin relevant content across Pinterest and create group boards. This enables brands to invite bloggers or influencers to contribute to different themes and ideas. It also helps in building a community and interacting through contests, theme boards or by liking / commenting on their repins & personal collections. As Jeff Bullas mentions in his article, Shopify users referred by Pinterest, spend an average of $80 compared to Facebook referral of $40.

5. Boost your SEO efforts

Use the right keywords & hashtags in your descriptions & image titles to get noticed and gain more traction. In order to create quality backlinks and visits to your social media handles, add these links to your profile and individual pins that will drive traffic. Much like other platforms, local businesses can tag their location to pins and profiles to reach relevant audience on Pinterest. You can also see some of our other link building techniques tips here.

6. Make your website or blog Pinterest-ready

Pinterest is a great platform to discover new products, as it caters to a wide range of categories such as fashion, home décor, art, food, gadgets, travel, etc. Marketers can add a ‘Pin’ button to their products on the site to make it easier for visitors to share it across. For e-commerce players or businesses that sell online – these pin buttons can help in generating more sales and traffic.

Pinterest Pins

Is Pinterest soon to be a part of your digital marketing mix?
Or stepping up your existing Pinterest marketing game?
Let us know about your experience so far in the ‘Comments’ section.

Digital Chai pe Charcha – Digital Marketing for Startups

Posted on by Abhishek Kumar
Reading Time: 6 minutes

‘Great Product + Great Marketing = Great Startup’

In Dec 2015, we had an idea of creating a platform and open community for discussing challenges faced in marketing a startup – and this was the birth of “Digital Chai pe Charcha”. It got off to flying start in its first edition at our office on 8th January 2016. With limited promotion, we had a full house with 30 participants. The open discussion threw up interesting questions and insights from the diverse community comprising first-time entrepreneurs, seasoned professionals, digital marketers, journalists, PR professionals to social media influencers.

We discussed 7 broad topics and have summarized them below:

IMG_0613

1. Validating Your Product

  • To kick things off,  we first discussed how entrepreneurs can get a quick sense of the market and customers, without spending months on building their product, website or ecommerce store.
  • While we usually recommend WordPress as the platform for most businesses – this can take anywhere between a few weeks to months to build. The quickest way to start off is to create a landing page for your app, business or store. Tools like Unbounce and Instapage allow you to develop landing pages within a day. They can also be a great medium to understand whether customers would like to take up your product/service and at the same time start building an emailer list. You can even get low cost images from platforms like PhotoConcierge.
  • Another way the digital medium can validate a product is to get feedback via platforms like Product Hunt, BetaList & Inbound.org or survey tools like Get Insights, Survey Monkey. Platforms like GetInsights have an existing audience panel so it helps in getting the survey results quickly. Some participants did raise concerns on the authenticity of these audience panels and in these cases, sending a survey (via Survey Monkey or Google Forms) to your own personal network might be worthwhile.
  • Reach out to your personal network for validation tests. Don’t hesitate in asking for initial feedback as it will help shape your product.

2. Acquiring your First set of Users

  • Leverage your Personal Network in acquiring your first set of customers. Reach out and ask for referrals and test users.
  • LinkedIn, if leveraged properly, can be a great tool for the purpose. The premium LinkedIn account allows In-mails to your potential customers. Moreover, directly targeting relevant customers on Linkedin & Twitter can be very beneficial in not only getting first time users but also getting valuable feedback on your product. If it’s a consumer business even sites like BetaList can help.
  • Offering free trials to induce usage can help in showcasing the value your product adds to your customers. If they like it, then they might want to turn into paying customers. Many SAAS based companies do have a freemium model to cater to this.
  • Contrary to belief, Email Marketing is still very effective. Build a database of email ids, but avoid purchasing databases – it doesn’t work. Effective ways to build your own database can be to have a prominent email/lead collection mechanism on your landing page. You could also use tools like SumoMe, attend networking events and create good content on your website to induce newsletter signups. Platforms like MailChimp can be used for Emailer Marketing and they have integrations with WordPress, Unbounce or other email collection platforms.
  • Adding a Live Chat feature on the landing page, app or website can also help directly interact with customers and build on to your emailer list. This way you can also find out what questions customers have, before they take up your product/service.
  • Quora is fairly popular in India. Search for people looking for solutions where your product can fit in. Answer questions with backlinks to your product page/website. It will help in the long term.

3. Marketing on a Shoe-String Budget

Startups do not have big pockets for marketing activities. In the face of budget constraints, how can they build a brand and acquire customers? Some ideas discussed were:

  • Create User / Google focused content to help your product get discovered at the right place & time. Long-form content has excellent SEO value as well as drive relevant traffic to your website. If you are interested in understanding the basics of SEO for Startups then do check out this slideshare. There are a bunch of SEO tools as well, which can be of use.
  • Creating Unique & Fresh content is important. Avoid creating duplicate content as you might not get much traction. It would be prudent to instead focus the time and energy on developing content that will be interesting for your users. Amplifying the content is also critical as there are millions of content pieces out there.
  • Plan well ahead of time. Nothing beats strategic planning. Develop a content marketing calendar with different placeholders for blog articles and social media content – this could be around relevant themes e.g. Valentine’s Day, Launch of a Movie etc. You can check out an investment & wealth management company leveraged Star Wars to showcase Investment Lessons from Star Wars. Be interesting, be regular.
  • Some interesting points that came up for discussion like the ideal number of hashtags to use and how to get your social media profiles verified.
  • Digital Advertising, while integral was not discussed as it warranted a separate discussion of its own.

4. Save Time with Free Tools

There is a whole host of tools out there that can be leveraged to help you amplify your marketing efforts. Some tools you can explore are:

  • IFTTT is a useful tool to create automated actions across a wide variety of platforms from Twitter and Facebook, Youtube to Gmail and Instagram. You can use it for different purposes by building your own custom recipes. One useful application can be to create automated twitter lists in area of your interest and track people in your domain. A sample recipe can be – when someone tweets in my area with #Offers hashtag, I add him to my list “OffersNearMe”.
  • Hootsuite can be a one stop solution to schedule and track your social media posts. It saves you the hassle of logging into different accounts every time you want to post. The Instagram post schedule feature was recently launched by Hootsuite and does not have automated posts functionality. For Instagram, Schedugram or Stribr can be a better tool to use.
  • BuzzSumo is the best in-class tool for content research. You can track the best performing content in your industry that will help devise a strong content marketing plan for your brand. It is also useful for tracking influencers in different domains based on geography and interest area.
  • Feedly, It & Twitter Lists can be explored to track curated content. They fetch content in your interest areas and present it on your feed which can be shared on your social media channels.
  • Many other free social media tools are available – you can check out a complete list here.

5. Build an online brand persona but strike a balance vis-à-vis traditional marketing

  • You need to be clear what your startup or product stands for. It will help you in creating the brand persona – this is important for online as well as offline branding for your company.
  • Brainstorm and come up with your brand colors, tone and maintain the uniformity across channels. While this may change over time, uniformity across channels and mediums is critical.
  • Not all of your customers are online hence, traditional marketing is here to stay and would be wise for companies to go for a balanced mix in their marketing budget.

6. Traditional Vs Digital Marketing

  • One of the questions that got asked during the discussion was, how do you split the marketing budgets between traditional and digital mediums. We are already seeing brands spend atleast 15% of their budgets on social media, but in our experience many of the forward looking businesses are going to spend as much as 50% on digital marketing in 2016. This of course depends on the industry and business model as well.
  • You can also see what trends we predict for digital marketing in India in 2016.

7. Track & Measure the results

Here’s what some of the participants had to say:

 

 

 

Based on the suggestions from the participants, we are going to make this a monthly initiative with each month having a focused topic. You can check out the hashtag #DigitalCPC for more details on the next Digital Chai pe Charcha meet.

Please feel free to comment below or tweet to us, in case you would like to add to the existing list of pointers for startups. We would love to add them in the article.

21 SEO Link Building Techniques for 2016

Posted on by Abhishek Kumar
Reading Time: 8 minutes

Every brand or website targets ranking on top of search results but achieving the same requires a lot of effort over a period of time. The search engine rankings are determined by a variety of factors. Mobile-friendly nature of your website, On Page SEO, Content quality & freshness, Number of backlinks and relevance to the search keywords are some of them.

According to a recent study by Moz conducted across 150+ industry experts, the top 5 factors for search engine rankings were as follows:

  1. Domain-level link features
  2. Page-level link features
  3. Page-level keyword and Content-based features
  4. Engagement & Traffic/Query data
  5. Domain-level brand metrics

While there are various tools to help you with SEO, in this article we focus on 21 link building techniques that can play an important role in boosting your search engine rankings and website traffic. Though the number of backlinks is important but poor quality or spammy backlinks should be avoided. It can result in a negative penalty for your website by Google.

Seo techniques infographic

1. Create excellent link-worthy content & amplify them

Today, Content Marketing is the buzzword. Brands are churning out content in large numbers. In fact, more than 27 million pieces of content are shared every day. In such a cluttered space, it is important to create content that is discoverable, sharable and informative to your target audience. Moreover, as Moz points out, “good unique content” is not enough– you need content which his 10 times better than the best content out there. Certain content types like How To articles, Listicles, etc. are examples of Pillar posts that can help you garner a large number of references/links from external sources. Read the BuzzSumo report for more details on this.

2. Leverage Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a gaining prominence as an effective marketing channel for brands. For the uninitiated, Influencer Marketing is the new form of word-of-mouth marketing that involves partnering bloggers and social media influencers to talk about your brand – be it on their blog or social media handles. An effective way to leverage influencer marketing would be to get the top bloggers in your industry to review your product/service. Apart from giving you important backlinks, it would also help you create awareness about your product among your target audience. There are many platforms in the industry that allow you to track the top influencers in your industry niche.

The other way to use influencers is to co-create content when you don’t have internal bandwidth to create your content. It’s important to keep in mind the user and find the right influencers who can create content for those users.

3. Broken link building

Under this technique, you track the resource pages in your industry and check for broken links using tools like Check My Link. Once you make a list of the broken links on these pages, you can reach out to the page owners with the list of broken links that need to be fixed along with the links to useful resources on your website can be linked to.

4. Infographics

Visual content grab eyeballs and infographics can be a great format to build your brand and get backlinks at the same time, from people out there are who are looking for informative content in a visually attractive representation. You can also submit your infographics in a whole bunch of infographic submission websites such as visual.ly, infographick.com, bestinfographics.info, etc.

5. Surveys & Industry Trend Reports

If you are looking to create fresh & novel content ideas, Surveys and Industry Trend Reports can work wonders for you. Launch an industry survey in your niche – it can be a simple consumer preference pattern for a consumer brand or an investment survey for a financial services player. Tools like Survey Monkey or GetInsights can let you create surveys in a whiff. They also have many pre-researched survey templates for each industry which can be explored.

Create reports, share it in different industry forums, mail it to top experts for their insights before releasing the report and include the quotes / insights in the report if possible, as it adds credibility to your study. For B2B businesses, releasing industry trend reports can be an excellent way to drive traffic to the site and build authority online. These reports have a strong sharability quotient and can garner a large number of backlinks online. Offline PR can also be activated to create more awareness around the release of the industry report.

6. Skyscraper Content

Skyscraper content creation technique involves finding top performing content in your industry and adding more depth or value to the existing content. Once the content is ready, you can reach out to people linking to the existing content and share the link to your article. In order to find best performing content in your industry, you can leverage tools such as BuzzSumo, Topsy or Google Search to some extent. To read more on building skyscraper content, check out this article by Brian Dean.

7. Writing Testimonials

You can write Testimonials for products / services that you have used for your brand with a backlink to your website that demonstrates how you have leveraged that product. It would be better to write a quick case study to add more value to the testimonial.

8. Content Curation & Industry Round-ups

You can curate the top articles in your industry, take interviews of top experts or compile the insights from the latest industry report & convert it into a case study. Once the post is ready on your website, share the link with the experts and let them know you have linked to their content or have published their interview. For content curation, you can make use of tools like Scoop.It, Feedly, BuzzSumo as well as Google Alerts. Apart from gaining potential backlinks, this would also help you make your property more informative for your audience.

9. Internal Linking

Effective internal linking performs three important functions:

  • It makes your post informative for your readers by providing them relevant information for reference
  • It signals the search engine that you have more content relevant to the topic, thus boosting the site credibility for the topic.
  • Increases discoverability of your existing old content

10. Linking to Expert or Authoritative Sites

Apart from linking to your own content, you can also link out to expert articles which are ranked on top of search results. This way you are linking and connecting content to sites which already have an established authority in your niche. While linking to external sites, do not forget to use the rel=”nofollow” tag. This tag prevents the link juice from passing on to the external site. Even in this article you see we have linked to the likes of Brian Dean, Moz & BuzzSumo amongst others.

11. Leverage Q&A Forums like Quora

Platforms like Quora have rich discussion on varied subjects. You can find topics in your niche and answer relevant questions with reference backlinks to your content articles. This would provide the information to audience who is already looking for similar information and at the same provide you good quality backlinks. Quora also has a blog section where you can submit your existing blog content with a link to the original piece.

12. Repurposing old content

You can repurpose old content in different forms to allow it to reach maximum number of people. You can convert your blog article into a presentation, or downloadable pdfs, Videos or infographics and submit it on multiple platforms. You could even translate the content into different languages if relevant for your brand. For example, a presentation can be submitted on Slideshare. You can also add more juice to your already existing blog content by updating it with latest insights, images, presentation and reference links

13. Guest Blogging

Search and connect with high-quality portals or websites for guest blogging. If done properly, it can be an effective link-building measure. Avoid low-quality websites or duplicate content as part of the guest blogging initiative. It can result in penalty from Google. Even commenting on relevant blogs is still  a good practice in case you are unable to get guest blogging activated.

14. Leverage social media platforms effectively

Build an engaged community on Social Media platforms & share your content regularly to amplify the reach of your content. On platforms like Twitter, it is important to share your content multiple times. To prevent repetitive posts, use different post copies, images and stats for sharing. Your engaged follower community is more likely to share or talk about your content. Linkedin has its own blogging feature and you could repurpose your content and publish it there for increased reach. For ecommerce websites even Pinterest can be a very interesting source for quality backlinks and traffic.

15. Ask for backlinks

Last but not the least, ask for backlinks from quality source. For example, if you have great content on Personal Finance, look out for portals which list quality content from different Personal Finance resources and reach to them. If they find your content relevant, they might link back to it. Once they backlink, don’t forget to drop a thank you mail with links to other helpful content which might be useful to them.

16. Reclaim your brand mentions

Tools like Google Alerts, Talk Walker and Mention can help to track the mentions for your brand on the web. Track all mentions for your brand and see if these mentions have linked back to your website/blog. If the backlink is missing in the mentions, mail or reach out on social media and see if that can be converted into a backlink.

17. Keep an eye on your competitors

Track and analyze the backlinks to your competitor websites and check the source of their backlinks. Look at content and pages that have got the maximum links to see if you can produce better content on those topics. Watch out for aggregator sites or industry curators that link to their websites and reach out with links to your content.

18. User discussion platforms like Zomato, TripAdvisor

Platforms like Zomato and Trip Advisor drives millions of visitors to their website daily. Leveraging these platforms in the right way can help claim relevant backlinks and at the same time, drive relevant traffic to your website. Partnering with top reviewers on such platforms (for example – see our list of top food bloggers in India) to seamlessly integrate their reviews / posts with links to your products can go a long way in providing quality backlinks. Forums likes MouthShut.com even have a blog section apart from the review section; you can submit your blog content there with links to the original article hosted on your website.

19. Refresh old backlinks

Old backlinks to your website can return a 404 error over a period of time, resulting from a new site or a change in url. Even in case of new backlinking, there is a possibility that the source site might make a mistake in typing the url to your site. You can use online tools to research the broken links to your site and redirect these.

20. Feedback Site Submissions

Highly recommended for product based websites, submission to feedback sites can help drive lot of traffic to your website & also boost the conversion rates. LaunchSky, Valid8or, Product Hunt, Startup Lift and Beta List are some of the websites that can be used for review submissions.

21. Help a Reporter Out

Help a Reporter Out or HARO as the technique is better known as, is an excellent way to get backlinks from news portals. Once you sign-up on the reporter help portals like HelpAReporter, you are likely to get mails with requirements on information the reporters are looking for. You need to respond with the information from your end, along with helpful links if available.

Few Fatal Link-building Techniques to Avoid:

Sometimes, websites, in their quest to achieve quick results, resort to negative techniques which are not seen in a positive light by the search engines. I would like to list out some of those techniques which should be avoided at all costs to prevent any penalty to your website.

  • Do a proper study of the directory where you are submitting your website. Simple submitting your directory to a website for the sake of getting a backlink might not add great value to your site. In fact, Google excludes many such directories from its search engine rankings. Checking the Moz Domain Authority & Spam Score is a best case practice.
  • Never buy backlinks or establish a barter system for backlinks. Google Considers backlinks as votes ups for your website and paying for a vote cannot be seen in a positive light
  • Excessive keyword optimization in anchor texts in articles
  • Spammy comments on 3rd party blogs and forums with links to your website

Hope these techniques can prove handy to generate good quality backlinks for your website. In case you know any other method that works well and deserves to be a part of this article, please feel free to comment and let us know.

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