9. Our Linking Strategy

LinkingMatters.com starts from zero inbound links.

Therefore every link that we manage to secure will be as a result of our linking strategy - and will provide a good measure of how effective a linking strategy can be.

We'll publish regular updates on our site and you'll be able to see the progress or otherwise that we are making.

A linking strategy should be pro-active and it should integrate with other marketing activities. However, we felt there were some tactics we could use to promote the site and others that we could not. We wanted to make sure that any successes could be attributed to the linking strategy we had put in place.

We therefore decided we could not:

• Conduct a comprehensive search engine marketing campaign
• Do any paid-for advertising
• Do a full-scale public relations campaign.

And we decided that we could:

• Do a full linking strategy
• Create a link page to make it easy to link to us
• Submit the site to major search engines and directories
• Publish a news release on the site and send it to a few journalists we know
• Write a feature article about what we're doing and place it in appropriate journals
• Encourage our users to talk about the site
• Give talks and seminars about our methodology
• Talk to as many people in pubs as possible!

Our Linking Strategy kicked off in earnest on February 10th, 2003. To see how we're doing, check out the results of our linking strategy page.