Want links? Educate your customers!

One of the first places to start creating content is through educating your customers and doing as much as you can to answer their questions.

Voices.com is a freelance marketplace for voice-over talent that has done an outstanding job of creating podcasts, interactive tools, tutorials and articles that educate their customers and have brought links from universities, schools, business sites, government sites, directories and non-profit organizations.

As audio and video on the web has grown, so too has the need for professional voice-overs - voice talent that can add professionalism to any message. This has created a fantastic opportunity for Voices.com - a marketplace for voice-over talent. They have two main groups of customers:

Businesses that want to add professional voice-over to their material can browse and hear samples of thousands of different voice talents.

And the talents themselves (the voice-over artists) can focus on a niche in which they do exceptionally well and are able to attract customers worldwide.

Many of the business customers and voice-over artists are new to using this type of service online and need to learn. Voices.com not only educates them but attracts links as a result.

Educating businesses

For the businesses looking for voice-over artists, Voices.com provides an extensive video collection that explains the whole process. This is a quick way for potential business customers to understand what Voices.com does - and of course, it’s a great example of how useful video can be for education:

Voices.com also provides resources to help businesses promote their finished work such as this list of podcast directories http://www.voices.com/podcasting/podcast-directories.html:

Educating voice-over talent

The marketplace has created a significant source of income for an increasing number of voice-over artists. But many of the artists are new to the business and Voices.com sees a need to educate them.

That starts with a simple self-assessment tool at http://www.voices.com/tools/self_assessment

And the results point potential artists to further resources and the next steps they should follow:

Some of the most popular educational resources are the regular podcasts at http://podcasts.voices.com/voiceoverexperts/2011/03/voice_over_experts_episode_127.html

To see more case studies like this - and much, much more - check out The Definitive Guide To Successful Link Building written by Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney and published by Wordtracker.

Attracting links

Voices.com didn’t set out to create this body of content in order to build links. They created it because it answered a very real business need - to make sure their potential customers understood the industry and what they had to do to be successful.

Nevertheless, this fabulous content has attracted many links. The best links for SEO may come from links you would have even if there were no search engines.

The content, however, does provide rich material that a good link builder can work with. And harnessing the content for link building is also a cost-effective use of resources. Businesses, particularly when they’re growing, often have to cope with great pressure on their time and resources.

But if existing resources within the business are underused for their link building potential, then new content may not be necessary immediately. Voices.com simply had to educate their customers to use the service - the fact that the resulting educational material was so link-worthy was a tremendous bonus.

Every link builder or business owner should start by looking at what resources they already have that can be used for link building.

To see the potential of such resources, let’s have a look at a selection of links pointing to Voices.com. For example,

A business article on The Marketing Donut ...

A link from an academic site ...

... generated because of an article on giving presentations: http://www.thesource.calstate.edu/learning.shtml

The published link points to a deep resource within the site - http://www.voices.com/articles/general-voice-over-topics/guide-to-public-speaking.html - a great link building bonus.

And a link from a government site ...

… the National Parks Service at http://www.nps.gov/history/history/categrs/govn6.htm

The link points to an article on Voices.com Ten Presidential Speeches That Transformed The United States of America

What a great way to get a dot gov link!

Another business link at ...

http://www.businessknowhow.com/Internet/podcastmusic.htm:

A school link ...

... from HazelwoodSchools.org which links from their choir page to an article on vocal warm-ups on Voices.com at http://blogs.voices.com/voxdaily/2007/01/vocal_warm_ups.html

A non-profit link ...

... Grassroots.org lists Free Resources For Charities also links from:

And finally, media links ...

Here’s an example from the New York Times:

As CMO, Stephanie Ciccarelli says, “In the past few years, we've secured links from The New York Times, CNN, CNBC and many other mainstream publications. Rather than a strategy where we target these publications by pitching stories, we have instead focused on building an amazing web application that has truly become the industry leading service.”

Voices.com is always ready (and well prepared) to talk to the media, even though they suggest it’s not a primary objective.

However, we’re pretty sure that the ‘cascade effect’ of media coverage - if one major outlet writes about you, then many others will follow suit - has generated many links for the site.

Ciccarelli explains: “By positioning Voices.com as the industry leader, we have served as a source of market research, statistics and generally been the voice of authority for the world of voice-overs.”

Author: Ken McGaffin

To see more case studies like this - and much, much more - check out The Definitive Guide To Successful Link Building written by Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney and published by Wordtracker.