Linkbuilding for eCommerce biz owners

[Zach]

Looking for feedback on a linkbuilding strategy that I think would be ideal for many ecommerce or product OWNERS specifically. It's probably nothing new in the industry, but let me know your thoughts!

Most linkbuilding comes in the form of a guest post about topics related to the niche.

The hard work is outreach + topic research + writing + (possible) payment to website owners. All said, there's a decent amount of work to getting these links going.

On the contrary, for business owners, why don't you just offer blog owners a custom coupon code affiliate style and have them write their own review of your products. Like influencer deals, but in blog form and nab a link along the way.

Outreach + topic research + writing + payment turns to ------> outreach + coupon code and revshare deal

I am just thinking about the thousands and thousands of mommy blogs an approach like this would apply to that is uniquely available to product owners. All I have to know about is my core demo, and type in "{CORE DEMO} BLOGS LIST" and start mass outreach.

This strategy feels like having my cake and eating it too. Why do guest posting the hard way, when as a product owner you can just incentivize it and get all these niche bloggers to cater to their audience in their own authentic way (and I don't have to do anything but outreach).

We've recently had a big long review + link written by a fitness blogger and the post is just beautiful, lengthy, and racking sales! We pay the blogger for every coupon code used. I'm just like "uhhh why don't I go hard af at this?"

Thoughts? If you own the product yourself, just no reason NOT to do this kind of linkbuilding as your primary strategy?

 

[ToffeeLa]

I've had a few people offering free product for a review lately. I would imagine it is quite popular with people who are unaware of how much a link on their site is really worth...

 

[Ryuzaki]

If you incentivize the links, you're going to have some percentage of webmasters using nofollow on the links to your site. The amount that don't might still overcome the classic type of outreach campaign.

I'm pretty sure Google has found a way to identify what's incentivized or a guest post (especially putting the guest author in the author box and having the link there, or announcing it's a guest post but having dofollow links). I've seen 2nd hand evidence of people catching penalties for guest posts that left obvious footprints like this. I say all of that to wonder out loud if they could catch it all the same when the posts mention custom coupon codes.

If your goal is to make money, then who cares about the nofollow. But if your goal is to get dofollow links by offering a coupon code, I would think you're flirting with a potential penalty in the future.

 

[Zach]

@Ryuzaki Yea this is one consideration I've thought up. Google could figure out a footprint there by realizing "hey all these links also mention COUPON CODE" on the post somewhere too - which would mean the publisher has monetary incentive for the link.

I made the post basically looking for feedback like you provided - could Google pick up on these "coupon code" styled backlinks....which sounds like maybe they could.

But yea, this is like a double-whammy. These aren't random nobody-will-read-this guest posts -- it's actual sales. The SEO portion is just icing on the cake. Answer on whether this should be THE linkbuilding strategy for ecomm owners seems obvious.

 

[Ryuzaki]

@Zach, I'd scrape every site in the vertical and getting the stats on the domains, then filter to what's appropriate for you (especially to not waste your time on DR 10 sites, etc). I'd treat this like a "Master List" and hit them all with a classic guest post offer. You'll end up scrubbing out soft and hard bounces and people pressing "junk" or "spam", of course.

Some people will bite, some won't. You could segment those that do give you a guest post (to come back and get a 2nd one later to a different page or whatever). Anyone that doesn't bite (a different segment), you could offer to pay to insert a link in a page. Then finally you have an "I got ignored" segment.

From there you could decide who to offer what value of coupon code and what kickback. You should get some traffic stats from the domains that did give you guest posts or links edited into old content. So with those two segments you can cook up custom offers and ask them to use nofollow (and since you already got a dofollow, who cares, it's about the money now).

You can offer a lesser value kickback and coupon to the 3rd "I got ignored" segment and see who's willing to play ball.

I kind of made that up and spitballed along the way, so the logic may not all be there. But the point would be to get the dofollow first which would help give you quality-based segments on a list, and then work with the ones that send traffic with the coupon code method.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

Just one tip on the 'giving stuff away' front to get links that worked really well for us a few years back for a 'fitness supplement manufacturer' to be sufficiently vague not to give them away, was to look for too small but GROWING sites and influencers. They often didn't know to charge anything, about nofollow for ads, heck some had never even been approached by anyone yet but you could see from their growth trend that it was a link worth having in the long run.