Sometimes, when it comes to business, we spend so much time helping others that we either forget or run out of time to help ourselves. Indeed, we at Calgary’s Emphasize Design have been guilty of this! While we consistently hammer away at improving and adapting our clients’ Internet marketing campaigns, we have, admittedly, been a touch remiss at working on our own. Although it’s still difficult to clear our schedules enough to focus on ourselves, we have made a commitment to start doing so more often. We have been updating our own website as of late, and employing the same strategies for us as we do for our clients. We want to make sure we’re not missing anything when it comes to providing as much value as we can. And who better to experiment on than ourselves!!
It would be great to be able to say that inbound approaches provide all the solutions we all need for successful Internet marketing, but although it is a tremendous tool, it really simply provides a proven framework that is up to us to implement properly. And just as businesses vary to the extreme, so can our techniques and approaches. By continuously developing our own inbound strategies we are consistently inspired with good ideas for our clients and ways to provide great results.
Benefits of Inbound Linking
Content is by far the most important aspect of any website these days. Search engine algorithms are becoming better and better at finding websites that exist solely to rank as high as possible, and then punishing them by knocking them out of the queue. Web designers used to be able to get away with providing very little or even no content at all and still rank well through aggressive search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. This is referred to as “Black Hat SEO”, and search engines now do their very best to ignore websites that employ these tactics.
Content now exists in myriads of different forms on the Internet. Business websites supply blogs, guides, product information, news and events, and content even exists outside of company pages on social media websites, too. And although that may seem like enough, the truth is these days it isn’t. As we recently went over in our article What is Inbound Linking?, peoples’ comments on your website and your comments on theirs also counts as good content, and is becoming more and more important.
Emphasize Design Earns Leads Through Inbound Linking
Emphasize Design was recently provided our very own real-world example of the power of inbound linking. We learned just how important inbound linking actually is when our Content Manager was invited by HubSpot to craft a blog regarding, of all things, how to make the content on your website work for you. HubSpot’s blog has more than 1.4 million readers monthly, and since we were given the opportunity to also link to our own website we jumped at the chance to participate. We knew that simply by the exposure HubSpot’s blog receives that we could likely expect to make some contacts.
And boy did we ever! HubSpot was kind enough to not only allow us to link back to ourselves, and they also, in their amazingly generous fashion, provided a call-to-action to one of our landing pages!
The blog was published on September 3, 2013. By September 5, we had 17 leads and visits to our website were up 400 per cent. One week later we have 20 leads, and our site is still performing ahead 92 per cent.
Think of inbound linking as a free Adwords campaign or free Facebook campaign. You can get clients to your site through methods other than search engines.
- A few things to keep in mind while setting up quality inbound links:
- Make comments on popular and highly visited sites.
- Provide a link back to your own website if you can (and make it a landing page)!
- If someone leaves a comment on your site, do your best to reciprocate.
- Do not make a comment just because you think you have to. Make sure what you are putting down is relevant and useful.
At Calgary’s Emphasize Design we employ a talented web designer, an inbound marketing strategist, a website content expert and an implementation specialist to work with our clients. We provide all the pieces necessary for amazing inbound marketing results.
