Aligned Marketing Blog

I should have seen that one coming James. Here’s my recommendation: Ask them.

I’d start by finding sites you are willing to link to and then create a link on your site. Then add sites that you think your site compliments, adds value to. In total you’ll probably want 50-100 targets. Finally, send emails requesting a link. It's best to send the emails to an individual and not to a “Contact Us” email address.

That’s a lot of emailing so I recommend that you create a template and avoid all that unnecessary re-writing and typing. Writing your link requests in a friendly and personalized style will increase your chances of success.

Here is an example of a link request for a fictitious company:

Subject: Social media resources on your website

Good morning, [insert name],

I found the resources on your site helpful and well organized, especially the articles and whitepapers on social media. My company, Get2NoMeZ.com is dedicated to helping others master social media. As far as I can tell we do not compete with one another.

Since November 2007 we’ve posted a new blog three times a week. It’s a big commitment on our part but, like you, we’re serious about helping others and understand that being found on the web takes hard work and constant effort, which is why I’m emailing you.

The purpose of this email is to ask you if would post a link to our site on your site’s Resource Section - www.socialmediamatters/resources.htm?

You can link to us by downloading our logo and code from www. Get2NoMeZ.com/linktous.htm or just create your own link.

We have already added a link to your site (www. Get2NoMeZ.com/resources.htm) on our website and trust you are already getting additional traffic.

I can check your site in a couple weeks to see if you’ve granted my request but an email response would really be appreciated.

Keep up the good work and thanks in advance for your time and consideration.

Regards,

Steve Hartkopf

800-659-3638 (Linda or Ben)

Feel free to borrow this template. Obviously it will have to be modified if you’re writing to a site you don’t want to link to from your site.

If you decide to write your own email request template you’ll want to remember to include the following:

It’s a good idea to write a few variations of your request template to (1) see what works best and (2) speak in the style and tone of your target audience. Requests to large corporations, for example, need to be formal while requests to small companies can be less formal.

Finally, remember to keep a record of all the link requests you send out, track your results and don’t be a spammer.

Steve

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To help solve the problem, Twitter recently launched Lists, which is a tool that allows you to group the people you follow into categories,. The benefit is you can reduce the number of people you truly want follow and avoid the noise created by those that, for whatever reason, are included in you officially Follow. You can now drill down into the conversations/news that matters to you. Here’s a summary of the benefits I see with Lists:

1. Saves You Time.
Someone else has already discovered the best people to Follow for your keyword. As you scan the lists you’ll notice that many of them include the same people. That’s ok,. That means the crowd has spoken and a consensus was reached.

2. Keep Control Over Your Followers.
You don’t have to actually Follow all the people on a list.  You can just follow a list and dive in occasionally to see what people on your list are tweeting about and then go back to your main feed to see what everyone you are Following are tweeting about. In the end, you actually gain more control. That’s huge, I Follow over 1,000 people and have over 1,000 Following me, there’s no way I can keep up all the Tweets.

3. Keep Your Lists Public or Private
You can create your own lists and set them up as either public or private. There will be times and topics where you want to create your own list. For example, I’m going to create a list of tweople in the Lake Wylie, (SC) area.

4. New Application is Awesome – Listorious
There’s a complimentary service that just came out called Listorious. Listorious aggregates the best lists from everyone who has created a list and, then, lets you use them as a resource. It’s very cool! It was created by Sawhorse Media in New York City and has over 6.5 million lists already. You simply type in a word such as “news,” for example, and the tool delivers you the best lists.

5. What else? Increase Followers
I use Listorious and Lists to search for people I want to Follow and, as you would expect, once I started Following all these great people they started Following me. In addition, a bunch of other people, some good and some not-so-good, started Following me back. Here's the data: In three days I went from about 875 Followers to 1,167 and the quality of those new Followers is much better than is typically found with other Twitter tools.

Some of my favorites Lists are:
Linkers: http://listorious.com/palafo/linkers
Thought Leaders: http://listorious.com/kitson/thought-leaders
New Media: http://listorious.com/palafo/newmedia
Great Content: http://listorious.com/Jason_Pollock/great-content
Blogging: http://listorious.com/bloggersblog/blogging
Marketing: http://listorious.com/dannysullivan/marketing

Steve

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