Marketing online para pequeñas Empresas

 ¿Quién te ha dicho que internet es sólo para las grandes empresas? echa un vistazo a todas las cosas que puedes hacer:

Aumenta tu presencia en internet. Tu objetivo es conseguir el mayor número de resultados en Google, utilizando todas las opciones a tu alcance:

Prepara tu web para la geolocalización, no olvides cuidar especialmente los siguientes datos:

Optimiza tus criterios de búsqueda añadiendo la ubicación, apóyate en la herramienta de Google para palabras clave, para conocer las tendencias de búsqueda, y diversifica tu estrategia, no te empeñes en trabajar únicamente el criterio principal, p.ej. si tienes un restaurante en Valencia, también te interesará posicionarte por "dónde comer en Valencia" Hay un gran nicho de mercado en las búsquedas relacionadas, que te aportará tráfico de calidad.

Genera contenido útil y de calidad, optimizado para buscadores. Actualiza tu web periódicamente con contenido fresco, y ten en cuenta que no solo de texto vive Google, en su última actualización ya concede mayor importancia a las imágenes, eso sí, éstas han de tener suficiente calidad y estar correctamente optimizadas, de lo contrario pasarán desapercibidas para los robots.

Estudia la evolución de tus visitas. Consulta analytics, clasifíca sus datos por horas, palabras clave y fuentes de tráfico. Identifica las tendencias y aprovecha esta información, muéstrate flexible frente a aumentos de tráfico y conversiones, averigua cuándo es el mejor momento para crear ofertas puntuales.

Prepara tu sitio para móviles y tablets. España es uno de los países con mayor penetración de smartphones, ¿estás preparado para ello, has comprobado cómo se ve tu web en el móvil?  Si la carga de tu web es lenta, no dispones de versión para dispositivos móviles, estarás perdiendo un importante nicho de mercado.

Google maps, presencia obligada. Un 59% de los consumidores usan Google al cabo del mes para encontrar un negocio local. Google, consciente de su importancia, incluye resultados de fichas geolocalizadas de empresas nada menos que en su primera página, ¿vas a dejar pasar la oportunidad de estar ahí? No lo pienses más, crea y optimiza tu ficha de Google Places.

Youtube, el segundo mayor buscador a nivel mundial. En tu estrategia de generación de contenidos no debe faltar la creación de vídeos. Da de alta tu canal de Youtube, personalízalo y sube tus vídeos. Estos han de ser de una temática interesante y atractiva para los usuarios; siguiendo con el ejemplo anterior, podrías grabar una receta de la popular paella valenciana o hacer un pequeño recorrido turístico por las playas de Valencia, donde no podrá faltar una degustación de productos típicos en un restaurante de la zona, en este caso el tuyo.

Códigos QR. Esos gráficos compuestos por cuadraditos en blanco y negro que últimamente ves en la puerta de establecimientos y anuncios gráficos (prensa, marquesinas de autobuses o carteles) son una verdadera fuente de posibilidades, utilízalos para promociones, cupones de descuento, invita a participar en tus acciones de redes sociales, muestra tu catálogo de productos… las posibilidades son infinitas. Puedes crearlos en pocos minutos, sin ningún coste de producción y tienen un gran potencial de cara a incitar a los usuarios a la acción.

Apóyate con las redes sociales. Se dice popularmente que si no estás en Google no existes, pero si no estás en redes sociales, aunque existas, tu público no lo sabrá nunca. Son las reinas indiscutibles de la red, el punto de encuentro ideal donde reunirte con tus potenciales clientes:

Facebook te facilita el engagement, el lugar idóneo donde mostrar tu lado más personal, tus gustos aficiones y saber hacer. Habla aquí de tú a tú con tus clientes, fomenta su interacción, haz que te recomienden, cuídales y sabrán responderte.

Twitter es el canal de la inmediatez por antonomasia, una poderosa arma para la virilidad. Monitoriza las tendencias que se están dando a tu alrededor y lanza tu mensaje. Aquí la respuesta no se hace esperar, si sabes afinar tu puntería, darás en el clavo.

Google+ cuenta con la gran ventaja de tener enchufe en Google, quien recoge en sus resultados de búsqueda aquellos elementos donde tus contactos han pulsado el característico botón +1. Pon en marcha una campaña para cosechar +1 en la red, desde tu web en general, pasando por cada artículo, hasta tus vídeos, imágenes...

Pinterest, la recién llegada al social media, ha entrado por la puerta grande, convirtiéndose en la red social que proporciona mayor tráfico referencial. A la gente le gusta compartir, y si es de una forma útil, mejor. Incluye el widget de Pinterest en tu web, convoca un concurso de ideas para nuevos productos, sube a tu perfil "el pin del día" y anima a tus contactos a votarlo.

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Redes sociales y Ventas por Agencia 365

¿Inbound, marketing de contenidos o simplemente información y diálogo entre personas y empresas?

Esta nueva forma de comunicarse de las marcas a través de contenido relevante se sustenta en tres pilares:

La Web: centro neurálgico de tu empresa. Es decir: la Web es tu empresa igual que el lugar físico en el que se encuentra, seas una fábrica, una tienda o un distribuidor. Si cuidas tu imagen corporativa física, igualmente tienes que cuidar tu imagen corporativa digital.

Además te debes dar a conocer de tal forma, lo que haces y cómo lo haces, como si las personas entraran a tu local, y el mismísimo Director General directamente le hiciese un tour por la empresa. Tu Web, hagas e-comerce o no, es tu negocio en Internet, tu empresa como unidad.

El Blog: es tu periódico, tu revista donde puedes darte a conocer mejor, no tu producto en sí, que también, sino aportar información y soluciones relacionados con el objeto de tu negocio y con las posibles necesidades de futuros consumidores. Tú eres la mejor opción porque eres quien mejor le soluciona sus dudas y necesidades. Eres experto en ese ramo y tienes que demostrarlo, aportando soluciones a problemas o llenando sus vacíos.

Las Redes Sociales: las redes sociales, además de poder comunicarte con tus clientes, otras empresas o profesionales de tu sector, son un excelente canal de comunicación para viralizar tu contenido, además de ser una fuente de conocimiento e innovación para tu negocio.

Las tres herramientas o canales son un tándem perfecto, donde se satisface la necesidad de información y conocimiento con la necesidad de consumo y beneficio. Además de dar a conocer tu empresa desde diferentes perspectivas, formando un todo, generando notoriedad de marca, trafico a tu tienda virtual (web) y confianza en nuestra empresa, por sus conocimientos y productos.

Ya no vamos a buscar un producto en concreto “de la marca tal”, sino información sobre una idea de compra o de servicio que tenemos en la cabeza. La empresa debe llegar a sus posibles consumidores dándoles una solución a su necesidad, para explicarles lo que haces, qué beneficios le reportarás, por qué eres una excelente opción. Es decir, la marca tiene que informar y comunicar, crear la necesidad y dar satisfacción si esta está ya creada. Y una necesidad que beneficie, bien económicamente o anímicamente.

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Redes Sociales y Ventas por Agencia 365

7 Keyword Research Mistakes for a SEO Strategy

7 Keyword Research Mistakes That Stifle Your SEO Strategy

Selecting Keywords That Don't Reflect How People Actually Search

Sometimes the search terms companies target reflect how they think about their industry, not how their target audience does. Are your search terms full of industry jargon that aren't even part of your leads' vocabulary yet? Are you targeting branded terms that describe your specific solution that many searchers aren't familiar with yet?

it's important to confirm that the keywords you brainstorm are on point -- you know, that people actually use them as search terms. Simply check the search volume using the Google Keyword Tool. If your search term yields little or no monthly search volume, you haven't hit the mark. If the search term turns up hundreds or even thousands of monthly searches, congratulations! You've got a great new search term to target.

This isn't to say you shouldn't target jargon and branded terms in your search strategy -- you should! But it should also be balanced with the typically longer tail variations of keywords that people use when they don't know exactly what they're looking for (but you know what they're looking for is you!).

Failing to Perform Competitive Keyword Analysis

One of the reasons you're optimizing your organic search presence is so you appear higher up in the SERPs than your competitors. Research from Optify shows that websites that appear in listing position 1 in Google had an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4%. It drops to a CTR of 12% in position 2, and a 9.5% CTR for position 3. Do you want your competitors getting those clicks, or you?

If you don't perform competitive keyword research, two things may happen: you could end up targeting keywords that don't actually help you capture any competitive market share, or you miss important search terms your competitors are targeting but that you forgot to include in your keyword arsenal

Not Focusing on Profitable Terms

No matter what your competitors are doing, you should always focus on whether the search terms you're targeting affect your bottom line. If your biggest competitor is in position 1 for a term that doesn't actually yield you any leads or customers, who cares, right? 

First, take a look at which keywords are driving conversions. In the example below, the keyword "free advertising" yielded a lead, but the keyword "don corleone" didn't give bunk (wonder why?).

Prioritize the keywords that have the best conversion rate from lead-to-customer, and then take it one step further: look at which keywords drove the most customers. Traffic and leads are good, but customers are better. Based on the closed-loop analytics below, it wouldn't be wise to spend time creating content and building links around the term "lil wayne," despite the fact that it led to some website visitors. Though for what, I can't be sure.

Having an Uneven Distribution of Keyword Difficulty

Not all keywords are created equal; some are extremely difficult to rank for, and others will be a quick win for your business. The key to seeing constant gains from your organic strategy is constantly targeting keywords of all difficulty levels. If you target only competitive terms -- head terms with search volume in the hundreds of thousands --maybe you'll see significant gains in several months. Or you could target keywords with low search volume that are easy to rank for -- typically long-tail keywords, which do drive highly qualified traffic -- but never see that big win that comes from ranking for a hugely important head term with tons of traffic.

So the best inbound marketers target both, and they let the long-tail keywords they target feed their campaign to rank for important head terms. So if you're trying to rank for the (possibly) highly competitive head term "unicorn farms," you can spend time improving your rank for it while also generating traffic from long-tail terms like "unicorn farms in boston," "unicorn farms with good reviews," and "best unicorn farms for kids."

Not Knowing Your Geography

This first little detail is easy to overlook -- before targeting a search term, ensure the traffic originates in your area of business. If you only sell to customers within a certain geographical location, what good is it to rank for a search term that is searched largely in a place you don't do business? You can filter your searches by location in Google's Keyword Tool.

And if you're a local or regional business, get proactive with geographic search terms. If you're one of just a few unicorn breeders in Michigan, for example, you may be fine to just target terms like "Unicorn breeders in southwest Michigan," "Unicorn breeders near Detroit," and "Unicorn breeders in Michigan." If you're in a much more competitive market, though, like unicorn insurance providers, your geographic terms should be more granular. Consider terms like "Unicorn insurance providers in Royal Oak," "Unicorn insurance providers on Woodward Avenue," and "Unicorn insurance providers 48201."

Not Monitoring Search Trends

When considering keywords to target, consider how their popularity trends over time so you can get ahead of a potential search boom before your competitors. This is also a crucial research tactic for seasonal businesses so you have enough content written in advance to rise in the search rankings during the off-season, and keep you in the top when your season is in full swing. You can use tools like Google Insights for Search to see how a certain search phrase performs over time -- you can see when the search starts to increase for "halloween costumes," for example, in the graph below.

This is also crucial to consider because of the way Google presents search traffic -- as a 12-month average. If your business' search traffic has major seasonality swings, the search volume estimates you're receiving could overstate or understate the current importance of targeting any given search term.

Failing to Maintain and Adjust Over Time

Just as you should monitor the search trends of keywords over time, you should also monitor your performance for keywords over time. First, see if your content creation and link-building efforts are helping you improve your listing position in the SERPs for the search terms you're targeting, and whether that improved listing position is actually driving traffic, leads, and customers.

But, just as important, is watching how your performance tracks for search terms that you've already gained top positions for. Often, marketers stop optimizing for search terms that they are always in the top of the SERPs for, because come on, they already made it to number 1! But you can easily slip from that position if competitors ramp up their efforts to rank for that term. Continue to create content and build links around these terms, or you could find yourself struggling to regain lost positions -- and all the traffic, leads, and customers you lost with it.

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CRO o SEO por Agencia 365

Social Media Marketing: ni gratis ni barato.

El mayor activo que se consume en social media es el tiempo

Se precisan horas y horas para el planteamiento de la estrategia, planificación y su puesta en marcha. Posteriormente es indispensable realizar una monitorización pormenorizada, análisis de resultados y readaptación de la estrategia; así hasta llegar a la evaluación de los resultados.

• Disponer de capital humano especializado. Es necesario que sea un profesional cualificado (o incluso en ocasiones un equipo completo), quien ejerza las funciones anteriormente mencionadas. El coste que supone la contratación de un Social Media Manager puede ser, como poco, el mismo que contratar a un Director de Marketing. Como agravante, contamos con que el social media es una disciplina relativamente nueva, por lo que es más difícil encontrar a profesionales disponibles. En consecuencia, su cotización aumenta y el esfuerzo por conseguirlos es mayor
• Herramientas de trabajo. Como en cualquier otra actividad, todo trabajador precisa de las herramientas adecuadas para desempeñar sus funciones. En el social media no podía ser menos; aquí se hace necesario el uso de herramientas de seguimiento y monitorización principalmente. Si se quiere obtener información fiable, hay que pagar el uso de la versión premium, así como licencias de software y otros. 
• Externalización de servicios y soporte técnico. Uno de los pilares del éxito en social media reside en la estrategia y diversidad de contenidos; son la fuente que alimentará nuestra comunidad y la hará crecer fuerte y sana. En este sentido, la estrategia de social media puede contemplar la creación de contenidos audiovisuales, tales como vídeos; el desarrollo y mantenimiento de blogs, la creación de aplicaciones; el diseño y envío de mailing… Todas estas acciones conllevan, claro está, un coste económico, que la empresa deberá tener en cuenta en su partida presupuestaria para poder asumirlo.
  Otros conceptos: regalos y detalles. A menudo las acciones que se realizan en los medios online implican algún incentivo para los usuarios. Puede ser el premio de un concurso, el obsequio como respuesta a una encuesta o simplemente un cupón de descuento. La empresa ha de ser consciente del gasto que trae consigo este tipo de acciones.
• Inversión en formación continua. Estamos ante un sector sumamente dinámico, donde hay que innovar cada día en este y evolucionar. De un lado surgen constantemente nuevas funcionalidades, nuevas plataformas sociales o nuevos cambios en las ya existentes, tomemos como ejemplo a nuestro bien estimado Facebook y el giro teatral que ha dado a los perfiles de empresa con su nuevo Time Line. De otro puede ocurrir que simplemente las técnicas utilizadas ya no causen el efecto esperado, se hayan tornado ineficaces; ante este panorama no queda otra opción: renovarse o morir. En social media la obsolescencia nos espera a la vuelta de la esquina, debemos estar preparados para combatirla.
• Contratación de publicidad convencional. A menudo se da el caso de que una campaña en redes sociales requiere, para dar mayor impulso, de una promoción a través de los canales mediáticos convencionales. Sí, esto sucede y es altamente recomendable si se quiere conseguir el efecto esperado y estos, en modo alguno son gratuitos.

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Comercio electronico y Facebook por Agencia 365

Customer Service + Social Media

According to Zendesk, 62% of consumers have used social media for customer service issues. And if you don't use social media for customer service, news flash: consumers will do it anyway. And when customers take to Twitter, Facebook and the like with an issue, they expect a response immediately. 

Set Up a Crisis Response Plan

1. Determine what constitutes a crisis for your company. For some, a crisis may be a customer cancelling -- for others, that's already part of their everyday social media monitoring. Think about the negative instances specific to your business for which you don't already have a plan in place to handle on social media.
2. Assign team members (and back-ups) to be responsible for each instance. For example, you may have determined your company has 3 potential types of crisis: customer cancellations, website problems, and negative reviews. You might send negative reviews and customer cancellation mentions to customer service, while website problems go to IT. Tell whoever monitors your social media to triage problems that come in and send them to the point person, in order of priority.
3. In the event that complex situations arise, you may want to draft a holding statement. A holding statement is something you can put up on your website or blog that lets your audience know you're working on a large-scale issue and will update them when you have more information. The best holding statements will let your audience know when they can expect the next update -- for example, "each hour" or "by 3:00 PM EST", and where they can go for more information -- like your Twitter account.

If you don't have an answer for someone immediately or need more information from the sender, respond right away to say you'd like to help and want to get in touch via phone or email -- always move complex complaints to more appropriate communications channels. Put yourself in your customers shoes. In the event of a crisis, what information would you need to trust that the situation is being handled well? How often would you want to hear from the company? Often it's not lack of answers, but lack of communication that can turn a crisis from bad to worse.

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Comercio elctronico y Facebook por Agencia 365

Types of Contests on Pinterest

Best Pinboard
Users create a pin board under the contest guidelines and brands select the best one.

Most likes/repins
Contest entrants create pinboards and specific images for users to like and/or repin and entrants win based on the amount of likes/repins they receive.

Sweepstakes Entries
Random winners drawn from a pool on entries. People can enter the sweepstakes by repining an image and/or following a brand on Pinterest.

Establishing Best Practices

It is still early days for marketing on Pinterest, but many brands are looking to invest in the platform and some obvious best practices are beginning to emerge for contests.

1. Create a legitimate looking contest. Make sure your contest has a homepage with specific rules that lives on your official website. Pinterest is already seeing scam contests so to ensure Pinterest users get involved, they have to trust your campaign.
2. Create a repinnable image (yes repinnable is a word). One of the first steps for promoting a Pinterest contest is to have an image that your followers can repin for you easily. It should list the contest name, display the brand, mention a prize and reference the rules.
3. Have clear rules listed. These most likely should live on your official website or blog, but can also be reference on Pinterest.com.
4. Support the contest with existing resources. Help get the word out through email lists, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and any other audiences your business has access to.

5 Contests Examples for Review

1. High Point Market: A company that organizes trade shows for the furniture industry
2. ModCloth: An online boutique featuring indie and retro-style women’s clothing
3. Homes.com: A website for searching homes for sale or rent
4. Mark Eric Photography: Wedding photographer in Louisiana
5. TeachHub.com: Teacher resource website

1. High Point Market: Style Spotters

Type: Repins

Rules:

• Entrants, named “style spotters” (selected by High Point Market), pinned their favorite images from High Point Market
• Style spotters solicited votes through repins and likes
• The pinboard with the most likes/repins as voted by fans wins

Prize: A free trip to the April High Point Market 

Complexity: A less complex contest with the focus on gaining repins and likes

2. ModCloth: Something ModCloth, Something You

Type: Best Pinboard

Rules:

• Must follow @ModCloth
• Pins required to include hashtags (#modcloth and #wedding)
• Pinboards must include a pin from 20 categories as outlined in the announcement
• Pins must have a caption listing the number and name the pin corresponds to
• Entrants share their boards by posting a comment (with a link back to their board) on the ModCloth contest announcement pin

Prize: $100 gift certificate and “inspire” the ModCloth 2012 Spring Wedding Campaign

Complexity: Many rules and content requirements make this a more complex contest

3. Homes.com: Pin It If You Love It

Type: Best Pinboard

Rules:

• Create a “Pin It if You Love It” pinboard
• Pin 10-20 of your favorite homes from Homes.com
• Pins must include a link to the listing on Homes.com within the description
• Users enter by adding the link to their pinboard to the Homes.com Pinterest contest blog post
• If users have trouble adding their link, they have the option to email contest@homes.com to enter

Prize: Contestants can win one of five $250 home improvement gift cards

Complexity: A medium level of content requirements and complexity with an option to email entries

4. Mark Eric: Pin m.e. to Win m.e.

Type: Best Pinboard

Rules:

A link building campaign.

You've got to work on two main areas - the keywords you use on your own web pages (on-page SEO) and the links on external websites that point to yours (link building).

On-page factors are easy to manipulate and therefore search engines don't base their algorithms on them alone. They look for more information in the links that point to your website. These are much more difficult to manipulate and so are given precedence in search engine algorithms.

So successful SEO soon requires successful link building. That can be a daunting task and it's why we've written this book.

Good content, an understanding of your online community and knowing how to get external sites to link to yours are all needed to build quality links over time.

This is entirely possible no matter what your level of experience - just approach the job systematically and give it sufficient time and you'll soon be getting quality backlinks without even asking for them.

Here we'll take you through 62 steps of the following seven stages of the definitive link building campaign:

1) Strategy
2) Management & metrics
3) Networking & prospect hunting
4) Content creation
5) Promotion
6) Debrief
7) Repeat

We'll then give you a link to a spreadsheet containing a checklist you can use for your own link building campaigns.

Stage 1. Strategy

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat". Sun Tzu.

It's best to know where you're going before you start your journey.

SEO translates your company and marketing strategies into target markets and matching keyword niches.

1) Choose target keywords. For SEO, this means you must decide which keywords you are targeting. And you must include those keywords in the link text of internal and external (from other sites) links.

2) Group your target keywords into market sectors. So, for example, if your website is an online garden center you might categorize your keywords into groups, including the following:

• seeds
• plants
• garden furniture
• water features
• barbecues
• etc, etc...

3) Focus your link building work on each market sector in turn, eg barbecues, water features. For each of those, you might further refine your target keywords into keyword niches, eg for barbecues, this could include:

• gas barbecues
• charcoal barbecues
• portable barbecues
• barbecue accessories
• etc, etc...

A keyword niche is all keywords containing a seed keyword, eg the gas barbecues keyword niche includescamping gas barbecues and natural gas barbecues.

4) Infuse all your link building and promotion with your brand name. Eg, if you have any influence over link text then don’t just use gas barbecues, use (if ‘Barbilicious’ is your brand name) Barbilicious gas barbecues.

If you are launching a new design line called, say ‘Vintage Chic’, call it (if ‘MyBrand’ is your brand name) ‘MyBrand Vintage Chic’.

There's much more on link building strategy in Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building - How to build links to your website for SEO, traffic and response, by Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney.

Stage 2. Management & metrics

To be successful, any project needs to know who does what, when, who is in charge, what's being measured and how. Let's break that down. Before you start, make sure you have answers to these questions:

5) Decide who will do what and how? Who blogs? Who tweets? Who comments? What's your company's social media policy? What software will be used? What account will be used for sending and receiving emails from bloggers? How will records of (and contact with) link prospects be kept and accessed?

6) Make sure you've got a clear decision-making process You might be going into new territory for your company. Is blogging the PR department's brief or the online marketing department's? (We've seen SEO under one and blogging under another). How will options be discussed and decisions reached? If these issues aren't sorted out then you can be paralyzed (and it's why big companies often are).

7) Ensure you can make rapid changes to your site Sounds simple enough but it often isn't. With one client, to get a blog post live, we had to: write it, get it approved by a PR company and then a government department - the process took up to a week and at times a post would come back unfit for purpose and too late to be worth publishing!

8) Decide what metrics to use, eg inbound links, traffic, SERPs ranks, mentions, email recruits, feed subscriptions, sales. As well as total links, you might count links containing target keywords in their link text.

Be aware that there are many factors outside your control - you might get lucky and deserve no credit for good results; and you might have the best link building campaign ever but fail for other reasons.

Metrics are there to help you - of course you need results but concentrate more on how you do things (your method, your process - this is what this book is for) and results will be more to do with your considered actions than luck.

9) Choose your monitoring tools. You can count links with Google Analytics, Google Webmaster andWordtracker Link Builder.

I recommend using Link Builder because:

• It uses the Majestic SEO crawl of the internet which is as big as almost any search engine’s but without their filters (ie, you can see the lot).

• You can see your competitors’ inbound links and your own with one ‘click’.

• You not only see inbound link counts but also a breakdown of those links into different types like blogs, directories, media and social.

• Everything is displayed in attractive, easy-to-read graphs.

• Er, I managed much of its redesign with my link building partner Ken McGaffin.

It's now time to get out into the community...

There's much more practical advice on planning and managing link building campaigns in Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building - How to build links to your website for SEO, traffic and response.

Stage 3. Networking & prospect hunting

Find and explore your target market’s online community. Make friends there and build lists of link prospects.

There are many opportunities for this as we show below. But you must always record your prospects' details either in a spreadsheet like this, a bespoke contact management tool or specialist link building software like Wordtracker Link Builder.

10) Check your own site's inbound links and referrers. Use your site's analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Wordtracker Link Builder.

301 redirect any 404s you find whilst there.

11) Find relevant blogs. Study, start commenting when confident, don't mention your own products at first.

12) Monitor news sites. Make sure you know what's going on. Comment, be supportive and helpful, make friends.

13) Build press lists. Contact journalists, make yourself available as an expert - show your pedigree.

14) Join forums. Register, use your signature, be more helpful than promotional, earn community trust.

15) Look for specialist sites that accept article submissions. Contact any specialist sites and bloggers and ask if they want guest content written by you.

16) Take part in specialist social sites. egister, help, etc. Here’s a list of 193 of them.

17) Look for specialist groups on big social sites. On Facebook, StumbleUpon and Twitter, search for groups and lists

18) Look for local sites and small news sites. Make contact, offer help, stories and content.

19) Join trade associations and chambers of commerce. Be active, look for contacts and linking opportunities. They are there to help and that includes mentions and links.

20) Look for relevant libraries. Great resources for communities and quality links.

21) Approach your suppliers. They have websites, right?

22) Watch competing websites. Study inbound links, press releases, successful content and tactics.

23) Find directories. Consider becoming a directory editor. Don't submit your own site until it's established.

To help find all the above:

24) Enter your targets keyword into Link Builder. One search with a target keyword on Wordtracker Link Builder will find the inbound linking sites to the top 10 sites on Google for that keyword. Those inbound links are all link prospects. They are organized into different types of sites that can be used for different linking strategies including blogs, directories, social, news, business and jobs.

25) Do regular searches with your target keywords to find all of the above. Start with a systematic search.

26) Search with advanced queries. For example, try the following …

Find pages with your keyword on them and “submit url” contained within the anchor text of links pointing to them (in other words, find sites about that keyword who accept submissions):

keyword inanchor:"submit url"

Find pages that link to competitor1 and competitor2 but not your site:

linkdomain:competitor1.com; linkdomain:competitor2.com; -linkdomain:yoursite.com

For more advanced Google queries, aka 'search operators', See GoogleGuide.

27) Read all you can on the quality sites you find. Follow links to the websites they mention. Wander around and see what and who is in the community. What do people like and dislike? What do they get passionate about? Always be looking for link prospects and ideas.

Learn how to find more link prospects in Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building - How to build links to your website for SEO, traffic and response.

Stage 4. Content creation

Quality content is essential for natural link building and is a constant theme of Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building - How to build links to your website for SEO, traffic and response. This is because the most important factor in getting links without asking is creating something worth linking too. The list below takes you through some of your options for creating link-worthy content:

28) Always be looking for spectacular content. It can turbo charge your link building. But even in competitive markets, a solid, consistent approach will bring rewards over time.

29) Make the most of the content you already have Is it link-worthy? Can it be made so? In some recent work for a national retailer, after some digging around I found gold - a large collection of quality how-to content stuffed away in PDF format in a hidden corner of an old website.

30) Publish industry news (one-offs or regular). Industries have industry websites and they want industry news. Provide a regular supply, use target keywords in your headlines and you'll get links from pages relevant to your content (good) using your target keywords (perfect).

31) Don't ignore national media news (one-offs or regular). National news is a tougher nut to crack but be persistent and you can get results.