One of the most important strategies in link building is sending link requests. It can be considered both a science and an art. When you are drafting your link request mail, you need to take into consideration the following factors:
The first factor revolves round the reinforcement value. By linking to your website how would the linking website benefit? After all everyone wants to know “what’s in it for me?” By linking to your website, your link partner should benefit in any one of the following ways.
Recognition – By linking to your website, will your linking partner get any special recognition? Is your website part of the top 10 or top 100 lists in your niche? Such websites will get their links much faster.
Resource – Does your website provide useful information? Will it be a useful resource to the linking partner and to the visitors of the linking partner’s website? You will have a good reason to link to a website that offers exclusive information that is related to the concerned niche.
Association – What is the association value in linking to you? Are you a member of any of the online consortiums, any directory of businesses, etc? This will make more sense to link to your link partners to have an affiliation with your website.
Reciprocation – Will your linking partner get a link back to their website and if yes, will your link be of any value to them? How relevant is your website to the linking partner and his or her niche? It makes more sense if two real estate portals to link to each other. This will facilitate easy sharing of knowledge and information on the real estate industry belonging to a particular region.
Besides the above factors on the benefits your linking partner will get by linking to you, there are other influencing factors such as Action, Interest, Desire, Attention, etc.
Your link request emails should be very carefully drafted so that you will be able to get the desired results out of your efforts.
Grabbing the attention – You must remember that the webmaster that you are contacting will be getting a number of similar mails like the one you are sending to request your mail. Unless you get their attention, it is not going to work because they will not have the time to review all the link request mails that they get. Here are few tips that will help you grab the attention of your prospective linking partner.
• Make sure to use the name of the person you are contacting and not just their designation.
• Make your mails sound interesting and not the regular template based email that you copied from one of the link requests that you received.
• Let your subject line, starting paragraphs and closing lines be striking enough to get their attention.
Creating Interest
It is not enough to get the attention but it is even more crucial to get their interest to read through the entire mail. Every one likes to know how they can benefit from your mail so put that first. Make them feel important and special in your link request. Do not try to write elaborately about your services and features of your services.
Creating the Desire to Link
Your request mail should create the desire to link to your website. To do that you should now what they want and giving them exactly that. It can be an eBook, newsletter or even an RSS feed that they want others to subscribe to and before contacting them subscribe to those. This will influence them to return the favor.
Provide them with genuine contact details, email address and your businesses physical address. Be available if they need to contact you.
Tell them the benefits of linking to your website especially how beneficial it will be for their website visitors.
Make Them Take Action
The idea of your link request mail is not to send a thought provoking message that will make them think but they need to act right away. So provide them with the code to link to your website and ask them to send their code to reciprocate their link.
The next time you draft a link request, incorporate all the above factors and you will certainly see better conversion rates.
Tags: Link Building, real state link building, SEO
Great advise. Do you have any recommendations for attracting linking relationships when you have a new site? I have a new site that doesn’t have much to offer a link partner in the way of pagerank, traffic, etc. to a link partner.
Gary,
To get good quality links, you need to frequent your favorite sites and build a solid relationship! If you legitimately participate in the conversation and forget get about spamming content and loaded keywords you can build quality relationships and maybe even get a good link along the way. Think of it this way, even if you don’t get a link, it’s no big deal, because the knowledge you gained was priceless anyways! Gary, although I am not a client of Realty Rankings, I can vouch for them and say since I have been participating on this great site for some time now, and the content is impeccable. Frequent this site often, read and retain, then watch your site slowly blossom.
Gary, there are literally 100s of ways to promote a new site. The basic and fastest way to obtain links initially would be
Article Submissions, Social Media Link Building, Guest Blogging and YES there are still a few directories that are worth submitting to.
However, IMHO nothing beats having great content on your site. If you use your blog properly you’ll be amazed at the type of links you’ll garner.
@ Robert, thank you for your kind words.
Hello,
I am new to this site and I have to say that there is “So much GREAT information here”…and very very useful!
I have done very well with my websites in the Silicon Valley CA area. I have a few sites and most do extremely well in google organic searches for the most popular key phrases.
I have not participated very much (but intend to do so) with social media…but having good content and following all of the standard SEO rules will get you to the top. One of the rules is the age of your site. Not only how long you have had your site up and running…but how long you have bought the domain for. The search engines want to know that your business (or website) is going to be around for a while and they take more are serious if it appears your domain is bought for multiple years in advance.
Good “quality” links are going to move you up the pages fast, even with a new site. The website attached to this post is brand new and doing very well in my area. And I am getting quite a few signups everyday (15+ new signups a day).
Now I need to talk to “RealtyRankings” about their service…and get back to doing real estate
Thanks again for all the great, useful information on these blogs.
Don
I, too, am starting a new domain. I have another one that’s a bit more established, but this is a real estate site, and my other is a home purchasing services domain. IMO I feel like I have a longer road ahead because now I must create quality content on my site before I can ask for partner links.