Getting to know your online community

Posted by Ken McGaffin on 05 May 2011

Ken McGaffin in this extract from Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building explains how online communities work and how to find and contact link building prospects within that community to help you build a profitable, traffic-attracting website:

One of us lived in Boston some years back and took great pleasure in the variety of culinary delights available in the city.

“I’d often have lunch at Faneuil Hall – a food market buzzing with restaurants and food outlets of every flavor. Sometimes, I’d leave the office knowing exactly where I was going and what I was going to eat. But most times I had no idea and I’d wander around until something took my fancy.”

There were hundreds of people doing the same – attracted to Faneuil Hall not just by one restaurant but by the lively mix of many. Each restaurant or outlet benefited from being part of the collective whole – the community that is Faneuil Hall.

The same type of clustering happens online. What binds websites together is not geographical location but the links between them.

There is an online community around every business or topic area and just as with the restaurants in Faneuil Hall, each individual website benefits from being part of the collective whole. People wander down the aisles of Faneuil Hall, stopping, looking in and moving on. In the same way, on the web people follow links as they collect and absorb information that helps them decide to buy.

But the online community is not immediately obvious. Geographic location doesn’t help: a website owner based in Boston may have a stronger sense of community with a website owner in Australia than he does with a website owner in his own city. In this chapter, we’re going to explore the concept of an online community, why it is so important to your online marketing efforts and how you can find and exploit it to drive your profits up. Online communities are made up of hundreds of websites, blogs, forums, networking sites, Facebook groups, directories, trade associations, trade press sites and many others.

When you set out to promote your website, your first step should be to identify and understand this informal network of websites.

You should not try to promote your website ‘on the web’, but rather try to promote your website to the online community that already exists around your industry.

Think about how you naturally find new websites. You are likely to:

• Try a few queries on a search engine.
  
• Pick out interesting results and scan them for content and links to other resources.
  
• Absorb the information and refine your searches in the light of what you have found.

Do this repeatedly and you’ll find that the same sites come up, referenced and linked to by other websites. This collection of linked websites has built up naturally and forms an informal online community. So sites about football tend to be interlinked, the same for movies, small business and so on.

To understand this better, we’ll create a very simple example of how someone might search for a product online.

1) Your customers research and buy in an online community

James is a rather dogged and experienced searcher. He believes in a methodical approach to searching. He wants to buy a widget, but not just any old widget: he wants the best widget he can find and he’s prepared to work at finding it.

His search behavior and the results he finds can teach us a lot about the online community for widgets:

• James has been thinking about buying a new widget for some time. He has noticed online articles that suggest the widget industry is being transformed and that there are now some very exciting new models.
  
• He goes to Google and enters a few search terms. Scanning the results he comes across WidgetPages.com which turns out to be a widget industry news and information site. He looks at the site and sees that it is mainly a portal with lots of links to external resources. He scans the mentioned sites and spots a section on ‘Widget Magazines’. He follows the link and is attracted to WidgetsToday.com, the leading consumer site for widget buyers.
  
• He goes to WidgetsToday.com and quickly finds an article, “Buying the new breed of Widget”. He enjoys the article and scans the rest of the site. He finds some good content and decides to sign up for their free newsletter, follow them on Twitter and become a fan of their Facebook page. He then goes back to the original article. The review lists five of the best new widget deals with links to the manufacturer’s website. James visits each in turn and decides he likes the sound of the Blue Widget Company and their new model, the BWC3001X.
  
• He enters the model number into Google to see if he can find some more information. The first result is a blog published by Max Samson, one of the world’s leading experts on widgets. He reads the extensive review and is very happy with what he finds: he goes back to the Blue Widget Company website to make his purchase.

James has traveled quite a path and the steps he has followed have all involved using search engines or following links.

This is one search – another day and he might have done it differently.

Now imagine other people in search of widgets just like James. None of them will follow exactly the same path, but they’ll do similar types of searches, they’ll visit some of the same sites and they’ll find some sites that James didn’t come across.

Think of the hundreds or thousands of people doing searches on widgets. The sites that they visit and the links they follow will collectively map out a tangible but informal network of interlinked, independent websites – an online community for widgets. Some of these sites will have a good reputation, some will have high traffic, some may sell huge numbers of widgets, some may specialize in certain types of widget, others may be experts in repairing widgets, some may even be involved in widget manufacturing standards.

If you can identify the online community that exists around your products or services, then you can establish your presence in it, you can set out your stall and you can build competitive advantage.

You should know the important information and news sites; who your competitors are and what relationships they have; their position in the community and how they are interlinked. You should compile lists of the most important websites in your industry and be aware of what is happening on them.

These sites will be used by the people who are interested in your products and services. If you are to be successful online, your website must become known within the community. You must gain links from industry blogs, persuade magazine and information sites to write about you; take part in forums and discussions groups; and have a voice on Twitter and Facebook.

To identify the community, you don’t have to know every resource or website. All you have to do is get off to a good start and follow the links to discover the main routes on which people travel.

As a case study, let’s take a glimpse at how Patagonia, a manufacturer of outdoor clothes, has made itself and its website a part of an online community.

2) Online community case study: Patagonia.com

Patagonia began as a group of climbers and surfers with environmental concerns who wanted to climb in the summer and surf in the winter. In the 30+ years Patagonia has been in business, that group of climbers and surfers has grown to include paddlers, mountain bikers, backcountry skiers, sailors, snowboarders and fly fishermen.

Patagonia has committed to being a part of the online community its customers use. For this it uses the following:

Website Blog Twitter Facebook YouTube

Importantly, Patagonia’s content is story-led. But it doesn’t just tell its own stories – it shares readers’ stories too and last year received over 100,000 unsolicited stories and photographs from customers. More customers now talk to Patagonia online than by phone.

The result is that Patagonia.com has 64,000 inbound links according to Yahoo and over 500,000 according to the more extensive link count given by MajesticSEO. Many of these are quality links and a look at them shows us the nature of Patagonia’s target online community and how it has become part of it.

Patagonia’s inbound links reveal how it has reached out to and had coverage from:

• Consumer and trade websites eg Travel Independent.info and Green Money Journal
  
• Different activities and sports of its target audience eg surfing and backpacking
  
• Elite performers and professionals (influencers) eg Everest climbers and mountain rescue teams
  
• Significant concerns and passions of its own and its audience ie environmentalism and sustainability
  
• Grass roots organizations eg Surfers Against Sewage
  
• Mainstream news media eg the BBC
  

Below we list a small sample of those links ...

Green Money Journal

The Green Money Journal encourages and promotes the awareness of socially and environmentally responsible business, investing and consumer resources. The website’s goal is “to help individuals and businesses to make informed financial decisions through aligning their personal, corporate and financial principles”. The link to Patagonia can be found in the body text of an article titled: “Shopping with Your Values: Green Holidays and Beyond”.

Backpacker

Backpacker is a popular outdoors magazine and an obvious great place for links for Patagonia.

Design for the Environment (DfE) Program

The Design for the Environment (DfE) Program is a voluntary partnership program from the US Environmental Protection Agency that works directly with industry to integrate health and environmental considerations into business decisions. A link to Patagonia can be found in the listings of Garment and Retail Organizations.

Save the Waves

Save the Waves is an environmental coalition dedicated to preserving the world’s surf spots. The goal is to preserve and protect the best surfing locations on the planet and to educate the public about their value. Patagonia is listed as one of eight sponsors at the bottom of each page on the website.

Absaroka Search Dogs

Absaroka Search Dogs of Montana train search dogs, sometimes called rescue dogs, to assist with search and rescue efforts for lost or missing individuals.

National Ski Patrol

This is the official site of the National Ski Patrol, a nonprofit mountain rescue and safety organization.

Surfers Against Sewage

Surfers Against Sewage campaign for clean, safe recreational waters, free from sewage effluents, toxic chemicals and nuclear waste.

American Alpine Club

The American Alpine Club: Providing knowledge and inspiration, conservation and advocacy, and logistical support to the climbing community.

Extreme Ultrarunning

Extreme Ultrarunning provides ultrarunning links and information for the novice or veteran ultrarunner.

MountEverest.com by climbers

Mount Everest by climbers is a mountaineering and news site for those serious about climbing Mount Everest. Being associated with Everest expeditions says that Patagonia is serious equipment that will look after you.

Travel Independent.info

Travel Independent.info is an independent, non-commercial site by travelers for travelers to encourage people of all ages to travel independently and give them the information they need to feel confident about it.

BBC

This is an article about reducing personal carbon footprints. On it a commenter mentions and links to Patagonia – that’s success.

3) Record, assess and manage your link prospects

You must seek out the community by traveling across it, using your own experience, intelligent searches and by following links. It’s like a great detective story: you’ve got to uncover the secrets by following clues – and every industry will be different.

You’re going to look at a lot of websites on the journey and you must be able to identify and collect the addresses of the sites that will help you. At a basic level, learn how to create bookmark folders within your browser. If you save your bookmarks with a web-based service like Delicious you can access them from any computer.

Beyond bookmarking, we recommend you list potential link targets and add useful data with which to evaluate and prioritize your prospects - Wordtracker's Link Builder tool makes this easy and provides the 'Contact Us' and 'About Us' data that will make that much easier. There is no end to the data you could record about each link prospect on a spreadsheet. But each piece of information takes time to collect, so the challenge is to restrict what you record rather than add more. We like to note the following:

• Market
  
• Niche
  
• Site name
  
• URL
  
• Type (eg affiliate, blog, directory)
  
• Source of prospect
  
• Rating (researcher’s own – out of 10)
  
• No. of comments on a post/article
  
• Follow or nofollow?
  
• Alexa Rank
  
• Google PageRank (of home page)
  
• Google PageRank (of possible link page)
  
• No. outbound links on possible link page
  
• Year created
  
• IP address
  
• Contact URL
  
• Site notes

If tracking and contact management is going to be done within a spreadsheet then we’ll add the following contact management ‘fields’:

• Contact name
• Contacted?
• Replied?
• Contact notes

You’ll find (and can copy) a spreadsheet with a template of the above spreadsheet here.

The Link Builder tool can be used for contact management and will partly automate the tracking, management and finding of link prospects. You can also leave notes that you and other team members can later read.

Let’s now take a quick look at each of those types of data we like to record to assess link prospects ...

Market

Group your link building campaigns and therefore your prospects into market sectors. These might be further divided into specific keyword niches.

Niche

Your link building should be centered around target keyword niches. Eg, if you have a gardening site your target keyword niches might include barbecues and garden furniture. That is, all keywords (and there will be many thousands) containing barbecues and garden furniture.

Site name Simple, the name of the site.

URL Homepage URL.

Type (eg, affiliate, blog, directory) A way of sorting your prospects into site types eg: social media/forum, personal blog, company blog, ecommerce, news, affiliate, directory, other.

Source of prospect Prospects come from various sources, such as your site’s existing backlinks, competitors’ backlinks, suppliers, leads from clients, etc.

Rating (researcher’s own)

Almost all other data relies on a site having been around a while. But this personal rating (perhaps out of 10) of the quality of a website allows the stars of the future to be identified.

No. of comments on a post/article

Many of the metrics used here to assess a prospect can be unreliable, but readers’ comments are made by real people and are perhaps the most reliable measure of a site’s long term link value.

Follow or nofollow?

If a link has the nofollow tag attached then search engines will not follow the link and it will not directly help your search engine rankings. ‘Follow links’ (links without the nofollow tag) are therefore more attractive. Although, of course, users can still use nofollow links to get to your site and other sites might find your nofollow link and repeat it as a follow.

Alexa Rank

Using data from its toolbar, Alexa ranks the web’s sites, with the most popular being no. 1 (it’s google.com if you’re wondering). The closer a site gets to being used by online marketers, the more unreliable its Alexa rank is, but Alexa rank remains a useful quick indicator of a site’s popularity. To find a site’s Alexa rank use the Alexa toolbar or either of the Firefox plugins, SearchStatus and SEO for Firefox.

Rank in Link Builder

The higher the number, the more important a Prospect is likely to be.

Google PageRank (of home page)

Google PageRank (as publicly seen) can be used as a rough indicator of the number and power of a page’s inbound links. It’s often wrong and misleading (so always cross reference) but it is quick. We look at the home page’s PageRank because it usually has the highest rank on the site.

Google PageRank (of possible link page)

Link power is passed from page-to-page and not from site-to-site or site-to-page. So if you want to assess the value of a possible link from a site then you really need to look at an example of the type of page you might get a link from.

No. outbound links on possible link page

A page’s link power is distributed amongst its outbound links. So the more outbound links a page has the less valuable one of those links is to you.

Year created

In general, links from old sites are better than links from new. SEO for Firefox looks up a site’s creation date for you (via the excellent WayBackMachine).

IP address

Recording IP addresses helps find networks of links from the same or closely related companies. If your competitor has a similar IP to the network then they likely ‘own’ the sites in it. (Are they open about this?) Although different inbound links to the same site could by coincidence have similar IPs, it’s more likely they are related. If you can’t connect the network to a competitor then you have found a collection of good (or bad) prospects.

4) Researching your online community and finding your link prospects

Below we’ll look in detail at different methods you can use to research your online community and find link prospects.

(i)

Use Link Builder - see our Quick Guide to Link Builder

(ii) Mine your referrer logs

Every time someone clicks on a link to arrive at your website, the address of the web page from which they came – the referring site – is recorded. You can see a report of all your site’s referrers in your site visitor software’s referrals report. The image below shows a referral report from Google Analytics for ThinkingManagers.com showing the top 10 (of 2,936) sites that bring traffic to ThinkingManagers.com.

All the web pages listed above not only link to ThinkingManagers.com but bring real visitors (see the ‘Visits’ column). This is really useful information – it tells us which sites send traffic and how much. Armed with this, we can:

• Spot new links as soon as they appear
  
• Look for opportunities to build relationships with referring sites
  
• Spot niche opportunities that we might have missed
  
• Get ideas for the types of sites that are mostly likely to link to us

Google Analytics’ ‘Intelligence’ feature can be configured to alert you of new referring sites when they start sending a certain amount of traffic. Each new referrer offers an opportunity for more and better links. Perhaps you can ask the referrer to change their link text to use a target keyword.

(ii) Google Webmaster

Using Google Webmaster Tools you can get a detailed look at your own site’s inbound links, regardless of the traffic they bring. In the image below you can see that Webmaster Tools shows you which pages your inbound links come to:

The easiest links you can get are those linking to the 404 ‘not found’ URLs listed by Google Webmaster Tools in its ‘Not found’ report. 301 redirect these to appropriate pages and you’ll get credit (link power) for the links.

Google Webmaster Tools will also show you the specific pages linking to each of your pages:

Google Webmaster also offers you the easiest inbound links you can get by giving you a list of links to your site that are delivering ‘404s’, ie, no such page exists. As 404s, you get no link power from these links. If you redirect to an existing page using a 301 permanent redirect then the link power will be yours. The easiest links you can get are the 404 ‘not found’ URLs listed by Google Webmaster Tools in its ‘Not found’ report. 301 redirect these to appropriate pages and you’ll get credit (link power) for the links:

(iii) Find out who links to your competitors

Link Builder allows you to find out who links to a particular site (or page) by doing a backlinks search. A backlinks report by MajesticSEO on Wordtracker.com:

As you scan the results of backlinks reports, look for blogs, news, directory and community sites – any results that are likely to be information sites used by your industry. Spend time identifying your competitors online. They are not necessarily the websites that you think are selling similar goods, but rather the websites that score better on search engines for your important keyword phrases.

So if your main business is handmade chocolates, identify your competition by doing a search on Google for handmade chocolates and scan the results.

So our handmade chocolate manufacturer would have seen from the Google results (see image above) that his main competitors were www.burdickchocolate.com, www.lillytremont.com, www.send.com (via Amazon on the ‘Shopping results’), www.tomandsallys.com and avamariechocolates.com.

He could then enter these websites into MajesticSEO’s comparison tool and get the following measure of each site’s link popularity. A comparative backlinks report by MajesticSEO. Top report is all backlinks; bottom only counts each domain once:

The report above shows that www.burdickchocolate.com has more inbound links than the others and therefore would be a better starting point for competitive research.

As you research inbound links to a number of your competitors, look out for the following:

• Websites that link to a number of your competitors. These may be authority sites and therefore important to get links from. To find them here’s a simple search to make on Google and Yahoo (credit to ‘fedem’ of buyandwalk: linkdomain:competitor1.com; linkdomain:competitor2.com; -linkdomain:yoursite.com That gives you sites that link to your competitors 1 and 2 but not to you. You want those links and you should be able to get them.
  
• Similar IP addresses. The domains linking to your competitors may be different but they may come from the same IP address (you can identify this with MajesticSEO). If the IP addresses of the inbound links and the competitor are the same then your competitor is using a network of their own sites, perhaps even creating domain just to boost link popularity.
  
• Domains that have multiple links to a single competitor. This suggests that either they have a business relationship (perhaps they are an affiliate) or your competitor owns both domains, or your competitor is buying links.
  
• Pay particular attention to links from news sites and news distribution services. If these appear regularly then your competitor is active in online public relations – a look at their published press releases will give you an idea of what they’re up to.
  
• Try to understand the reasons the links were established. Was it because of a newsletter your competitor publishes? A research report? A reciprocal arrangement? A paid-for link?

(iv) Just searching

Google is the most popular search engine because it’s good at returning accurate, relevant results. So good in fact that many people take it for granted and don’t use the very powerful search features built into Google.

However, if you want to become good at link building and finding good link targets, then you need to become good at using these extra features. Here are a few examples of searches that are useful for finding link targets:

• This search will return a list of web pages that mention photography and have the phrase, “submit a url” in the page title tag: photography intitle:“submit url”
  
• This search will return a list of web pages that mention photography and have the phrase, “submit a url” in the link text pointing to them: photography inanchor:”submit url”
  
• Do the above searches using a selection of phrases and you’ll find numerous linking opportunities. Try these to find sites that accept guest content:
  
  “Submit link”
  “Submit a site”
  “Submit a resource”
  “Add a link”
  “Add a site”
  “Add a resource”
  “Guest post”
  “Guest article”

Use as many variations of these phrases as you can think of.

Always spend time exploring the quality sites you find. Look for subjects and keywords that are new to you. Save the keywords and then search again with them. Look for interesting links deep in body text and follow them. You’ll discover niches and specialist sites that other fixed techniques just can’t find.

(v) Blogs

Blogs have really come of age and they now form an important part of any online marketplace. Search engines love blogs because they are full of fresh content and lots of links. MyTinyPlot.co.uk, a blog about vegetable gardening and seasonal cooking) is a good example of a quality blog that likes to link to other quality sites

Free and low cost software allows anyone to start publishing a blog in minutes without any technical knowledge. Blogging has become so popular that the original definition of a blog – an online journal (or ‘web log’) – has become almost meaningless. Although many sites maintain a distinction between their regular pages and blog posts, almost any site can be (and is) now called a blog; and almost any type of content can be (and is) put into a blog post.

There is something of interest to link builders that still defines and identifies a lot of blogs. It is that they are often personal – at least written (sometimes edited) by a single identified person. These personal blogs are the ones you can build relationships with because everybody wants friendly interaction, especially writers working alone and publishing to a faceless online world.

The best blogs will keep turning up in search engine results so keep an eye out for them. Even better, bloggers like to list links to other good blogs and sites (called a blogroll). For example, My Tiny Plot (a blog about vegetable gardening and seasonal cooking – see image above) provides three different lists of links to quality sites, one each for other gardening sites, shops and tutorials. The image below is an example of three different blogrolls (lists of links to recommended sites) on MyTinyPlot.co.uk:

Once you’ve identified a number of blogs in your industry, try to get yourself known and build a relationship with the people who write them. You start to build a good relationship by being useful. For example:

• make thoughtful comments and point out other resources
• send an email and offer something of value
• write reviews and link to their blog posts

Once you’ve established a relationship and proved your worth and knowledge, offer to write a guest post. Make it clear that you would like a link within the text of the post. One way of doing this is to ask before writing if you can add a resource box at the bottom of the article with a description of your company and a link to your website (use different copy for each article you get published).

Any guest posts you write should be top quality and you should be suspicious of any blog that accepts guests without any sort of quality check. (They do this because they treat your article as search engine fodder – your content is used to give the publication search engine traffic, rather than appeal to a genuine readership).

Similarly, make it clear on your own blog that you accept guest posts.

Of course, how you build a relationship is entirely up to you. Remember there is a real person behind every blog. Get to understand them by reading what they write. Don’t waste their time and only get in touch when you have a tangible reason for doing so.

Blogs are great because they provide fresh authoritative content and links to good articles, useful websites and other resources. As with all of the sources in this chapter you must take time to read and understand what each individual blog sees as important and what they write about.

You can find interesting blogs by searching Google blogs with relevant keywords. Google blogs also categorizes indexed blog posts into 11 major categories from politics to video games.

Technorati the mother of blog search engines, has indexed over 133,000,000 blogs since 2002 and it ranks them all. Technorati maintains a top 100 blogs list categorizes thousands of other top blogs into 35 different categories. You can also use its tag pages to find quality blogs in your market niche.

Also try this simple Google search to find more relevant blogs:

   keyword inanchor:blog

This search makes use of the Google syntax, ‘inanchor:’ which finds pages that are linked to using ‘blog’ within the linking text. So if your market is related to gardening you might try this search:

  gardening inanchor:blog

A Google search with gardening inanchor:blog finds sites relevant for the keyword gardening that also have blog within the text of at least one inbound link. The search returns over 7 million possible blogs of interest!

The results will have many good sites – and some bad ones as well. You’ve just got to work through them to find those worthy of attention.

The websites that you collect by following these steps will be the most important in your marketplace. The next step is to create content that will persuade them to link to your website.

(vi) Forums

Forums are an important part of any online community. Rather than a team of journalists writing, you get large numbers of people with different degrees of knowledge asking questions, making comments and stimulating debate. They’re usually free to join – you just need to register and then you’re ready to participate. You’ll quickly get an understanding of the style of each forum and the nature of posts that are encouraged. You usually get to put a link in your signature that appears with every post you make and some forums will allow you to link to your own site within the body of your post when appropriate.

A lively discussion group or forum will have numerous threads or topics active at any time. Experienced members debate vigorously with their peers and will also spend time answering questions and helping ‘newbies’ by pointing them to previous discussions.

Such groups can be useful sources of links to your site but you must earn them by participating in debates and making useful posts. Do not just be self-serving – it really is better to give than to receive.

You’ll be surprised at how even seemingly obscure topics can have lively discussion groups. Who would think that the web was a good place to discuss fountain pens? But it is and the Fountain Pen Network forum has 40,000 members who’ve made 1.3 million posts between them. Every market niche has its popular forums where its online community talks. The Fountain Pen Network forum shown here has up to 6,000 people online at a time:

(vii) Specialist networking sites

Social networking sites differ from forums, with their emphasis on making friends and sharing different types of content. For example, on The Fountain Pen Network forum, subjects are raised and discussed: whereas on MPORA (a social site for action sports lovers – see image below) users can load and share videos and photos, make friends, make groups, personalize their own home pages and have private or public discussions.

The rise of more advanced social sites has been enabled by cheaper and easier technology – it’s now cheap to build a social networking site. MPORA is a niche social networking site for action sports lovers. It’s like a forum on steroids – users can share videos and photos, build lists of friends, create groups and chat.

Social networking sites and forums may differ but the etiquette remains the same: take part, help others (give) and make friends to influence people.

As anyone who uses Facebook knows, social networking sites often offer a means of listing ‘friends’. Make friends and you can contact them and/or they will see your posts when you have something to say (or even promote). Make that content (or promotion) interesting enough and your friends (and their friends) might comment on it and link to it.

Just as six degrees of separation connect almost the entire world’s population, so a few links can connect you to everyone in your market’s online community.

Below is a table showing a selection of specialist subject social networking sites (you’ll find a more complete and up to date list here):

See a longer list of 200 sites here. http://bit.ly/8sosy5

viii) Generic social sites

Some generic social sites like Facebook LinkedIn and StumbleUpon are so big they contain significant specialist groups that make up part of your market’s online community. As an example of just how niche this can get, on Facebook, an unofficial Iggle Piggle fan page dedicated to the UK children’s TV character of the same name has over 36,000 fans. Targeting young moms, anyone? See image:

Figure 2.15: On Facebook, even small niche markets have large communities like the 36,000 fans of this Iggle Piggle (a UK children’s TV character) fan page.
The LinkedIn: HR Human Resources Group on LinkedIn has over 218,000 members and 18 subgroups. As a member you can join in discussions, help others, make friends and recommend quality content. This LinkedIn group gives access to 218,855 professionals interested in human resources. Post something interesting to the group and they might link to it from their own blogs and websites; or visit, then revisit and later link.

Of course, as well as joining others’ groups, you can start your own. They don’t have to be large – our own Thinking Managers LinkedIn group has 650 members – if you post quality content (and it may be obvious, but even large groups must start small).

Get creative: what if you sold beds or pillows and set up one of the following fan pages on Facebook (each of which has millions of fans)?:

• I love sleep (4,702,636 fans)
• I hate waking up during a good dream and it won’t come back! (3,869,090 fans)
• I don’t sleep enough because I stay up late for no reason (3,741,905 fans)
• Flipping the Pillow Over to Get to the Cold Side (3,088,744 fans)

(ix) Directories

Directories are not very fashionable but they remain good references for authority sites in any industry. The best are edited by humans and they will have done a lot of work for you. Take time to explore them in depth by looking not just at one category but at as many relevant categories as you can.

Start with DMOZ (see image on the next page) Yahoo and Business.com The best human-edited directories like DMOZ (below) remain a good way to find quality sites. So if your website targets teenagers, you might be interested in 485 different sites listed in DMOZ’s Teen Life category (and that is just a sub cateogry of Kids and Teens which lists 46,000 sites).

As well as being a source of link prospects, it’s still worth being listed on the best directories. Directories can directly bring traffic and even if the link is nofollow, your site might be found there and then linked to with a follow link.

Apart from using your judgment and checking that a directory discriminates and lists only quality sites, here’s a simple test of its worth. Take a sample of the sites listed and note the text used to link to them (the link text). Search with that link text and see if the sites appear in the top 10 results. If so then the directory might be worth being listed in.

SearchEngineGuide publishes details of industry specific directories as does the Internet Search Engine Database

Become an editor and submit your sites for free. This is a great option. Not only will you get your sites listed for free but you’ll learn how to write good titles, descriptions and linking text by following editorial guidelines provided by the directories.

Before you submit to directories, spend some time thinking about how you’ll describe yourself. You should avoid any marketing hype, use important keywords where you can and pay attention to good grammar. You need to write three things:

• Title – usually the name of your website though some directories will allow you a keyword rich title.
  
• Description – make sure you include keyword phrases in your description and avoid any marketing hype.
  
• Linking text – for an extra search engine boost, use keywords in the linking text that you use to point to your site.

We’ve listed 11 good directories below to get you started ...

1) DMOZ: AKA the Open Directory Project, DMOZ is the mother of all directories and also populates Google’s directory and many more. A listing remains highly desirable. Free

2) Business.com: Business.com is the leading business directory serving more than 40 million unique business users and thousands of advertisers each month. It’s expensive to be listed but is definitely one of the best directories on the web. $299 / year

3) Yahoo! Directory: Not cheap, with $299 the cost of being considered for entry with no guarantee of acceptance. If successful, this is a recurring annual fee. $299 / year

4) JoeAnt.com: A well-designed directory run by a community of volunteer editors. You can submit websites for a one-off fee of $39.99 or apply to become an editor for free submission. $39.99 one-off

5) Skaffe: Provides a multilingual, familyfriendly, spam-free directory and search engine. There’s a $44.99 one-off fee or again you can apply to be an editor.$44.99 one-off

6) Go Guides: Popular directory that’s been around since 2001. $39.99 one-off

7) BOTW: BOTW or ‘Best of the Web – entry criteria includes “unique content, user-friendly navigation, no broken links or pictures”.$149.95 / year

8) Web-Beacon: Web-Beacon is another well-designed directory. $39.99 one-off fee or apply to become an editor and you can submit sites for free.

9) Gimpsy: Only covers sites that provide an interactive online service. So an information site will not be included but an information site that sells something online will. From $29 you can get more promotion for your listing. Free

10) WoW Directory: Founded in 2003, primarily focuses on local and regional submissions. Free to submit, but $43 fee for express inclusion.

11) Clush: Describes itself as ‘the search engine that allows you to personalize your search results!’. By signing up you can submit five links to the Clush database.$19.95 / year.

(x) Specialist search engines

There are thousands of specialist search engines serving market niches and you can use them to find link prospects and networking partners. Again, try Internet Search Engine Database and SearchEngineGuide to find those relevant to your online community.

(xi) Trade associations

Trade associations are important elements of any online community – whether they be traditional organizations with many years of experience behind them or one of the new breed of web-based organizations. Such organizations can provide a wealth of information and advice, and will probably repay their membership fees many times over.

Furthermore, in some industries (particularly business to business), potential customers will often browse an association website looking for suppliers. Journalists and writers may also be looking for case studies, research and people to interview.

So having a link or editorial on a trade association website can be very useful. Check out trade association websites and see if they offer:

• a link and directory listing as part of a membership package
  
• free industry resource links – usually there for the asking
  
• advertising or sponsorship opportunities

For example, the National Association of Electrical Distributors (see image below) provides links as part of a membership package and also publishes an electronic version of its TED magazine. Trade associations like the National Association of Electrical Distributors shown below are important elements of any online community.

5) Network building exercise

This chapter is one of the most important in this book. If you don’t have a knowledge of industry specific resources, you’ll be groping in the dark or depending on an external agency to do the job for you. However, it is much better to do the groundwork yourself and build up this knowledge within your own business. Move away from thinking about yourself as ‘doing business on the web’ and move to ‘doing business in your online community’.

Here are some exercises to get you started:

1) Get your staff together and ask them to list all the industry related websites that they know – you’ll probably be surprised at how many you come up with. Now ask staff to add to this list by noting down any new websites they read about or come across in the coming week.

2) Pick 10 of the sites you like best and set yourself the task of building a relationship with them. How can you find out the people behind the sites? How can you approach them? What ideas can you develop for working together?

3) Once you have exhausted the possibilities in the first 10, move on to the next 10 and so on until you have at least approached all the important sites in your industry.