Link building strategies: Shopping

Posted by Ken McGaffin on 30 May 2011

Shopping on the web is of course a major activity so the number of sites retailing goods and the number of sites writing, advising and commenting on products and the companies who produce them is huge.

If your main focus is on selling stuff online, then you’ve really got to focus on this area.

Your competitors will of course be unlikely to link to you unless you have some sort of strategic partnership.

So where would you start to look for shopping links?

Look at sites that write and comment on shopping. There are many of these and they offer rich opportunities for link building. You can find them by building a campaign around a number of retail sites:

• Looking at industry-specific sites: so if you sell pet food, then you could start by looking at other sites that retail pet food
  
• Or you could take a broader approach and look at online retailers that sell a variety of goods

Let’s take an example, I’m going to look at a few sites that have just been featured on InternetRetailer.com: beyondtherack.com, coldwatercreek.com, hayneedle.com, shoebuy.com and pet360.com.

I’ll just enter these into Link Builder …

When I hit ‘Create my link building campaign’, Link Builder creates a campaign of over 3,400 prospects.

The campaign is created by looking at the links coming into each of these domains, combining them and then categorizing them.

Of the 3,400 link prospects identified, 1,132 are classified as shopping links.

Trawling through these prospects will produce many link opportunities. Here are the types of sites that you’ll find in the results:

Shopping Directory

This one focuses on plus sizes for women: www.largewomensclothing.org

 Personal finance blogs

Many blogs focus on savings and making the family budget stretch as far as possible. One of the most popular examples is www.WiseBread.com

News media

Seasonal stories in popular magazines offer great linking opportunities:

Or fashion guides:

Mommy blogs

Mommy blogs have proliferated. Like www.moneysavingmom.com

You can find even more of such blogs and link opportunities by using the filter function: filtering on ‘mom’ provides over 70 results:

You can see that the results are full of ‘mom’-related opportunities.

Back to school offers

Back to school is another time for buying stuff. Would your products offer opportunities like this at www.beststuff.com

All of these opportunities can be found in just a few minutes on Link Builder

Use them to inspire your own link building.

Try Link Builder free for 7 days

So there really is a tool for link builders that will help you research and find social media prospects, plan your campaigns, and monitor targets.

It’s Wordtracker Link Builder. You can register now for a free 7 day trial