Creating Multi Links with Blogs
by Rick Hendershot, Marketing Bites
In Part 2 of this series I outlined how I decided
to create two blog sites using Google's own blogspot.com for the
first one, and a new domain of my own called biz-blogs.com for a series
of business oriented blogs.
Once I had things set up in this way, I began the process of entering
posts for promoting specific products. This process may sound
a bit contrived for those of you who think blogs should be spontaneous
"top of mind" journals.
What I was proposing was something much more carefully
structured and planned — a series of posts highlighting a range
of specific features for a number of specific products. If this
sounds like an "advertising campaign", that's fine with me, because
that is exactly the way I decided to approach it.
When I say "highlighting a range of specific features for a number
of specific products" it is important to understand this in the
context of my "power linking strategy".
What I am talking about here is creating links
to pages within my websites that highlight specific features of
the products I want to promote.
So I decided I needed to create some lists. First I needed a list
of products. Second I needed a list of features, benefits,
and interesting information about each of the products. Third,
I needed a list of my own web pages where these features,
benefits and information about the products can be found.
(And fourth, as I gradually began to realize, I needed some references
to sites other than my own -- especially some relevant blogs --
in order to generate some track back links to my blog entries.
I explain this further in another blogging
article in this series.)
When I have these all ready to go I should be able to quickly
put together a series of posts with lots of embedded links pointing
directly at the most relevant pages within my sites.
For example, here is a product offered by one of the companies
I do the online promotion for:
Product: PopUp Displays
Features: Low cost, easy to set up, portable,
low maintenance, low cost delivery,etc.
Links: pointing to pages highlighting each of
these features.
Making the list of products is not problem. Making the list of
features, benefits, and interesting tips and tricks for each product
is also no problem.
But finding the pages within my websites where these features,
benefits and other things are dealt with is a problem,
because in many cases the pages simply don't exist.
What I discovered is that I had not structured my website(s) this
way, even though -- after the fact -- it seems perfectly obvious
that a site should be created this way.
When you put a website together you should say
"OK, first, what product(s) do I want to feature? And second,
what are the specific features of these products?" And then set
about creating pages covering these things.
So you would think your website would have a page
for e.g., "PopUp Displays", and then two or three or four pages
focusing on specific features of popup displays.
But as I discovered, I had not really done this. Either
I simply hadn't had enough time — I've been working on a large
number of brand new projects over the last six months — or I hadn't
felt it was necessary, possibly because we were mostly working
off a few landing pages.
In any event, this little blog promotion effort illustrated
that it is necessary, and that I had not adequately "fleshed
out" my websites.
Sure, I had created basic sites with product descriptions,
photos, ordering information, etc. But I hadn't gone the extra
mile and created the supporting pages that do the backup selling
of these products.
There were pages missing that should have been
created — all the ones carefully and pointedly describing the
most important selling features and benefits of the products I
was supposed to be promoting.
As a result, before I could finish my blog posts I had to create
a bunch of new web pages that I could use my "Power Links" to
point to. In the end this was a good thing. But of course it meant
a simple little project had just become quite a bit more involved
than I had hoped it would.
Here is an example of the kind of "blog
post pages" I am creating. I intend to create several
"dummy" posts like this and use them as the basis for
regular daily posts.
Creating them is a slow process, but I think this
is the best way to create keyword-rich posts with the best range
of embedded "multi links".
Having them "in the can" ready to go
will make it much easier to actually get the posting done. These
will not be the only posts I enter, but they will serve as "go
to" material with the subject matter and links already in
place.
Rick Hendershot is a writer and publisher of the
Linknet Marketing Resource Library. He has produced a free course
on website linking called SuperCharge
Your Website with Multi Linking.
