by Neil Curtis on March 20, 2014

Posts of the Day focus on two or three articles that have resonated with me and I have read on social media, blogs, and even listened to on podcasts. I have no affiliation with any of the posts I discuss but they all have one thing in common in that they are related in some way to internet marketing and web design.
Content marketing, backlinks, and getting more website visitors
Today we have two posts covering different ways to attract backlinks to your website and how to attract more blog readers. Both of these articles are very interesting and you can take away a lot of tips from them.
When Building Communities Isn’t the Best Way to Build Links – on MOZ
This is a post by John-Henry Scherck that looks at two big companies in a similar’ish market, but discusses how their business model works and how this affects how they go about using content marketing to reach communities of people, and ultimately increase engagement and backlinks to their websites.
Airbnb is into the rental model, and thus it looks to build a community of people around its own website that it can nurture and sell to time and time again. They have a more impulsive community who may see something and then book in a relatively short space of time. On the other hand we have Movoto, who sell homes. Their audience doesn’t generally make impulsive buys, and it is a major event to purchase a new home. Thus their content marketing strategy is focused more on outreach and interacting with outside communities (i.e. not specifically communities on their own website). They make people aware that they exist and use tactics to generate large amounts of backlinks so that when people do want a new home they are on the radar.
This is a very interesting read and while these are large companies their modes of customer engagement can resonate with smaller websites and blogs.
Direct Link to the full article: http://moz.com/blog/when-building-communities-isnt-the-best-way-to-build-links
8 Tips To Get Your First 100,000 Blog Readers – on MatthewWoodward.co.uk
Matthew’s website is all about how to setup and grow a blog, and this recent article is focused on how to get more visitors to your website. There are 8 tips and some excellent advice for anyone who wants to grow the popularity of their website. For example, the importance of understanding your visitors, out-reach tactics to ‘Power Bloggers’ in your area, and other methods of identifying and then utilising opportunities to reach out to other websites and obtain some quality backlinks. This is a very useful article and I recommend you check it out if you run a blog or are thinking about starting one.
Direct link to the full article: http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/get-more-blog-readers/
Summary
Backlinks are great things for websites, and going about getting them can be a bit of a journey. The two articles here really improve our insight into how others go about getting more customers and backlinks, and points to things we can do too.
Please leave a comment if you have any thought on these two posts.
