If you’ve used traditional link building strategies and find yourself running out of ideas, maybe it’s time to do a little brainstorming. To help you get started, this article will clue you in to some underused but powerful ideas for generating buzz and traffic for your web site. Feel free to mix and match or use them as jumping-off points.
I owe a lot of the ideas I’m about to describe to Kim Roach at Zany Pixel. Roach wrote an amazing article on unusual link building strategies. I won’t have room to examine them all here, so I urge you to pay a visit to the site. You may come away with just the idea you need to really kick-start your traffic.
My first idea, however, comes from Hamlet Batista. He advocates giving something away. Giving goodies away is a time-honored tradition when it comes to marketing, from the little prizes in cereal boxes to the swag-filled days before the first dot-com bust. But how is giving something away going to get you links? It depends on how you do it.
Say you run a content-based site that features reviews. If you’ve just run a really good review of something – a restaurant perhaps, or a video game, or an electronic device – why not contact the manufacturer (or game designer, or restaurant owner) and let them know? They’ll be delighted to hear about the good review…and if you suggest that they accept a virtual “badge” or “trophy” that links back to the good review on your site, you will more than likely get a very nice one-way link.
This idea can be adapted in a variety of ways. Here’s a spin for not-for-profit educational organizations: in addition to all the educational data you provide on your site, include a number of tests. Let visitors take the tests. If they score particularly high, give them a virtual “award” at the end of the test that they can post to their blog. It gives your site another link, and gets the word out to the blog’s readers. True, not everyone who is online has a blog, but they’re common enough these days to make this worthwhile.
Website Promotion 
