What technique is better, outreach marketing or the crowd links?
They better exist in synergy than in a battle.
They work as left and right hand – outreach adds the anchors to the link profile and increases the brand awareness, and crowd marketing dilutes the outreach links in link profile and makes it safer.
The methods are complementary, and they both help you build the natural link profile for your brand.
Let us do deep and investigate how we can use outreach and crowd marketing together.
Outreach marketing basics
What is outreach marketing?
I consider it as a powerful link building technique.
Sometimes I contact online influencers, bloggers, journalists, celebrities, and other public persons to write about my business and link the post to the website.
Sometimes, when they are my friends, they do this voluntarily. Sometimes our clients want to thank us for the excellent service.
However, mostly you have to reach them out and pay for promotion.
Outreach links help build the link profile, increase brand awareness, move the product up in the reviews and catalogs, etc.
Outreach links in guest posts strengthen your profile and attract the traffic.
As every technique, outreach marketing has its pros and contras. Let us review the most obvious.
Pros of Outreach Links
Outreach links are usually worth investments.
Having backlinks from a reputable blogger adds more quality and relevance to your website to help achieve higher SERP rankings.
Outreach links can be an essential part of the valuable link profile.
It is also an impactful way of tapping into a bigger audience base that the influencer or blogger already has.
Popular resources generate organic traffic via outreach links and attract the potential leads to the site.
Cons of Outreach Link
Finding relevant and impactful influencers in your niche can be an overwhelming process, especially if you are new to this business.
Once you find and reach them, convincing them to spread the word for your brand or business can cost money.
Prominent bloggers often charge a high compensation amount for the process, and small businesses may not afford the same every time.
Also, the popular platforms have internal limitations; for example, no more than one no-follow link per article, or limited time the item stays on the site.
The site owners can place your article in the special section for press-releases or contributor pages. Despite the high cost, live people rarely visit these pages.
Besides, somebody has to write the text for the announcement.
If you have no internal resources for writing, the article will cost you extra.
My recommendation: always proofread and approve the article by the external author before publishing it!
Outreach vs Crowd Marketing, what’s the difference
For me, the major difference between crowd marketing and outreach marketing is the name of a talking head.
In outreach, you know it, as well as the audience. In crowd marketing, the author stays unknown.
Speaking seriously, the place matters.
Outreach marketing works with personal blogs, websites, and social media accounts mostly trusted and reliable.
The reputation of the web resource and popularity is a unique sales proposition in outreach marketing. And outreach works well.
However, we have and must dilute outreach links with the crowd links.
Crowd links are placed on the reviewers, Q&A sites, online communities, and forums.
The powerful side of these resources is live and informal communication.
People value the live experience and trust it even more than the paid article in a popular Instagram account or sponsored article in the blog.
So, instead of focusing on one technique, it is better to combine outreach and crowd marketing.
Crowd links can enrich the profile with the anchors and references, and make it more natural for search engine algorithms.
Crowd marketing essentials Web Resources for Crowd Marketing
There are several types of popular resources you can comment on:
- Review sites. As obvious as Amazon Customer Reviews, TrustPilot, Trip Advisor, Glassdoor… You can also use Google maps and customer reviews there: it works perfectly for local businesses.
- Social platforms/communities. For example, you can use Facebook groups or even business pages of the relevant theme with an active community. In some regions you can use Telegram channels and groups. For those who set hopes on LinkedIn groups: forget it. Most of them are dead and full of spam from some dirty SEO activists.
- Thematic forums. The most effective web resource for crowd marketing. The users on such forums discuss the topics related to your business, and the posts on these forums provide not only backlinks, but also high-quality leads.
- Q&A services. Online Questions-and-Answers services are an effective tool for audience capture. Not only it attracts visitors from the target or non-target groups and increases brand awareness, it is also perfectly indexed and considered a trusted resource by search engines. Not to forget – the most popular services, like Quora, make your links no-follow. However, if your answer is professional, relevant, and well-written, it will stay on the top and remain visible, so it also works.
- Comments on relevant websites. Some websites allow comments about the goods and services, inviting users to discussion.
Who Should Create Crowd Links for You?
Crowd marketing is a piece of work. Who should do those, can you manage it by yourself or hire a professional? Let us consider the available options.
1. Internal resource.
You can find a person who can work with crowd marketing in any company – it can be a copywriter, marketing manager, SEO manager, whoever.
Making crowd marketing with the internal resources keeps the process under your control and costs nothing except the time. Anyway, it is cheaper than hiring a freelancer.
However, don’t be so happy about the saved costs.
The task is time-consuming. Your employee should do the research, register the dozens of accounts, and post many messages to build the reputation before posting the link.
Besides, forum moderators will delete some references on the moderated forum.
You should also be aware of Google sanctions: if your employee uses bots or mass posting software, they can penalize you.
At last, you can hardly scale the process.
Supposedly you do not have the unlimited number of people who can get off the primary responsibilities and start crowding.
2. Freelance workers.
You can find a freelancer – there are hundreds of professionals with the variety of options for the price and for the results.
You can get an excellent result or you can spend a fortune and get nothing except the problems.
Any option between these two is also possible. So, pay some time and research to find a reliable subcontractor.
The risk for hiring a freelancer is medium, as well as the control level.
Probably, one of the significant benefits is the scalability without the shutdown – you can hire more freelancers anytime.
But don’t forget to discuss the terms of cooperation before the start or you will be charged extra for any change you request.
3. Professional service providers.
Professional service is the most costly but most reliable option.
These people invest in their reputation for years not to disappear from the market, and will not waste your money on an ineffective job.
They discuss and approve all details before the start and follow your remarks in the process.
Of course, they charge a price for the high-quality service, but you will get the best result if you can afford this.
Check List for the Vendor Reliability
- Can someone you know in person recommend this vendor?
- Can a vendor provide some case studies or success stories?
- Does a vendor have social media pages, dedicated emails, etc.?
- Is a vendor ready to contact you by phone, by Skype or even personally?
- Is a vendor ready to provide you a full report with the indexed links?
- Is there a functionality to track the order progress real time?
- Is there any confidentiality policy in place?Is a vendor ready to stay in touch until the job is done?
If the answer is Yes for most of these points, a vendor looks trustworthy and you can start cooperation.
Crowd links order checklist
This is a bonus for those heroes who read down this far. I know most of you will forget many details as soon as you close this page.
So, please have the visual checklist with the most essential points you should check to order the crowd market promotion.
I hope it helps.
So, crowd marketing is the most complicated technique of link building.
The registration on the mail services and web resources, account building, consumes a lot of time.
A link can be removed or archived; it can get the no-follow attribute – it means search engines will ignore it, so it does not work.
In Natural Links we guarantee the life-time replacement for the deleted links, relevance to the topic, high percent of do-follow links, the smooth growth, and high-quality texts written by our copywriters.
These parameters make crowd marketing cool!
And this is our main competitive advantage.
