Most Popular Crowd Marketing Concerns

There are many myths and misconceptions about Crowd Marketing. This is what can stop decision-makers from applying effective strategies, thereby depriving their businesses of many advantages.

Therefore, we decided to dispel all doubts, work out objections, and ask Erik Ivanov, the co-founder of Natural Links, to tell us more about it.

Concern 1. Crowd marketing is something new to me, does anyone use it at all?

Yes, indeed, this method of link building may be new to you, and you may not know what to expect from it! For many clients, just like you, it was at first an experiment that turned out to be successful when they started working with us from scratch and grew up to 100K+ traffic per month.

Or there was a traffic plateau and SEO techniques did not give results, but by complementing them with crowd marketing, we literally made a quantum leap in traffic in 1-2 months! In any case, without trying, you won’t know!

We make natural links — these are external links to the site, left by its visitors on other resources in the context of a recommendation, example, or question answer.

That is, for Google, they will never be sponsored, сheated, or spammed… with the right approach, of course.

Concern 2. Crowd is unknown. Maybe it’s better to use guest posting, outreach, and PBNs?

Here at Natural Links, we believe that getting started with crowd marketing should in no way prevent you from performing other actions using other means, both on page and off-page. Why not use other types of links, such as guest posts, PBN, and outreach, in synergy with crowd links!?

We also believe that for success and TOPs in the search results, the link profile should be as diversified as possible and have as many different types of links as possible! In addition, you can focus on large outreach articles on direct/commercial anchors and dilute them with general, branded, and URL anchors using crowd links!

Such an approach also works for guest posts, outreach, and so on. Crowd links can strengthen your tier-linking strategy, here’s an article, where you can read about it: https://naturallinks.net/blog/tiered-link-building-strategy

Of course, this is all theory, but here’s a living example for you: We have a large enterprise client, which is the second most popular job search engine in the world. They have an in-house SEO Department that handles guest posting, outreach, and PBNs on a full-time basis. Their traffic has been on a plateau, having between 6 and 8 mln of traffic during a year.

After applying crowd marketing to their strategy, in synergy with other SEO activities starting in November 2020, the traffic has gotten off the plateau and started showing a positive dynamic. The site now has an average of 10 million unique visitors per month.

Concern 3. I use only outreach links and do not wish to change my strategy.

Crowd marketing is not a competitor to the outreach links. It does not require you to give up everything you have done before – it works in synergy with outreach links and makes them run faster. For example, if your usual monthly batch of outreach articles gives your website a 10% growth in traffic every month, with crowd marketing, it will not add much effort to turn 10% into 30%. Plus, when outreach articles are posted, you are promoting the commercial anchors.

With crowd marketing, you are naturally distributing the backlink profile between commercial and non-commercial, branded anchors.

As an example: in October 2020 we started working with a consumer electronics client with the goal of uplifting the regions that had been minor for their business before. One such minor region was the UK – at the moment of the start, the product had just 215 monthly visitors on average. At that moment, the internal SEO Department has been working on more traditional SEO techniques like press releases. In a combination with crowd marketing, the growth dynamics became upward in just 3 months. Traffic has grown by 3 and is still counting.

Concern 4. Crowd links transfer little weight to the donor and don’t seem to affect anything.

Crowd links really transfer less weight than a link from a guest article. However, their roles in the link profile are different. Crowd marketing performs its role, which is forming the anchor text list, better than others. Since links are placed from resources with solid metrics and traffic, and we have the opportunity to mix do-follow and no-follow links, crowd marketing has a very positive effect on the naturalness of backlink profiles.

Concern 5. Links from forums will not lead to a rapid growth of positions

Well, nothing happens quickly in SEO, as they say, slow and steady wins the race!

Experience has shown that with the right approach, good pitch, and of course everything depends on the site itself, the first results can be seen in a month or two. It is also worth remembering that crowd marketing, like any off-site SEO activity, works only in sync with regular work on the site, on-page SEO, valuable content, and stuff like that.

Concern 6. As for me, Crowd marketing will not work.

Forum links like any other type of link work. You need to get a picture of how you want to use it.

If in order to become at the top, then it is advisable to understand the reference competitors at this top. The combination of crowd marketing and outreach shows excellent results. There are 2 guaranteed cases when the crowd will work effectively:

1) Non-anchor and brand on the site – crowd links;

Anchor on the site – guest posts (outreach). Links to outreach articles in order to increase the weight (Tier linking) – crowd links.

2) Placing only crowd links to landing pages using the anchor strategy that we offer in Natural Links.

Namely 15-20% of commercial anchors, and the rest is brand and non-anchor and generic anchors. Works great for link profile growth.

Concern 7. Such links will mostly be no-follow – and what’s in it for me?

Many webmasters have such prejudice or opinion that ONLY do-follow links work in link building! That’s how it was a few years ago. But as practice shows, for Google robots, if a site has 100% do-follow links, it looks unnatural and increases the risk of sanctions from search engines. At the same time, if your site has 100% no-follow links, it will not give any boost for promotion.

We believe that a healthy link profile should have around 70% do-follow links and 30% no-follow links! Therefore, we adhere to the 50/50 rule in our reports! An additional 20% of Do-follow links can be “picked up” from outreach, guest posts, and so on! You can research this on your own with this top-notch article.

Concern 8. I’m not sure if it is safe to be promoted by the crowd. Can I get banned from Google using your links?

Getting banned for building up your natural link mass is almost impossible. After all, these are links created by people and for people. They are placed in the context of the discussion and do not contain “business anchors” such as “buy a refrigerator inexpensively only today”, and interested users follow them.

If search engines impose sanctions for the presence of external links, then no site will remain in organic search results. It is important to remember that links are the backbone of the Internet, people share a million links every day and will continue to do so in the future, in one form or another, even if the search engines themselves go down in history.