Best link building activities to increase velocity.

[Riona]

I'm running my own web based company selling security software. I'm a one man band and do the programming, web design, SEO etc. all myself. I've taken a very white hat approach so far and spend all my time writing guest posts and getting them published on tech blogs (I get 3-5 links per week doing this). The only tool I use is Buzzstream and I've been doing this for about 6 months now.

I'm starting to see a few results but whenever I look at my competitors I see they have links from thousands of root domains. I feel like I need to increase my link building velocity with a new activity which will yield a much greater number of links than I am able to create using my guest posting strategy. I'm not keen to start spamming article directories or any other short term activity. I dedicate about 8 hours per week to SEO and I could afford to spend around $700 per month if necessary. Any help would be much appreciated.

[Dan-Petrovic]

The best kind of competition is when it gets personal. Not necessarily about prize but more about status, ego, achievement and daring.

Apart from competitions you can try viral content. Here are a few examples of viral content I created:

• http://www.giantstars.de/ (Flash & Video)
• http://analogik.com/acid_trip/ (Flash)

Hope this helps.

[Riona]

Thanks Dejan SEO. Actually I've had reasonable success offering giveaways of my product to bloggers. I assume you mean creating a competition on my site and trying to attract inbound links? Would you mind providing a little more details about the strategy that you have been successful with?

[Dan-Petrovic]

Try running a competition. We've had good success with it.

[mattbeswick]

Although a little over-used, infographics are still a great way of gaining links if you market them properly. A quick outline of the process would be:

• Pick a topic (doing all the proper research into making sure it's going to be interesting to people, etc)
• Create the infographic (make sure to use a good designer - it's worth spending the extra cash)
• Seed it through social media, employing the use of friends, colleagues and random homeless people if needs be.
• Market it to blog owners in your niche.

That last part has a workflow of its own which is time consuming but something that you can outsource (drop me a PM if you need any help). Another quick outline:

• Create a list of blogs. Columns should include things like their URL, contact name, email, contact form, twitter handle, facebook page, title of a recent post, why that post was interesting, etc.
• Add a new column to your spreadsheet with a quick few words about why you find their blog interesting. This will be added to your email so needs to sound like a real person and written in the correct tone... so don't rush this too much.
• Email all of your blog owners telling them of your infographic and asking if they'd like to feature it. This can be automated with data from your spreadsheet but make sure it looks like you written and sent the email manually.

Hope that's all helpful - it's really just a quick overview of a much larger process but should  help at least a little

• Matt