Traditional advertising is still an extravagant expense for many businesses in New Zealand. It can cost thousands of dollars to get a page in a printed magazine, tens of thousands for billboards and even over 100K to buy television spots.

Often, most real world advertisements just want people to visit the virtual presence of a product or service via a website, which requires providing a URL in an ad. We often run into URLs in the offline world: on billstickers, business cards, on the side of cars. For someone to actually remember and write down a URL in order to type it into their web browser, they will probably have a strong interest in the product or service already, meaning they are perhaps consumers that do not need to be ’sold to’ as heavily as the general public.

One crucial thing that advertisers often forget about is the power of links. A major part of web traffic is users clicking links, whether they have a genuine interest in them or not. It costs a user nothing, and is effortless to connect them with a destination instantly. If we think about the concept of the web, it is a source of connectivity between people and information, whereby it is a global network that makes anything obtainable by a single click. This is done largely by links.

As users of the New Zealand web space, your first experience with linking your current website may very well have been on NZS.com, as we provide a link to your website - and in exchange you can provide a reciprocal link back to us. To thank you for doing this, we make your link stand out in bold amongst other links, which are in a standard, less visible font.

It is one thing to move your cursor a few centimetres to click on a button, it is quite something else to see a URL in the outside world and remember it for the next time an internet browser is handy. Getting your website link available in various places the online world is a sure-fire way to increase awareness of your business or organisation, and stay up to speed with the advertising game.

Image from Flickr.

In my last post, I talked about some of the things search engines like about the websites they rank highly on their results pages. One way I mentioned was to get votes from 3rd party websites. Here’s more on how you can get ‘votes’ for your site.

Getting other website owners to ‘vote’ for your Web site is all about getting them to publish a hypertext link on their website, which points to one of your Web pages. The more links pointing to your website not only means ‘more votes’ but provides more ways for people and search engines to reach your Web site.

Presidential link bait
The best way to get links from other websites pointing to your website is to publish content (link bait) that is so mind-blowingly brilliant that another Web site owner just WANTS to link to it.

Linking leg work
You can also ask website owners to publish a link to your site. Start with friends and associates, then move onto specialist, national and international directories. Spread your wings further by seeking out websites (preferably relevant to your business) that also publish links or ‘resources’.

The online back-scratch
Some website owners will only publish a link to your website if you publish a link to theirs in exchange. This mutual back-scratching is called, unsurprisingly enough, link exchange. NZS.com offer a FREE bold listing for link exchanges - it’s well worth checking out their link exchange offer.

You can read more about some of the best practises for link building and link exchange, in Link Building Made Easy.

That’s all from me for now folks. Cheerio!