The days of lonely link builders are gone; in the age of content marketing, creating and maintaining contact with people who are leaders in your industry, as well with those who are your target audience, is what will ensure the success and long term stability of your existing website, or for any new project you launch. For a successful site or blog, beside SEO, you also need to build a good follower base for your site with the help of social media, which will ultimately lead to increased traffic for your site. For help in building your follower base through social media, have a look at the following article as well,

ALSO READ: How to Get Facebook Likes to your Page

Customers and Business Partners

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Maintaining good relationships with people you’re doing business with can be beneficial in the online world, in a lot of ways.

Social networks on which your customers have profiles – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and others – can have a large impact on spreading the word and establishing your company brand. One of the basic rules in Internet marketing is: always go where your audience is; so let them know that your company has an active Twitter profile which they can use to interact with your customer support, or to find out when you’re offering discounts. Encourage them to share your content with their networks of people in order to get more followers for your company’s profile – and not to forget that signals from social networks matter a lot in Google’s book too.

Another way to take advantage of the contact you already have is to define people who have their own websites or blogs, and ask them for a link to your website. They can add your website to their links page, or you can ask them to write a review of your product and publish it on their blog, as well as to guest blog. This can be all the more useful when you’re just launching a new website and need a push.

Third way you can use your existing contact is to ask them to review your business on review websites like Yelp, and more importantly on your Google+ page. The number of reviews on Google+ can influence your local rankings, and reviews in general are a good way to have your products or services recommended by the people who have actually tried them.

Influential People in your Niche

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When you’re making your online presence for the first time, it’s important to connect with those who are already established leaders in your market, for at least two reasons.

If you manage to establish a relationship with an authority user and he or she agrees to either publish your guest post or link to you in one of their own posts, the link your website will get will be more powerful than a link from an anonymous website (although it’s good to have those too, in order to maintain the link diversity). That is from the search engine’s point of view; from the point of view of traffic, the readers of that blog will take that link as a recommendation from someone they already trust, and they will be more inclined to trust you too.

Second, authority figures have large following, and one tweet they’d publish with your link and a nice comment, can sometimes do wonders for the promotion of your website. Also, since Google is putting more and more weight to the strength of a person’s Google+ profile – and these people usually have strong profiles – if they share your content there, they will also send a signal to Google to let them know that your website is trustworthy.

Of course, this kind of relationships takes time to build; you don’t want to be a stalker, but you have to let them know that you’re there: share their content, comment on their blog posts, @mention them in your tweets and offer good value over time, and they will get to know you by who you are and what you do.

From there, it’s a lot easier to build trust and brand awareness; when you share your knowledge with your potential and existing customers, and when they see that you’re not only the authority by yourself, but also connected with and supported by other authorities, it will significantly reduce the efforts you will have to put in your website’s promotion later on; and continue to work on these relationships, because they will be one of your biggest link building assets.

Written by Jeff Gross. Edited by Rahul Chowdhury.

Jeff Gross has been in the SEO industry for over 6 years, and he knows how important it is to create and maintain lasting relationships with people you come in contact with. He’s associated with many websites, including http://www.serijskiubojica.hr/ as their consultant for search engine optimization and social media marketing.

Featured Image Source: Brandon Schaefer