Listening For links

I love this shot.  

It says everything you need to know about listening.

Look at the body posture, the size of the eyes - she’s laser locked and her entire attention is focused.

When done right, listening is an all encompassing behavior.

Good Listening Equals Links

The way to get people to notice your content is to interact with them in the digital world.  

• Interact with the wrong people and nothing happens as they don’t care about your content.
• Interact poorly with the right people and still nothing happens because now they don’t care about you.
• Interact well with the right people and your content gets shared.

The trick to identifying the right people AND finding the right way to interact,  is to be a great listener.

You Know How To Do This

Here’s the screen-cast from January:

4 minutes on how to listen strategically.

In the ideal world you would spend as much time listening as you spend on content creation and publishing.  

Imagine If You:

• Allocated time every day to listen
• Added “Hours spent listening” to your KPIs
• Set a quarterly target for listening

How much further would your content reach?

Quick Caveat

This approach only works if:

• Your digital footprint is in order
• You have a regular content production cycle
• What you create is actually good

Written while listening to: The Bench 173 Bpm Flow - Session 1 | 1014 by music2work2

Image Credit: Listening by fs999 on Flickr

Link Building Advice from Beagles

Just like you - she can’t see them, but she knows they’re there!

Links!

Beautiful, tasty, high quality pieces of deliciousness - the more you have, the better life is!

Look at that guy on the right, he’s got bags of the things, how fair is that!?!?!?

Content first

Links are given to those that deserve them. 

Digital marketers share a lot with Beagles in this regard.  While they have to learn specific behaviors like sit, outside, walk, get off the couch!, our behaviors are more concerned with learning how to consistently produce content so good that people might throw us a metaphorical bone.

A smart puppy can suss this in a few weeks.  It can take a smart business owner years.

The thing about links

They’re not just lying around.  You can be the best trained Beagle on the planet but someone’s gotta notice you and have a link to give in the first place.

Once you’ve mastered “quality content production” the next step is to find those people who have links to give (and quality ones at that - not those lame ass Farmer John’s breakfast things)  and ask for one.

Here’s the bad news

Link building, it’s not easy

Getting good links is almost as challenging as creating the content in the first place.  It isn’t as hard in terms of bare brained creativity, but it takes time to do it right, and you really don’t want to do it wrong.

You could of course go off and spend a grand a month (for a minimum of 4 months) and have an agency generate 2 (yes, that’s right, two) quality links back to your site.

Or you could learn how to do it yourself.

But who has time for that?

Links are everything

The biggest factor in determining whether you appear in search is the number of quality links you have coming into your website.

If you feel you’ve got to the point where your content is worthy, maybe it’s time to start looking outward.  If you’d like to learn more about link building and how it would work for your business, drop me a line.

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Written while listening to: Breathe by music2work2

Image credit: erwartungsfrohes Warten an der Wursttheke by Axel Kuhlmann on Flickr