If you have a locally-based business, this is a great and really easy way to get more local traffic to your site, and it can also be an excellent way to make nice personal connections with businesses that might become customers or referrers one day.
The concept is simple: if you have a locally-based business, make a place on your site where you link to all the businesses that are nearby (and that have websites).
Here’s how it goes:
- Look around or walk around or somehow find out the names of all the businesses near you. How you define “near you” is your call. One local client of mine had about 40 businesses within a block or so. That’s a great start. You can reach out as far as you want—just have a sense of what “neighborhood” you’re compiling. It could be a block or an office building, or it could be a whole town or a county. You’ll want to do them in reasonably-sized portions, whatever your range.
- You may want to narrow your list down, and pick your targets based on an estimate of their likelihood of “paying off”. I discourage taking that approach–though it couldn’t hurt to at least make sure you’re putting your best effort into the better bets. Still, you never know what might come from reaching out, even it’s to Grandma Smith’s Sewing Shop. And part of this exercise is about using old-school relationship-style marketing, and when translated to your neighboring businesses, that means being friendly to everyone you can. So if they have a website, I say keep them on the list unless there’s a good reason not to.
- Find websites for all of the businesses on your list that you can. As you add them to a links page on your site (or a text file on your computer), note down contact info for the business in question. (Email, phone, address, owner or manager’s name, etc.)
- Post the links on your site. There are two main ways to deal with that:
- The easiest is to create a links page and just add whatever links you want to it. (Or use WordPress’s Links function to add your links, and a links page plugin to display them.) If you use a links page, make sure you add a link to that page somewhere in the common navigation areas of your site. Some marketers might say you could just have your links page exist without cluttering up your menus with a “Links” button. Those same folks implicitly would be thinking that links pages are a thing of the past, and they’d probably think of your links page as simply a chance to bleed away visitors who will never be seen again.
I disagree on all counts. It’s true that links pages have been around since the earliest days of the web, but this is still the Internet, and people still want to get pointed to other cool places. And the idea that you lose people from linking off of your site is 99% myth. So if you have a links page, make it a full partner in your site. You can stick the link to it down with the bottom-of-the-page links if you want, rather than up in your main navigation. But don’t just create the page and leave it lonely and untethered from your site. That’s cheesy, and it undermines the genuineness of the connection you are trying to make with these other human beings, your neighbors.
- Another option, if you a) only have a blog or b) have a lot of empty sidebar space, or 3) don’t want to have a links page for whatever reason, is to post your links “blogroll”-style–i.e., in a list in your right or left sidebar. If you have both sides available, do the right. And put it below other primary stuff in your sidebar. That will make it the least emphasized of all your sidebar stuff–but even still, you will be giving very prominent props to the folks on your blogroll.
If you have a lot of links, or are concerned about giving up that much real estate, you could use a plugin to rotate your links on a page-by-page basis, showing just one or five or ten links at a time. (That could make it tougher for your linkees to go see their link, since it would be rotating randomly around the site, but if it’s a good fit otherwise, then it might be the way to go.)
If you really want to get friendly with some other places with websites, putting them in a blogroll/links list that shows up in the sidebar on all or most of your pages is a very generous gesture, and if they are web-aware at all, they will realize as much, and most likely feel indebted or at least grateful.
- Once you have posted the links on your site and your blogroll or links page is looking good, then you get in touch with your newly-linked neighbors. How you go about that is up to you–you could stop by in person, call on the phone, or send an email. You’ll have to go with your gut on that. Obviously each has a different time commitment, and will be received differently.
I would go for at least a phone call probably, but it does depend on who you’re dealing with on the other end. It might be that an email is all you can do to try and reach the person who will care. But if you are looking for an excuse to get some face time with your fellow neighborhood business owners, I think this makes for a great opportunity/excuse to make it happen.
- When you tell them about the link, do not ask for a link back. Do not try and sell them anything. Do not try and give them your card unless they ask. This is important. Break this rule and you risk spoiling the whole thing. You are not doing this for easily measurable cost/benefit-based reasons, so don’t bother trying to make it “pay off”. This doesn’t mean don’t engage in conversation or even strut your stuff if asked, but your mission is simply to drop by and let them know that you did something nice for them, “just because you’re my neighbor and we’re both business owners, and it was an easy way to maybe point a few people in your direction every now and then.”
Paraphrase what I just said there, and if they don’t say anything else after they say “Thank you” or “OK”, then bid them a courteous goodbye and call it good. (Let them know how they can find your site and their link on it also, of course.) Don’t make sales moves of any sort on them, and don’t try and get anything out of it other than making contact with another human being. If they want to go forward in business with you, they will let you know.
- Now, wait for the piles of money to start pouring in! Just kidding. You will get some links back, though. That’s pretty much guaranteed. (And those will pay off over time.) And you will definitely be more at the forefront of those neighbors’ minds for the next while. If they didn’t know you existed before, they will probably look for you, and if they did know you existed, they will think more vividly of you when they walk or drive by every day. Because you will be the nice neighbor who did a nice thing for them, just to be nice. And not that many people do that these days.
Trust me, with a few of your neighbors, this little gesture will make a big difference in these modern times of detachment and increasing isolation. And while they themselves might not need a lawyer or hair stylist or whatever it is that you do, they probably know other people in the world. And some of those people will need your services (or will have what you need), and your neighbor buddy might be the one who is in the position to connect you when the time comes.
This is “Networking 101” stuff here, but it can be easy to forget how simple it is to make a new personal connection that could help your business (and your heart and spirit and stuff too).
It can also be easy to forget that your website doesn’t have to always be focused on “way out there”; something as simple as a list of neighboring business websites on a links page can get you traffic, referrals, and maybe even new lifelong friends! (Remember back when people made friends with other people in their neighborhood? Me neither really, but it’s in all those old TV shows, so it’s definitely a real thing.)
By the way, most of these principles can be applied to making a links page or blogroll even if you aren’t locally-based. You just define your “neighborhood” differently–by industry (horizontally and/or vertically), or by common interests, etc. If you reach out this way to folks around the Internet, treat it just the same, in terms of making a real personal connection. Don’t make it generic and impersonal just because you’re emailing or calling someone far away.
And do not–I repeat, do not–ask for a link back. (Don’t suggest it, don’t half-ask for it–don’t even mention it.) It won’t increase your chances of getting one, it will increase your chances of not getting one, and it destroys all the positive vibeage that you are trying to manifest, because it turns you into someone who’s trying to use them under the guise of helping them, and that just feels slimy and lame.
Link freely and with genuine neighborly love, and you will get dividends back, don’t worry.
Or at least maybe a nice plate of brownies or something.
Do you have a neighbor-linking success story to share? Well then share it, yo! (In the comments, yo.)
I’ve spent more than 15 years working on other people’s, and most of that time I’ve had to say “do as I say, not as I do”. If not out loud, than implied by reality, where I urge people to develop a regular pattern of posting to their blogs and to social media, and generating content and revealing themselves to their audience…meanwhile, I post sporadically (that’s being generous), and most of my “revealing myself” lately conists of adding cute photos of my 4 year old to her photo album on Facebook for my friends and family only.