Crowd Marketing for SEO: How To Turn Them into Link Engines

Link building has become one of the most crucial strategies in the evolving SEO landscape. When it comes to backlink generation, traditional strategies such as guest posting and broken link building are still utilised. However, most brands are switching to crowd marketing for link building. This strategy mainly relies on earning backlinks from the tens of thousands of communities in your industry. 

Even though it isn’t a completely new strategy, brands that have leveraged this have had successful results. So, in this blog, let’s learn more about link building through crowd marketing and how you can leverage the power of communities for your brand promotion with ease.

What is crowd marketing?

Crowd marketing is known by many names, such as forum marketing, community marketing, etc. The reason behind this is that the backlinks generated are from these online sources. Crowd marketing for link building is technically a link-building strategy that leverages the power of online communities for brand promotion and link generation. 

Considered one of the most powerful marketing strategies in recent times, crowd marketing involves being part of online discussions, making valuable contributions, all of which gives a major SEO boost. The point is to provide value by sharing knowledge and building stable relationships with the target audiences and the website host. 

This activity results in establishing credibility, trust and earning genuine backlinks from reputable sources. Just think of being an active member of an online community, making contributions from time to time. As this helps build your online reputation, more people will reference and link to your content as a helpful source of information.

How Does Crowd-sourced Link Building Work?

Have you understood what crowd marketing is? Good. Now, let’s discuss how this concept works in the background. Being a link-building strategy, the primary goal is to generate backlinks to your site and enhance its credibility. However, instead of directly outreaching to reputed sites, influencers for links, you have to be actively engaged in the various relevant conversations by offering value and insights. 

If you are planning to implement link building through crowd marketing, the first step is to identify relevant online communities within your niche and create a message you want to share. You must know where your target audience is actively engaging. Examples of online communities include forums, Q&A sites, blogs, etc.

Once you have found out the right platform, become a member and start making contributions to various customer queries. Since interaction is a crucial component of crowd marketing for SEO, you must ensure that factor by answering questions, sharing experiences, highlighting the product’s benefits, and making contributions in a meaningful way. You must also avoid techniques such as spamming, self-promotion. The key is establishing yourself as a genuine and respected member of the community.

So far, after establishing yourself as a valuable contributor, it’s time to include contextual links to relevant words or phrases in your content as you make contributions. Instead of placing them in headers or footers, integrating them organically in the content body is recommended. These links point to other sites and are added to provide a relevant resource to support your content. 

Uncovering the crowd marketing benefits

When it comes to crowd marketing platforms, there are a ton of online forums and communities with a large customer base. Choosing the relevant platform for your niche is essential to get started. Here we list some of the benefits of crowd marketing for link building in the long run.

• Build a stronger backlink profile

As you actively engage in multiple forums or communities relevant to your industry, getting links from such platforms helps build and strengthen your backlink profile.

• Helps with Lead Generation

Making genuine contributions to the relevant community or forum helps build brand reputation, thereby allowing you to start getting higher leads. 

• Higher User Engagement

As more users interact and engage with your content, it enhances your brand’s digital presence and authority online. Crowd marketing inspires your target audiences to take the right action according to your brand message.

• Build Authority

As you build authority by targeting the right audience with engaging content, this creates a positive perception about your brand. This signals search engines to mark your brand as a trusted source of information.

Various Crowd Marketing Types

Learning what is crowd marketing is important, but do you know what’s more important? Understanding the various crowd marketing types. Knowing this helps you choose the right platform for your link-building efforts with ease. We have listed some of them below:

• Blogs (Comment section)
• Q&A Websites
• Review websites
• Forums/communities

Turning Crowd Marketing into a Link Engine

With the right platform and efforts from your side, you can easily leverage crowd marketing to generate genuine backlinks consistently to your site. To achieve that, it is crucial to implement a strategic approach. By following the below set of factors, you can turn your crowd-sourced link building into a link engine.

Identify the Right Platform

Choosing a community should be your first step in a crowd marketing for SEO strategy. This is because not all communities/forums offer equal results. You must choose platforms relevant to your industry where your target audience is actively engaging. As explained above, using forums and Q&A sites for backlinks, and communities, blog sites are some crowd marketing examples.

Make valuable contributions

Once you become an active member of the community, your next goal is to make valuable contributions and help your audience. This is one of the golden rules of crowd marketing for SEO. Answering questions with detailed answers, sharing your expertise, participating in discussions, etc, helps create a positive brand image.

Incorporate contextual linking

Upon establishing yourself as a respected and trusted community member, you should integrate contextual linking into your content. The purpose of this is to genuinely add value to the specific web content and support it. 

Diversify your link profile

Getting backlinks from various reputable sources strengthens your link profile. One of the crowd marketing benefits is engaging in multiple communities offering value widens your brand reach and diversifies your link generation sources.  

Build Robust Relationships

One of the main highlights of crowd marketing is the networking possibilities with renowned sites and influencers that you can achieve. As you contribute and share knowledge, this attracts users and other trusted sites with whom you can build positive relationships. This increases online visibility and link generation opportunities. 

Crowd marketing: Black hat or white hat?

Crowd marketing, when done right, is organic and generates white hat links. Abusing it for manipulating search engine rankings is considered black hat. Let’s take an example:

If you want to guest blog and you reach out to reputable websites to generate backlinks to your site, that won’t get you penalized. However, if you are building a blog network for the sole purpose of link building, this is a black hat scheme. As long as you make valuable contributions in the online community and include relevant backlinks, everything is fine.

Winding Up

Even though crowd marketing isn’t a new concept, it is often overlooked for other link-building strategies. By leveraging this technique, you can generate leads, quality backlinks to your site, and drive conversions. Understanding what is crowd marketing, its benefits and the various types helps you choose the best platform to implement your link-building strategies. 

If the above factors aren’t enough, it is always recommended to choose a digital marketing agency like GTECH Information Technology for your crowd marketing efforts. We have been creating innovative marketing solutions for countless brands over the years. Analysing your business type and target audience, we build the best crowd marketing strategy that enhances your online digital presence.