Giving Discounts / Free Products Away
Definition: This technique involves contacting relevant bloggers within your industry and offering them free products to review and / or discounts on your products for a review. This technique can be a little bit gray-hat because it may be interpreted as paying for links. Google has been known to not take kindly to this type of link building so you should be very careful with its application and be aware of the risks. Google has gone as far as listing it in their Webmaster guidelines as a tactic they don’t like.
However, this technique can work very well if you have low-cost products that you don’t mind giving away or can give discounts on. You can also get quite creative with the way you use this technique so that you’re not explicitly giving products away for links.
Types of links you get: Given that you are offering free products to bloggers, you can be quite strict with them about the way they link to you. For instance, you could probably ask them to use the exact anchor text of your choice and link to the page of your choice. But, as mentioned, this can be a risky technique and pushing the anchor text too far can send signals to Google that this link isn’t as natural as they’d like. So you should use some caution here.
The quality of link can be mixed here because some of the larger, more influential blogs may have policies in place that means they can’t be seen to endorse certain products and if they do, they must clearly explain that this is a commercial piece of content. Things can also get a little messy here because of laws in different countries when it comes to online advertising.
The process: If you’re confident in pursuing this technique and have product to give away,
here is the process you can use –
★ Find out internally how much product you can give away and how many links you are
expected to get in return. E.g. for every $100 of product, you need to get two links
★ Find relevant bloggers within your industry who look like they are independent and not
part of a larger company – this makes it more likely that they control editorial policies
and can accept products to review
★ Categorise them by the type of product you’re prepared to offer them and start
contacting them
★ Ideally you want them to review new products that are just coming onto the market, this
gives you additional benefit of marketing your new product
★ Contact them and offer them the chance to review your product for free, perhaps even
offer them an additional product to give away to their readers
★ If interested, send them the product
★ Give them some time to use the product, then follow up to get them to write a review on
the blog
★ You could ask them to include certain things in their review, such as images and to
review certain features. This helps make sure the review is in-depth and not just a few
lines of text
Additional resources:
★ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/99-ways-to-build-links-by-giving-stuff-away-and-improveyour-
brand-too-14029
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