Really stuck guys. how do you earn links for an ecommerce site?

[TheUniqueSEO]

Hi seomoz guys

So I read a lot on seomoz and other sites, and see a lot of info about earning links, but this all seems to be aimed at blogs and brochure sites.

Being blunt, we sell stuff. Our competitors sell the same stuff. We are limited on what we can do product description content wise as our suppliers expect us to use the content they supply.  We are now putting together q and a pages based on a great article in the seomoz blog.

Does anyone have any great ideas for developing link bait or just getting links to an eCommerce site?

We know our service is good, and our product is good, but that's not enough to convince someone to link to us.

Help

Thanks

Paul

[EGOL]

I approach this problem by building an information site with a store.

That requires a huge writing investment to produce articles, photos and videos on how to select the products, how to use them, how to fix them, etc.   However, every article/video that you create starts pulling in traffic and over time your long tail keyword reach becomes enormous.   Your site will be EVERYWHERE in the SERPs.

If you do a good job lots of people will share your content, link to it from forums.  Manufacturers might link to it if your content is better than theirs.  Trade associations, clubs, professional groups, bloggers, forum posters might link to you.  People will share on facebook if you have great content.

Over time, if you track the entry page of your conversions you will learn the types of content that pulls in sales and that will inform future content development.

This method is slow work and really expensive but has a great payback over time, in my opinion.

Make your site the "go to place" for anybody anywhere who wants to learn about products, how to use them, how to select them.  Other people in your niche have probably not done this and people will buy from you because you are the widget man.

[KevinBudzynski]

Once again Egol hit the nail on the head. The only thing to add is giving incentives does help out the generation of user content. Such as: Add a product review/image/video for a chance to win a gift card.

[TakeshiYoung]

I work for a site in the ecommerce space, here are some link building tactics I can give away

1. Competitor analysis. Where are your competitors getting links from? That can be a good place to start.
2. Start a blog if you don't already have one.
3. Giveaways. This one is huge. Either hold contests where you give away free stuff or give free stuff to prominent bloggers and have them review it for you. The former can get you a lot of traffic and social media buzz, the latter gets you a solid link.
4. Charities and student groups. Find groups that have pages set up for their sponsors, and become one of their sponsors.
5. Get in the news. Hold a local event and then get it covered by local media.
6. Job postings websites, internships, job pages for universities.
7. Microsites. Tumblr meme sites are my favorite.

That should get you started. If you want more, check out this link and see which ones fit your business:

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

[TheUniqueSEO]

Hi Egol

Thanks for your assistance.  We are looking at building more content through Q&A sections, video etc.  As you say this is a significant investment.  How do you gauge the ROI on a content writing project like this?  At the end of the day we are in this to generate revenue, or otherwise we might as well put on our coats and go home.

Something we did try in the last 12 months was adding more detail to our products.  Ok, let's be specific.  We sell Magazine Subscriptions, so we started adding details to the magazines about the target audience, if a kids magazine we listed what the target age is.  We listed the ISSN numbers, as schools and libraries search by these.  We added a whole raft of information bits to the magazines.  The net effect, we dropped in the search results.  This is probably down to other factors.

So now we are looking to build a Q&A, but I don't need to tell you how much of an investment that will be.  And with our experiences its difficult to walk down that path not knowing if it will make any difference, and what ROI we can expect.

What makes it even tougher is a competitor of ours who does very little in the way of content marketing, and does nothing more than add a magazine to their site, gets ranked far higher than us.

So we work our socks off going backwards, and this competitor simply adds product and does fantastically well.  There seems to be something amiss there.

I am waffling on now so I will end that there

Thanks for your help

Paul

[littlesthobo]

I run an ecommerce site and definitely agree about the giveaways.

I notice that you are in the UK - me too.  On the site I run monthly competitions - easy question stuff and the prize value is worth upto £20 per month max.  I run an 'answer this question' in the blog comments and a winner will be chosen at random.  Also, if you think you can get away with it, get them to like, share, tweet or whatever. I then publish that on various competiton sites such as loquax, uk competition sites - there are quite a few.  A good one is HotUK deals, but you cant add your own.  Somebody has to innocently add it for you.  Once these professional compers get hold of it, they'll tweet and like it like crazy.  Make sure the offer is attached to a page on your site so it gets all the social signals.

It depends on your product, but you could hire a good PR person to see if they can tap into some contacts and get you some press about any events. A contact of mine occasionally manages a couple of celebrity endorsements on twitter, but to be honest I find them a bit embarrassing and I doubt they've done any good!

[EGOL]

So now we are looking to build a Q&A, but I don't need to tell you how much of an investment that will be.  And with our experiences its difficult to walk down that path not knowing if it will make any difference, and what ROI we can expect.

I would do this for some of your very best products.  See how it works.  My ROI might not match yours and it is very possible that magazines do not have the same potential that exists for hobby, tool, craft, construction and other industries.

[TheUniqueSEO]

Hi LIttlesthobo

We did run a competition/giveaway for around 2 years.  What we found though was that we got the same people entering the competition all the time.  i.e. professional compers.

Are you saying that your competitions give you continued social interactions and are generating back links for you?

Thanks

Paul