By using advanced discussion marketing techniques you can get much more out of your links, much more link juice or much more referral traffic (or even both).
Fake personas
90% of discussion marketing is done by fake personas. These believable-looking artificial personas have established Facebook, Google+, Twitter and sometimes even Linkedin profiles.
You can change your fake persona’s profession, set expertise, or job to suit your needs so you can appear as an authority or expert.
Artificial discussions
Artificial discussions are simply discussions initiated by a fake persona for the sole purposes of discussion marketing. A good example of this would be a Yahoo Answer question which was asked by a fake persona. It would then be answered by a second fake persona with the link back to the client’s website.
This way you can drop links even when there are no relevant questions available for you to answer.
/I suspect, that actually more than 40% of all the questions on Yahoo Answers are artificial discussions. I have single-handedly generated a couple of thousands on Yahoo answers alone without getting banned or even receiving a warning. /
Cross linking
My personal favorite technique. Simply put, this is linking one discussion marketing item to another.
For example, you create an artificial discussion on Yahoo Answers by posing a question using a fake persona. Your second fake person answers it, and you let it run for some time and let genuine people answer it too.
Then a third fake persona answers the question and but also drops a link pointing to a different discussion marketing item by saying, “Hey, you might be interested in this discussion as well.”
The trick in it is, that the DM item the third person is linking to is also linking to another DM item and so on and so forth. This way you can create link-chains of hundreds of interlinked DM items. Pretty powerful stuff and it works with blog posts and forums as well, not just Q&A sites.
Of course Yahoo Answers only provides no-follow links so in this case referral traffic is the important metric.
IP rotation
Once you start churning out discussion marketing at the scale of an online marketing agency, you will need a lot of different IP addresses We are talking about 20+ private IPs or more. Make sure when you buy these IP addresses, that they are social media compliant and are not shared! This is really important. Only buy private social media compliant IP addresses.
Conclusion
I hope these advanced discussion marketing techniques will help your link-building and referral traffic generation. They really do work. For smaller clients you can generate results even on a tight budget with these tactics.
I would say that discussion marketing should be a part of every online marketing strategy for small clients. It can help your rankings and referral traffic, and coupled with a good social strategy, it can be really beneficial for smaller websites.
Discussion marketing is low cost link building and referral traffic generation.
By Simon Andras (SimonTheSorcerer)
Simon (also known as SimonTheSorcerer online) is the founder of Simon’s Online Marketing, a forward thinking online marketing agency focusing on websites in difficult niches. Among others successfully operating and marketing gambling blogs, gambling affiliate websites, legal high e-commerce stores and duty-free alcohol and tobacoo e-shops.
