link building into your initial promotion

If you’re going to promote your new product, see if you can incorporate a way to build links at the same time. A year or so ago, I noticed a marketing campaign by a company that involved offering bloggers a “plant a tree” widget for their site – if you placed the banner on your site, they’d plant a tree. If anyone were to copy your embed code and put it on their site, your score would go up – the higher your score, the more trees they would have planted for you. It meant free advertising for the company, it made them look good, it was an interesting enough idea that they might have potentially picked up natural links anyway and each widget included a link back to the “download this widget” page on their site. (I can’t find any traces of the competition now, so I’m not sure it’s still running – but if you find it, please give me a shout). Make sure you don’t overcook this idea though, or you could cause Google to review what you’re doing – make sure you read this post firstso you know where the line is.