Breaking Free
Experiments in tech entrepreneurship
How To Get More Links To Your Website With User Badges
In: Marketing|UniversityTutor.com By: Brian Armstrong
22 Oct 2009I had an interesting conversation with Neil Patel earlier this week. I called him to get some advice on UniversityTutor.com and how I could take it to the next level. Neil is a really successful guy in the web business space, so I figured it’d be a good brainstorm.
His biggest advice was to get more incoming links to the site. This is probably the most important thing you can do to rank well in search engines, because Google (and others) place a high value on how many sites link to you. It’s also a great barrier to entry against competitors because an established site will have lots of incoming links built up over time and it will be very difficult for a new startup to outrank them in search engines.
I’m already ranking well for some local searches (such as biology tutor austin) but not so well in other (such as find a tutor). This is largely due to how long those sites have been around and how many incoming links they have.
So obviously getting more links is good, but HOW was the big question. Neil’s advice was to follow the same model Yelp.com used with their user badges. This lets Yelp users display their reviews on their own blog or website. They get to show off their work, and Yelp get’s an incoming link. You just have to provide users with a little snippet of code and an incentive to paste it into their site.
So a day later I had launched tutor “bling” that my tutors can add to their own websites (blogs, school websites, facebook profiles, etc). Since a lot of the tutors are university students, it would be particularly great if I got some incoming .edu links (these carry a particularly high value) but we’ll have to see on that.
As an added incentive I built in my UniversityTutor affiliate program so all the pre-generated links contain a tutor’s affiliate code (they can track it using the stats at the bottom). Using this they can not only advertise their profile, but also get paid for any new tutors they refer.
One More Idea….
This wasn’t related to my conversation with Neil, but I thought about it after reading a story on Hotmail.com. Hotmail got popular FAST (something like 2 million users in 18 months) almost entirely because they forced you to include a line in the bottom of every email that said “Get A Free Email Account At Hotmail.com”, or something to that effect.
There are over 100 contact messages going through UniversityTutor.com every day now, so I decided to add a line to the bottom of their contact emails reminding them of the opportunity to refer new tutors and get paid for it. You can see the new line in the email below. This is more for word of mouth than SEO because I don’t think Google will index links from someone’s Facebook profile.
So what do you think, will it work? Here is a graph of search engine traffic to UniversityTutor.com over the last three months (traffic from search engines makes up about 50% of total traffic).
It will probably take a month or two to have any effect (if it works), but we’ll see!
Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong
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Breaking Free is a collection of articles on tech entrepreneurship, business, and life written by Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »
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Damon M.
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Brian, I would put “Know any other potential tutors” above “To stop receiving these messages”
When I see “To stop receiving these messages” I noticed that as my cue to close the e-mail and I dismiss anything after it. That’s just me, though.
Otherwise I think this is a great idea! Good luck!
Brian Armstrong
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Thats a great point, I’ll try it. Thanks Damon!
CollegeTownMenus (CTM)
October 23rd, 2009 at 2:06 am
Finally back to the basics, another QUALITY article. This is definitely something I NEED to do. Can you explain your traffic chart? I’m curious as to how yours is so repetitive. Why is it always going down and then up in a pattern? Are you sending mass emails every month?
Also, I was meaning to ask you how you get the subdomains with cities automatically setup for your system? I’m assuming its not a manual process.
Brian Armstrong
October 23rd, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Hey there, the traffic pattern is weekly… I’m not sure why but apparently most people search for tutors during the middle of the week (Tuesday to Thursday). I wasn’t expecting this but it seems to be true across all my stats.
The cities database I imported from here (I think), might have been a different one:
http://www.maxmind.com/app/worldcities
Bubba
October 23rd, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Interesting thanks!
Mar
October 23rd, 2009 at 5:00 am
Heya Brian, I’m not sure how relevant backlinks are towards Google’s PR ‘cos I read in some forums and blogs that its effects are not as substantial as it’s used to. You may want to find out further about this.
And having a facebook related promotion is definitely a good, low cost (or maybe even priceless) manner to get more traffic. I’m sure you’d already knew that the Facebooks, the YouTubes, the Squidoos all can provide good traffic.
Tutor Blings are a good options to include and I think it’s going to be a key element in UniversityTutor.com’s promotion. Badges definitely work. Anyway since I’m free this morning, a little something I thought I’d share — http://blog.mar.sg/uploads/university-tutor-badges.jpg — just felt like giving it that glassy, modern ‘look’. Hope you liked it.
Brian Armstrong
October 23rd, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Haha, awesome! Do you have the PSD by any chance so I can do the other one too with different wording? Really appreciate it.
Mar
October 30th, 2009 at 5:23 am
Thanks (Brian n CTM), and it was done in Adobe Illustrator, and here’s the link to the working file: http://blog.mar.sg/uploads/certified-super-uper-tutor.zip
I’ve saved in an earlier format (Ai CS) Let me know if that’s okay. Cheers~!
Brian Armstrong
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Many thanks!!!
Brian Armstrong
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Actually, yeah I’m not able to open that since I don’t have illustrator, only photoshop :(
Mar
November 11th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Why, I thought you’d never ask. ; ) Here’s the photoshop files, all zipped up in one, er, zip file.
http://blog.mar.sg/uploads/badges/SuperDuperTutor.zip
It’s about 3MB, have fun~
Brian Armstrong
November 12th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Great stuff, you’re the best Mar!
CollegeTownMenus (CTM)
October 23rd, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Yeah the glassy look is nice.
Leah
November 8th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
This is a great stategy. Let’s see how it goes. Links are always great for SEO. We know that for sure. It also helps with page rank. I’m trying a little something myself.