Survey Your Customers to Find Link Opportunities

The questions are written to find out where the customers go when they're not on the client's site and what motivates them to buy when they're there. I keep the survey short and simple and try to focus on finding sites they've had direct experience with but will prompt them to provide the names of any bloggers, social media, forums, and online publications they've heard of. "Hearing of" is almost as important as sites used in certain industries so I look for threads of commonality and pull sites mentioned by more than a handful of respondents. They're labeled as "authority" sites and pursued for linking and advertising opportunities.

For example, I recently surveyed an organic co-op and found 20% of the respondents paid for an online subscription to a green magazine. The magazine hadn't popped up in the client's referral logs or in the inbound link structure of the competitors I checked so I was surprised to see so many customers mention reading it. After negotiating with the magazine I was able to get an interview for the co-op's president, purchase advertising and buy their mailing list for a cross promotion that included a link incentive. In the end, almost 50 links were secured from a site that had never crossed my radar before the survey. Not too bad for asking a couple of simple questions.