What I Learned from McDonald's about Getting More Links

Webmasters and bloggers are always after more links. The more links the better your ranking should be in the search engines and hopefully the more people will visit your website or blog and take what ever action you want then to take. Whether you want them to buy something, read your wonderfully witty posts on your blog, or take part in your latest social networking website. We all need links. Bloggers that have been at it a little while often follow Technorati and they know that their blog ranking is determined by how many blogs link back to them. You want to get your blog into the top 100, get hundreds and thousands of links.

Want to know a secret of getting tons of links back to your website or blog? Are you ready for it? Give something away that people want. Not really a secret right? Businesses have been doing this forever. McDonald’s is famous for giving something away for free to get people to come back. They started selling kids happy meals with toys for a reason. My son does not like to go to McDonalds for the food, at least he never eats it when we are there. He wants to go there to get the latest toy that comes with his lunch. We continue to go to McDonald’s because they give away something for free that my son wants.

A good example of this are website themes. There are hundreds if not thousands of people out there designing website themes for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and even plain HTML/CSS themes. Why do people take time out of their busy lives to design a website theme and then just give it away? Simple, they want that link back to their own website every time the theme is used.

Here is an example for you. Michael Martine runs a blog called Better Blogging with Michael Martine. I don’t read his blog very often, but there is something to learn by looking at the blog reactions for Better Blogging with Michael Martine. Notice anything about the links back to his blog? They are almost all links back from a theme he designed. All of those links place his blog in the top 100 according to Technorati, although you don’t see him listed on the top 100 list. He has designed a WordPress theme(s) that people like and use and in return he gets links back to his blog from every single blog that uses the theme. Not bad for giving something away. I am sure there are many examples of people or businesses gaining huge amounts of backlinks by giving away something.

How does this help you? Not everyone can create a popular WordPress theme, but I am sure if you think about it for a little while you will be able to come up with something that you can give away that people will want that can help you get those links.

I would love to know what you come up with. It would be great to make another post of all the possible things people could give away to help create more links back to their website or blog.