Guerrilla Marketing

by Charles Rubin

Providing links to other related resources is an easy way to boost the information value of your Worldwide Web site. It's also a good way to show your visitors that you're as interested in serving their needs as in tooting your own horn. Many Web sites now have a "related resources" or "other cool sites" department that offers collections of links to other places. In fact, some of the most-visited Web sites are essentially collections of links, like the Yahoo directory.

But every link you add to your site is a doorway to another location, an escape hatch that moves the visitor out of your information space and into another. And once visitors make that escape, they may not return to your site at all. So while you want to help your visitors find related resources, you don't want to show them the exit to your site before you have a chance to show your own stuff. Here are some strategies for including links in your web site.

• Don't put links on your home page. Give visitors a chance to see what you're offering before showing them doorways to other sites. If you offer links, put them on pages that are nested at least one level below the home page in your web site, so visitors will be exposed to at least some of your own information before they can head for the door. It's like putting the milk at the back of the supermarket.
• Check out each linked resource yourself before including it. It's easy to grab a cool-sounding URL out of Internet World magazine or from a discussion group post, but you should always check out the resource yourself before including it. The URL may be wrong, or the site may contain material that's detrimental to your own marketing efforts.
• Link to sites that augment, rather than compete with, the information you're offering. Look for sites that offer more detail about a subject your site covers. For example, my Other Marketing Resources links page directs visitors to specific details about HTML publishing, a subject related to but not competitive with the information I offer.
• Skip the "cool" site links. Don't provide links to sites that don't directly relate to what you're offering. Inviting somebody to visit a site with games, puzzles, or cool graphics or video just distracts them from the subject they were focused on when they chose to view your site originally. It's hard enough to hold someone's attention without inviting your visitors into an unrelated detour.
• Ask for reciprocal links. When you include a link to another site, let that site's owner know an, ask for link from there back to your site. Visitors can always navigate back to your site using their browser's navigation buttons, but it won't hurt to remind them by having a link on other sites, too.