A few weeks ago I wrote about how Friends Reunited had announced their site is now free for users - in an attempt to catch up with Facebook I presumed.

Well I’ve just seen a TV ad for the ‘new Friends Reunited’ website on ITV! Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this may be a first? A community site advertising on TV? Comparison sites have been doing it for ages, because there’s direct revenue available from visitors. However with community websites, whilst visitors = popularity = advertising revenue, there’s not the same direct correlation of clicks = pennies.

So are we in the middle of a user war between yesterday’s favourite site and the phenomenon that is Facebook? Or is there no war, and just desperation on the part of FR?

Personally I think, whilst they may be able to pull back some market share, they’ve left their comeback a bit late - about 12 - 18 months too late. Every day people from classes at school are sending me friend requests on FB. Even when I think ‘that’s it, surely there’s no one else from school that’s yet to join here’ someone else will pop up. Meanwhile I’ve had about one message sent to me on FR ever. So I think FB is the place to find old friends, whilst socialising with your current ones - 2 birds with one stone (although FB messages annoy me - send me an email! Then I can ‘reply to all’ without having to log in anywhere). A quick look at the new FR home page shows quick links to ‘RAF friends’ and ‘Navy friends’, which is instantly a way to appeal to a large number of people… but I bet these people have communities on FB already.

One point that must be mentioned that whilst FR are running an ad campaign on ITV - they are owned by the TV station - so I bet they got a good rate

Who else found an email in their inbox this morning, announcing FriendsReunited has gone completely free? The email says “[w]ith over 19 million members, we’re still the best place to find your old friends”. Hint of desperation there? Trying to remind us that there was a world before Facebook?

What with even Vodaphone launching a TV and billboard advertising campaign about free broadband so you “don’t get left in the dark” without access to Facebook, FriendsReunited obviously thought it was time to act - and who wants to pay to send messages to old friends when they can do it for free on another site? However - I’m shocked it’s taken them this long! FriendsReunited could have gone free a year ago, and still raked in a profit from advertising sales. Instead they’ve held out - maybe waiting for the Facebook bubble to burst, or maybe just too fond of their subscription based site. I hope for their sake they haven’t left it too late…

Everyone who has tried to market a website will know how hard it is getting established. Getting those first, all important inbound links to your site can feel like an uphill struggle, especially if you’ve built ‘just another’ shopping website. You might think your new site is the best thing since Google, but to anyone else it’s yet another boring link exchange email.

The most obvious way of acquiring backlinks for your website goes like this:

i) Do a search in your favourite search engine for your chosen keyword
i) The send an email to the site owners of the sites you find asking for a link exchange.

I’ve done this sooo many times and to be honest I don’t know why I bother. It’s got to be one of the most frustrating and depressing things you can do online! After sending about 20 blandly worded emails out into the ether you’ll be left feeling totally disillusioned - I can guarantee it! But there are cleverer ways you can go about building links, and here are a few of my favourite suggestions.

Link Baiting

I’ve been reading a lot lately about ‘link baiting’. Linkbaiting is the latest SEO buzzword and the new favoured method of building inbound links to your website.

The idea is to create something on your site that naturally attracts inbound links from forums, blogs and social media sites like digg.com, del.icio.us, Furl, Shoutwire, Mixx and all the billions of other site’s that have popped up lately. The idea is to create something with a ‘buzz’ around it. Viral marketing isn’t anything new, but I’ve seen some really great examples lately, including the Facebook haters video made right here in good ‘ol Bristol. (Forget San Francisco, this is where it’s at lol). Anyway back to the post.

Here are a few possible ‘link baiting’ ideas.

1. Create something genuinely useful for the community. This could be releasing a part of your code that is particularly clever, or writing a neat Javascript library that does cool stuff.

2. Create some free web templates and leave little links at the bottom to one of your sites, then let people download them for free as long as they leave the links intact. Obviously many will remove them anyway, but a few honest people might provide you with a few backlinks.

3. Make something funny, like a movie or picture gallery, then post on the social networks.

4. Interview someone famous, then publish the article as an exclusive on your site.

5. Write something controversial.

6. Write an article and submit it to an article archive. Let people publish it on their website in exchange for a backlink. There are loads of article archives out there.

7. Build a useful tool. - SEO Book have done this with their keyword tool. A tool aimed at replacing the ever popular, but now sadly expired Overture keyword tool.

8. People love freebies, why not offer people some free stuff if they link back to you. Probably cheaper than buying a link in the Yahoo directory anyway

Other ideas for acquiring inbound links

Link baiting it just one approach, here are a few more tried a tested ideas.

1. Submit your site to link directories. - A little bit of an goldie olden this one. You’ll find ‘The Ultimate list of link directories’ floating around somewhere, although most are out of date. You can waste an awful lot of time on link directories (believe me!).

2. Offer unique ’sponsorship’ opportunities on your website in certain categories. If you have a half decent shopping website for example, you could offer a merchant or partner site an exclusive link in the category most relevant to them. This is something we’ve been thinking about on a new price comparison site we’ve launched. As your browse each of the categories there’s a section at the top of the page that says ’sponsored by’ then a site name and link. This is prime real-estate and made all the more eye catching with a funky javascript fade-in after the page has loaded.

Whether this will get any interest is anyones guess, but I’m thinking there could be a few other similar style opportunities out there. I’ve noticed some very cool page turning ‘ad’ effects on sites lately. Just make it a little different from the normal ‘pointless’ links pages and people might sit up and take notice.

Final Thoughts

This post was going to be all about the best way of acquiring inbound links, but that’s reminded me of another useful tip I picked up a little while ago about finding possible link partners. Instead of doing a search and contacting those site that come up for your chosen keyword, why not find out who’s linked to them, and go after them instead…? You can do this easily with Google. Just enter ‘link:www.competitorssite.com’ to see the links pointing to their site.

I hope you’ve been partially inspired at least to think of new and innovative ideas for getting links back to your site. It’s a bit of a challenge thinking up new ways to grab people’s attention, but it pays if you give it some thought and planning and have a proper strategy in mind for promoting your site online.

Marketing online is all about creative thinking, so go and put your thinking hat on, and just remember… In the words of Damon Killian, “Give the people what they want”.

Two videos doing well on YouTube at the moment pretty much sum up the Facebook divide - you either love it or you hate it.

I was shocked last weekend when a friend said “I’ve heard Facebook are going to start charging… that would annoy me, but I’d pay!”. After laughing at the mere idea of them charging to use the site, I then very strongly declared I would NEVER pay to use it! Like Tom wrote in his post Facebook on the Decline, I used to have it permanently open on a tab - but now I can go weeks between visits. For some people though, such as my happy-to-pay-friend, it still hasn’t lost it’s charm.

Overall I’d still say I’m in the ‘Love It’ camp - but only because I’ve always ignored apps I don’t want to add, and don’t let it ruin my day when someone writes on my ‘Superwall’ and I can’t access it (because I don’t have one). Having said that - I do wonder why my friends insist of sending group messages through it, rather than just a group email. They’d get a much quicker reply from me if I didn’t have to log-in there first!

So - watch these two videos - and let us know your verdict… Facebook - do you love it or hate it?!

Lovers:
Facebook Song

Haters:
Facebook Anthem

It’s an increasingly crowded online marketplace, with everyone competing for the top spots on the search engines, beating each other up with adwords and fighting for all the traffic they can get. You might have the best products in the world, but if nobody knows you exist then it’s hard to get noticed.

That’s why we’ve just released some rather cool little widgets for online shops that bridge the gap between you the merchant and the user, giving you tonnes of free exposure for your coolest products. All in a simple bit of Javascript that brings all your best products to the naturalbornshopper.com community. Just add a couple of lines of code to your product details pages and you’ll get a lovely little badge showing how popular your products are. Complete with a link that lets our users vote you up the homepage of NaturalBornShopper.com and the associated shopping guides.

For more information take a look at the widgets page on NBS.
http://www.naturalbornshopper.com/widgets

Or contact us with your specific requirements and we’ll be happy to discuss how we can bring the NaturalBornShopper community to your site.

I was just reading on the fantastic mashable.com how the readership of Facebook has apparently dipped over the past month or so, although some are putting this dip in user numbers down to ’seasonal’ factors.

There’s no denying the impact Facebook has had over here in the UK, everyone’s been talking about it over the past 6 months, but I think the recent ‘blip’ on their way to world domination is probably just the natural re-adjustment that always happens after a boom. People have just got bored and moved on… All those little apps which were fun to begin with are now just annoying, and you’ve added pretty much every friend you ever knew… Now what!? Play silly games with them? I used to login every day, but I have to admit it’s more like once every couple of weeks now.

Facebook’s not going away, and it’s great for sharing pictures and keeping in touch with people. If the folks in charge can keep a lid on the app spam, not loose the usefulness of the site and keep it ‘relevant’, then I’m sure we’ll all be logging in again soon.

Meanwhile I’m off to checkout my new twitter account…