Crowd-marketing to promote online store. Guide.

Search engines regularly work on their search results, including thorough checking of backlinks. How to get natural links so as not to fall under search engine filters and to promote your online store in a quality manner?

Crowd marketing will help in solving this issue - communication with the audience through comments on forums, review sites with a link to the desired page of your site.

Let's see how it looks. The visitor was given advice, helped to resolve his issue, attached a link to the desired page:

Why does an online store need crowd marketing

Crowd marketing is a seo and marketing tool, with its help you can:

• draw the audience's attention to the product;
• increase brand awareness;
• test the minimum version of the product - if you have a young business, using crowd marketing you can collect feedback from your target audience;
• set the dynamics of the link profile;
• increase referral traffic to the site;
• set a behavioral profile for the site;
• to raise the pages of the site (which are already in the top 10-15) in the top 3-5 search results;
• work with negativity.

Crowd marketing is not as effective if:

- you sell a product prohibited by law, for example, drugs;

- the margin of your product is too high - the likelihood that the forum will ask where to buy diamonds is negligible;

- interface and usability require improvement - your online store should be pleasant and user-friendly;

- absence or poor performance of business processes - make sure that the client will be accurately answered, advised and helped to place an order.

How to implement crowd marketing for your online store

1. Select the target audience - consider who your product is designed for (gender, age, income, region).

2. Search for relevant sites - it is important to select relevant donors for linking. This can be done in the following ways:

1. manual search - search forums and discussions on your topic;
2. buying a base of sites - pay attention to the top bases from Anna Yashchenko , perhaps one of the few constantly updated donor bases;
3. studying competitors - look for online stores that are close to you by subject: you can do this manually by entering key queries into search engines, or through the services: Ahrefs, SerpStat, Majestic, SEMRush, Linkpad. Please note that they will all show different data from each other, so it is better to analyze using several tools. More details about each service .

This is how the search for competitors through Ahrefs looks like:

→ select the 5 highest quality competitors. In our opinion, the ideal competitor for analysis is a young (about two years old), fast-growing website with:

• traffic to the site is constantly increasing;

An example of checking site traffic through the free version of SimilarWeb:

Sometimes sites themselves show informers (the number of views for a certain time).

Additionally: If the site has a hidden counter, you can enter http://counter.yadro.ru/logo;site.ru/?29.1 into the browser line, where site.ru is the name of the required site.

• the link profile is constantly and smoothly growing, there are no sharp jumps and falls

• the link profile should be formed by links of different types

After you have identified quality competitors

→ analyze link donors:

- open "Backlinks" and export the referring pages

- then we sequentially analyze each site according to the following characteristics:

• traffic - as mentioned above, the best donor is the one with good traffic;
• security - ideally, the site should have a high trust and low spam. It is better to look at this sample using one of the analyzers, since the indicators are different and confusion can arise. The value of the trust must be:

- DR Ahrefs> 20;

- TF Majestic> 10;

- Checktrust - green range;

• discussions - we are interested in a donor with a lively, active audience. Track the frequency and quality of comments, user interest.

3. The choice of landing pages should be based on data from analyzers. Determine the most traffic pages, they should be linked to from external sites.

4. Placement of crowd links:

• to post comments, you need to register a profile, or rather several, then work on their reputation. High-quality sites often have strict moderation. Therefore, so that your comment is not deleted, even the most ideal one, you need to have a pumped account. This can be achieved through constant commenting;

• if there have been no discussions on the topic thread for a long time, revive it by posting new comments from other accounts;

• when the audience becomes active - your way out: write on the topic of the question, try to help the person solve his problem, give an expert recommendation. Avoid direct advertising, the text of the comment should be as natural as possible, and the information should be truthful, up-to-date and relevant;

• follow the development of the branch, if there are new questions, try to provoke a dialogue, actively comment;

This is what quality crowd comments look like:

5. Analyze activity and continue posting

You can track click-throughs through the following analyzers: Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics. We will not dwell on this, more detailed information on the analysis can be found here .

Remember, none of the internet marketing methods promise instant results. Search engines need time to index new links, there is no exact forecast of how many users will read your comment, follow the links, become a client. For the best result, crowd marketing should be used in conjunction with other promotion methods.

Therefore, keep working, gradually increase the frequency of placement and over time you will see dynamics.

Important! Crowd comments should be posted regularly, and their number should be constantly growing. For example: the first 2 months - 50 links each, the third - 70.

Who will do it?

As you can see, the process of a crowd marketing company is quite lengthy, and if you do not have enough time and knowledge to implement it yourself, you can:

- create an in-house team that will be completely subordinate to you, deeply immersed in the niche topic. You will also be able to control every stage of the work. Difficulties that may arise: the selection of high-quality specialists - they are in short supply, so be prepared for the time and financial costs of training employees, as well as renting premises and wages. Educational articles, online courses will help in training.

- delegate crowd marketing to professional services . The method has several advantages:

• assistance in drawing up technical specifications and choosing a strategy;
• their own base of sites for placement, where they often already have pumped up commentator profiles. If the site is found for the first time, the performers are engaged in the promotion of the account;
• high-quality selection of thematic donors, analysis of competitors;
• you can control the process: check the text of comments and on which sites they are going to be posted, accepted or sent for revision;
• placement guarantee - if it happens that the comment is deleted, the company will make a new one at its own expense.

This list of services is not available for all services, so before choosing a contractor, carefully read each of them, you will need a comparative review of crowd marketing companies .

To the conclusions

Crowd marketing is one of the tools for comprehensive promotion. It will help attract new customers, ensure site growth when ranking by search engines, and increase brand awareness.

To implement crowd marketing you need:

• analyze your website and competitors in detail;
• select relevant thematic sites for placement;
• create and develop commentator profiles;
• choose landing pages;
• write quality comments;
• continue posting.

Remember an important rule - working with a link profile involves ensuring constant continuous growth, therefore, the placement of crowd comments should be carried out regularly, you cannot stop or reduce the number of links. I hope the material was useful for you and you will start using crowd marketing today to develop your online store.