Building a Tool / App

Building a Tool / App

Definition: This technique involves building some kind of small tool or app that performs a useful, specific function. This function should be useful to people within your industry. It should also be relatively simple and focused, i.e. you’re not looking to build a huge piece of software that could be a product in itself. A few examples of this in practice could be:

http://www.dry-it-out.com/cooling-calculator - an air conditioning calculator

http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm - calorie calculator

Types of links you get: This technique can enable you to get very natural links over a long period of time. This is because if your tool or app is genuinely useful, it will become more like reference material and people will naturally share it with others. So you do not have to keep doing outreach for it month after month. This means that it can get you very natural anchor text too.

If you make your tool or app embeddable, you can probably control the link a little. So you can specify the anchor text and the page that the link points to and, if the person embedding it doesn’t edit, this will remain in place. Because of this, you should be quite careful that you do not use commercial anchor text as it may mean you end up with lots of commercial anchor text pointing at your website which doesn’t look very natural. If you build links to your website with commercial anchor text, you want to have some level of control of them in case Google does flag it up as spam.

The process: With this technique, the process can be quite complicated depending on the

complexity of the tool or app you’re building. But you should try to keep it as simple as

possible.

★ Research your industry to find problems that people have – can you build a small app or

tool that will help solve this problem?

★ Email a few bloggers in your industry and ask them if a tool to solve this problem would

be useful to them. You can also ask the question on somewhere like Quora or on

relevant forums. This helps gauge the interest in your idea

★ If the idea looks like it is of interest to people, work with your developers or hire a

developer to build out the tool. Remember to keep it as simple as you can

★ Test the tool with the bloggers who you contacted in step 2 and get their feedback.

Iterate on this and improve if you can

★ Once completed, add the tool to your website and start promoting it to bloggers within your niche