Link Building in Competitive Markets 

Building links in a competitive niche is one of the most difficult marketing tasks to do. Not only do you have to work in link-saturated industries, but more times than not you have to find a way to out-rank a "complaint site" and/or Wikipedia. 

Successful link building in competitive markets takes both traditional as well as Web 2.0 linking tactics to make an impact. So how do you avoid being buried in the search results or move above the complaint/Wikipedia site? One way is to work on developing reputation link bait.

What is reputation link bait?

Reputation link bait is the combination of two marketing strategies: pitching the media with an interesting story, and developing link bait. Traditionally, media pitches involve floating story ideas to journalists in conjunction with an upcoming event, while link bait is written to attract links from a wider audience by using controversial content. Reputation link bait uses each tactic, but with a twist—instead of promoting events and controversy, it focuses on promoting a company's overall image through positive buzz. In a nutshell, reputation link bait is a tactic used to promote a company using newsworthy and trendy angles to build a positive corporate reputation.

As a linking tactic, reputation link bait makes sense. Done well, it offers the potential to generate a lot of quality links in a Google friendly manner while establishing your company as an industry leader.

Capitalizing on current trends. There's a lot of support and publicity behind the "buy local, go green" movement. Take advantage of this hot trend by turning some of your products green and developing a full publicity and link bait campaign to promote the changes.

Build testimonial links. A single positive testimonial is good, but 50 is reputation making. Using the testimonials you have in place plus the new ones coming in as a result of going green, look for a line of commonality in each. Once you have it, develop an article series around the product or service everyone is raving about.