What are natural links and crowd marketing

On popular Internet forums and platforms that are organized in the Q&A form, users may come across comments that contain camouflaged advertising. For example, there are online discussions that concern marital relationship problems. Such strings may contain allusions to psychologists' contacts and website references. This is what crowd marketing actually is.

This promotion tool can only be effectively used if applied properly. It allows achieving the following targets:

• increase in the demand and the popularity of a certain product;
  
• improvement in brand recognition and public attitude toward a product or a service;
  
• link mass building that leads to the promoted page or website;
  
• enhancing site traffic;
  
• spreading information among the wide audience;
  
• thinning out the list of sources that lead to the site.
  

Thus, natural links are implied on forums and other open question & answer platforms and lead to the promoted website. According to the statistics, the outreach of this advertisement tool has notably increased in 2019.

It is essential to create a highly positive image of a brand or a site on the Internet; public opinion about the promoted product should be loyal.

In practice, backlinking may fail to reach the required effect in certain cases. Moreover, some offline companies and Internet shops can get zero advantage of crowd advertising.

This link type should be used on the resources with open commenting. It is important to choose websites or forums that contain discussions of products that belong to the same market niche.

For example, imagine that you own a shop that sells equipment and tools for beauty salons. You need to find a forum that is used for professional discussions. Choose a discussion thread that includes questions concerning necessary stuff for work and advice on the places to buy it. You may prefer to either leave a comment or to write a post and mention the promoted brand.

• Relevant forums;
  
• feedback-sites;
  
• comment strings on popular forums;
  
• social networks;
  
• Q&A services like Google Community, Quora;
  
• online reference-books and thematic aggregators.
  

The general advantages of these platforms are their high traffic and active discussions. The disadvantage is veiled in the risk of comment-blocking that is especially relevant for messages that contain links. Moreover, the implied link may not be indexed by search systems, like on the Quora site.

It is highly important to feel the borderlands between advertising, useful discussion, and direct spam. The fundamental of crowd-marketing is creating a helpful answer and providing active discussion support.

The implementation of camouflaged advertising should be well-arranged. There will be no effect if you create several posts on different platforms: they will be considered spam and deleted. Backlinks can be purchased from various specialists. Another variant is creating a special marketing department. Let us give a closer look at each of these options.

Outsourcing personnel, you get a chance to benefit from their experience and expertise. However, the obvious disadvantage is that a specialist may go back to the provided services. Moreover, you cannot control his or her work properly.

Developing an internal marketing department means additional expenses for its maintenance. Newbies should be trained, and qualified specialists demand higher wages. Managing this work on your own is possible still complicated provided that there should be a clear plan and a big number of implied backlinks.

• Backlink stocks that allow you to purchase the required quantity of links monthly;
  
  
• freelancers who maintain forum discussions and add comments and feedback on various platforms;
  
  
• a new staff member whose activity will be focused on backlinking;
  
  
• crowd-marketing services like Serpstat that search for suitable sources for backlinking used by competitor companies and identifying key phrases.
  
  

When choosing the executor service or individual, consider backlinking price and its pay-back period. The most expensive option is the use of automated marketing services while the cheapest one is recruiting non-controlled beginner freelancers.

Creating a sub-department of marketing makes sense if you deal with a complicated niche; training an outside expert and introducing product details and peculiarities to the new person is hardly possible.

Hidden advertising does not provide quick, visible results. It takes at least one month after backlinks implementation to see traffic increase. On average, you can expect notable traffic upsurge within 3-4 months. Crowd-marketing effectiveness may be evaluated by the following criteria:

• traffic enhancement;
  
• the growth of product popularity and demand;
  
• position increase in search results.
  

Posting on outer resources, you should mind their traffic ranking, the contents of included messages, and the way of link implementation. Hidden advertisements should look natural. It is a good idea to use the help of advanced accounts owners who have already established status on a certain forum.

Crowd marketing should not be considered to be means of link profile optimization. It is more about enhancing the company image and increase brand recognition.

Crowd-marketing allows reaching a wide audience through natural discussions on popular Internet-platforms. Backlinking has nothing to do with spamming; it should be used only for link profile optimization.

It is possible to purchase backlinks from specialized stocks or to order them from outer specialists. Companies that sell sophisticated products or services should make-up a sub-department or train an employee to imply natural links on forums and suitable Web resources. The effect can be expected at least in a month.