You’ve probably heard of “social proof”, and use it in your own marketing efforts. The most common form of this is simply customer testimonials on your salespage, but it could also include charts of sales or performance stats – anything that helps create believability and credibility for your sales message.
Social Proof doesn’t have to be on your sales page, though. In fact, “offsite” social proof (think buzz) is what helps establish your reputation, and that of your product.
Offsite social proof is more believable. Whether it’s a product review on someone else’s site, or a thread in a forum, the uncontrolled comments of others will carry more weight than all the testimonials you can put on your sales page.
I’m not saying that you don’t want those testimonials. Merely that the offsite references are just as important, and will even bring you traffic you wouldn’t have received otherwise.
I recently found myself checking out the inbound links to Rapid Action Profits. There are scads of these (all of which help me in the search engines) and I thought I would show you some of these as an illustration of the types of links that are attainable (with little or no work on your part).
Willie Crawford/Blog Talk Radio
You can create offsite references to your product(s) simply by setting up your own blog and posting there about what you’re doing. (This post is a good example.)
These are just a few examples of literally thousands of backlinks that have appeared over the past year, and only one of these required any effort on my part (Willie interviewed me on his Blog Talk Radio show).
The rest are the result of other people doing reviews of my product, discussing its merits in various forums, creating social bookmarks, blogging about their own experiences, etc.
By encouraging others to review your products, or stimulating discussions on public forums (answer questions as they come up, or debate the relative merits of your product), and setting up a good affiliate program, this type of social proof almost happens on auto-pilot.
A little “nudging” from time to time to get something started, will often feed the flames, and have a more dramatic effect than you ever imagined.
