The Power Of Reciprocation

Jun 7, 2010

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Please share this with all of your internet marketing buddies and business owners who wish to get more links, traffic and sales. Internet marketing is a thriving industry and among the major players is SEO (search engine optimization). Another player in the internet marketing field is the CRO (conversion rate optimization). While these two players are continually changing the internet marketing game there are still sound principles that can be injected. Today I am going to talk about “The Power of Reciprocation“. Have you ever performed a “return the favor” to someone who has done something nice to you. Perhaps your coworker bought you lunch one day and so you decided to buy their lunch another time. Every one wants to give back to someone who has given to them. This is at the center of how we are as humans.

SEO and CRO?

So how does this play into the game of SEO and CRO? It is simple if you want something from someone then the best way is to give them something. Inherently they will want to return the favor in some way. A good example is where you can offer something of value for FREE to your users who will say thank you. People love to get things for FREE, but how many times do we ask them to do something for us when we are not asking them for money? The main problem is we do not ask people for things and if you do not ask for things then you do not get things. You could simply ask for them to link to you are share your FREE offering with their friends on Twitter of Facebook. They got something for FREE so a good majority of people would be very happy to share it with their friends.
power of reciprocaton in action
Image provided courtesy of SEOmoz.org

This will help your SEO as you will get more people linking back to you if you ask them, bookmarking it or emailing it to their friends thus starting a viral campaign for you. It could help your CRO as you start to develop principles of being able to better know how to ask for things from people in a proper manner thus getting more of what you want.

Sincerely Asking

This offering to be nice and asking for things in return can be done without looking like all you are trying to do is look after yourself. You do not want people to say he is only being nice because he wants something. Instead you want to be sincerely nice and then ask for a favor as a “oh by the way” type of question. Here are some examples of how you could give and then ask for a favor in return:
  • You could blog about someone or some company and then send it to them and ask them if they would like to share the blog posts. It will be very hard for someone or a company who wishes to market to not want to share your blog posts about them.
  • You could give away a Free download and ask them to simply link back to the download on there own site as a good resource for their own visitors.
  • You could simply ask to put someone on your special email lists in return for getting your Free info.
  • You could do what a lot of bloggers do very well and ask for readers to subscribe to your content.

Conclusion

At the end of the day I think we would all be amazed at how much we could actually get in return just from simply asking for things as a result of our nice gestures. The key to the power of reciprocation is that people inherently like to do nice things for people who do nice things for them.

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