Yes, it can be done, if you can stay awake long enough to read a bit…
“you know the scene – very humdrum boredom – boredom”
There are a few things in life that bore me to tears, those being, in no proper order:
1.Popular literature (yet it sells like mad while no one gives a fuck about Milan Kundera over here.) Yes, I’m talking about John Grisham, and I’m talking about the author who wrote that book about the bad dog. I have a bad dog. I don’t need to read a book about one.
2.Popular music. No offense to most of my friends (hi Melinda!), but popular music sucks a duck’s ass. It sucks it through a bendy straw. It sucks it through a bendy straw that has enough of a tiny hole in it that, while you can still get something through it, there’s more effort and that whistly effect. I won’t even bother to name names here but come on, go and listen to The Clash and tell me that Fall Out Boy is a decent band. You can’t do it with a straight face.
3.Sports, with the exception of rugby, played in very hot weather, preferably with loads of rain and mud.
4.Wicca. Yes, I think it’s great that you enjoy the solstice and you like your hair dyed blue-black and down to your knees but honestly, I don’t feel like having to listen to you talk about goddesses, nor do I want to see your lovely collection of sword replicas.
5.Scrapbooking. I need say no more.
Obviously these are all actually quite popular, with the possible exception of Wicca unless you happen to run with my brother’s circle of friends. However, what if you do something for a living that bores the normal person? I’m not professing to speak for him or her, of course, but let’s take drill bits for an example.
You have a site about drill bits. Your site is one of the 4,890,000 results that Google shows for a drill bits search, God help you. You are, perhaps, situated quite poorly at spot number 650, you want to move up in the SERPs, and you’ve heard that link building can help you. How exactly are you going to reel in these links? With great content? Viral marketing? Link bait? I scoff, laugh, rinse and repeat. Actually link bait might work…I’d certainly be interested in a piece like “Top 10 Worst Accidents Due to Misuse of Drill Bits.”
You can apply this fact to any other fairly boring niche…there are, amazingly, loads and loads of people out there who share your boring interests. There are even people out there who make you look exciting due to their even more boring interests, but that’s another (scarier) story. You need to find a way to get your poor little boring message out there! Social media is there for you. As you’ve probably seen based on several Twitterers, boring pieces of useless information are still interesting enough for someone to post. I am actually very guilty of that too, but I like to think that my boring updates are simply a way for me to stay in touch with the Twitterverse. (There is one SEO that I follow who has the most banal things to say…my GOD I wish I had the balls to out him right here but I don’t.) Anyway, with the growth of social media, the odds of finding a community of folks who are interested in what you have to offer are very, very high. If you don’t find a community, form one.
How can you leverage this newfound community to help you build links? First of all, interaction with other like-minded individuals is always a decent way to build up relationships that can serve to do much more than simply bring in new links for your site. You can formulate new ideas based on what is and isn’t being done, you can find new stores who are looking for a better drill bits supplier, and you can subscribe to an online newsletter that is, wow, all about drill bits! Maybe the author of the aforementioned newsletter will ask you to contribute a piece on the merits of wood auger vs. cobalt drill bits, and you’ll get a lovely link that goes out to the 43 people who subscribe. OK all joking aside, you can see that being asked to contribute to a newsletter has the potential to bring more attention to your own business, of course. Maybe your piece is so good that it gets mentioned in a few sites run by newsletter readers, and maybe those sites have a huge reach across the industry. Thus you have some new links (which should be pushing you up above spot 650), but more importantly, you have some nice new traffic sources, too.
There are probably also a decent number of links pointing to an outdated page or site, in your boring niche. Surely someone who sells drill bits has declared bankruptcy or has moved on to selling actual drills…To make use of these currently broken links, contact the site owners and point out your own site, asking them to point the link to you instead. Since they’ve given a link to a drill bits site before, they shouldn’t balk at doing it again, right? Read Tom Critchlow’s SEOMoz post to learn all about this. In this same manner, search for mentions of your drill bits company to see if you have indeed been mentioned online, without a link. If you find any instances of this, contact the site owner to ask for a link. They’ll be glad to take a break from thinking about drill bits, I bet.
Then there’s the old alternative to link building in such a lovely risk-averse manner...you could, um, buy them. That’s right. I said it. I feel like Chris Rock now.