Internet Business Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Getting links is a huge key to internet business marketing. We’ve written before that Wikipedia is a good place to look for a link. A link from Wikipedia is great for two main reasons: the link will appear on a page with information about your site, and the domain is incredibly trustworthy. Relevance and importance of linking sites are cornerstones of internet marketing.

Fortunately, getting a link from Wikipedia isn’t that hard. This guide will provide the information you need to make it happen.

Know the rules

Wikipedia is run by people like you and me. Anyone can edit it, but other users can also remove your content. However, once you know the rules, you’ll be ready to go.

For our purposes, there are two important things to remember. First, Wikipedia strictly prohibits advertising. This doesn’t mean that you cannot create an article for your business or organization. Rather, it means that the article must be verifiable and from a neutral point of view.

Second, an organization must be notable to have its own Wikipedia article. This basically means that you’ll need reliable secondary sources to back up whatever you include on your company’s page. Things like newspaper articles, television coverage, and books qualify here. If a source has very shallow coverage, you will need more sources.

Sign up

To create new articles, you’ll need a Wikipedia account. The sign up process is simple. You really just have to pick a username, set a password, etc.

Once you’re signed in, you have lots of preferences you can tinker with. But we’ll just cut to the chase and create your article.

Start a new article

Like all things at Wikipedia, there’s a great help page that you’ll want to peruse. To boil it down, you just create a page, type your info, and save it.

Before you start an article about your organization, it’s important to make sure one doesn’t already exist. You can use the yellow search box at Starting a new page to verify this.

When you search using this form, it will only look for articles with that title. Be sure to look for variations. Assuming an article is not found, you’ll see a link below the search box that allows you to “create this page.” Click that link to create your article.

Edit your article

You should now see a large text box on your screen. This is where you can type your article. Once you’re done typing, click “Save Page” below the box. It’s really that simple.

You’ll want to include formatting in your article, which you can do with the markup buttons above the form. Fortunately, there’s a handy page on editing articles that includes commonly used formatting.

Don’t forget to “Save Changes.” If you don’t, all your hard editing will be lost.

The result

When a person looks for information about your company, they should quickly find the Wikipedia article. It’s a trusted domain, and you’ll have a link from there to the company’s website. This should help with your website’s overall search engine placement as well as generating new traffic to the site.

Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy your hard work.