If you landed here to get a tip/trick/idea/screenshot, don’t worry, you can get that in the second half of the post. But as is customary here, I want to create some context by telling you a story.

While the weather is still pristine in Philadelphia, I walk to the coffee shop where I like to write on the weekends. On this particular morning it was quite beautiful outside. As I was on my way, I cut through a park to stop and enjoy the nature.

Moments after I sat down on a bench, a women and her friendly dog sat down next to me. After the usual small talk, I asked what her dog’s name is.

“His name is Grib,” she said.

“You mean like the Russian word for ‘mushroom’ (Гриб),” I asked.

“Yes!”

The conversation continued.

Unconventional link building and brand advocating that led to a sale

After musing over our admiration for mushrooms and the Russian countryside, she asked about my backpack and wanted to know where I got it.

“I got it online. I love Adidas Originals and the only place I could find it was in Finish Line’s online store. I had a great experience ordering it and got it shipped with no problems.”

“I can give you the link to it if you like.”

She pulled out her iPhone, typed in the link I gave her, pulled up the site and bought the backpack – in the park – on the spot.

Is that link building? Maybe not in the traditional sense that some SEOs consider link building to be, but it’s link building to me because the principle is exactly the same:

You help people discover stuff. You help businesses sell stuff.

And think about this – because I acted as a brand advocate for Adidas and Finish Line, I could influence a complete stranger, who has a dog named Mushroom, to instantly buy a product. Two brands won and the stranger on the park bench got something she feels will make her life better.

How a brand advocate used Twitter to get a blogger to give a followed link

Alright, here’s an unconventional example of how this works in a more traditional link building sense, but that illustrates how a brand advocate can influence one site to link to another site.

@explorionary What's the best link? I usually hunt plugins directly from the WP admin panel.

— Roger Dooley (@rogerdooley) September 18, 2012

@rogerdooley His plugins are here - bit.ly/2YP4tk - I'm not affiliated with him, just appreciate his plugins, they are excellent. Thx

— David Cohen (@explorionary) September 18, 2012

@rogerdooley Very cool. Thank you, Roger. This is awesome.

— David Cohen (@explorionary) September 18, 2012

As you can see from the Twitter conversation, I reached out to Roger Dooley on behalf of Joost De Valk because I’m an advocate, not an affiliate, for Joost’s WordPress SEO Plugin. It’s a great product that I have benefitted from and I trust the plugin enough to tell others about it.

There was no personal gain by asking Roger to give Joost a link. But I felt like it would create a better experience for anybody who read Roger’s excellent post about writing headlines to have easy access to Joost’s plugin.

So what?

Please don’t get hung up on thinking about how to scale getting brand advocates to build links for you on a tactical level – that’s not the point of my post.

If you’re an agency-side SEO, I challenge you to think beyond just improving a site’s rankings, but to think about developing skills to get buy-in from your clients to creatively find ways to accentuate what your clients do well, and how they uniquely solve problems for people, as a catalyst to build links.