Facilitating a comprehensive content and marketing strategy is crucial for brands wanting to maximize their influence within various niches. Without a concrete plan for targeting specific audiences, other competitors will move in and seize those niches. Through both organic and paid strategies, any brand can make progress over time in dominating among their audiences.

One such method is by building links that direct relevant traffic to your businesses and brands. There are common link building strategies used by many, but those that do not get used often are ripe for the taking by those who take advantage.

Today, we’ll look at three untraditional link building strategies you should consider.

Q&A Link Building

There are many hubs and platforms through which you can build links without having to beg for a mention or earn any prior credibility. Question and answer sites like Quora, Yahoo Answers and Reddit are great places where you can generate relevant and organic links that’ll push traffic back to your site.

While in most cases these sites produce what are known as nofollow links (meaning Google does not rank these links in assessing your domain’s quality), they nevertheless drive valuable traffic and can help maximize your sales, views, subscriptions and/or conversions. By pinging links on these platforms (often by answering a related question and providing supplemental information or listing your personal credentials), you can slowly generate a reliable base of traffic within related niches.

“Old Media” Link Building

In an age where digital marketing, search engine optimization and content creation all revolve around online presences, it can be easy to forget about traditional media. In this way, many brands are failing to generate maximum visibility, traffic and attention.

Through a variety of traditional media and old media-turned new, brands can either build links or replicate the effects that link building provides. One such example is radio: while on-air mentions aren’t links, many local radio stations may publish links on their website if you provide them with a newsworthy item. Interviews, for instance, can earn you both an on-air mention and a link via the interview page and/or podcast.

Other examples include local news websites, which are relatively easy to earn if your business or brand is engaged in the community or can provide insight or advice in your area of expertise (reach out to local newspapers and orgs proactively, as they are always seeking future points of contact for information on all sorts of topics).

Broken Link Alerting

There are countless links across the web that are currently broken; in fact, most websites have at least a few broken links right now. If you can prove yourself to be a valuable asset to other bloggers and webmasters, then you might just earn a bit of reciprocity in the process.

Using any number of link analysis tools available online, you can peruse sites that are relevant (but not in direct competition) to your own. With a variety of broken link examples in-hand, you can then contact the webmaster or bloggers responsible for the content and alert them to the situation. At this point, you can politely ask for a bit of credit in the form of a link in exchange for your assistance.

This method does not always result in links, but it is an easy and often fruitful way to build links in relatively little time.

With dozens of ways to build links, there are strategies that suit every brand’s needs. You can choose how you want to start pinging links, but these three strategies are among the lesser-used options available  to you.