Introduction:

Since March 2011 I'm a supporter of Save the Children with a sponsorship (the child I support is called Christopher and lives in Malawi). Before you read this article, I invite you to consider making a donation to a non-profit organization and help some people less lucky than ourselves.

And now, let's come to the intent of this post: as the title says, its aim is doing link building and at the same time trying to do some charity. Let me explain how ...

We all know that donations are an effective building links mean, but, maybe for lack of adequate financial resources or lack of ideas, I know very few people who engage in this activity.

To both the possible impediments, I give you a simple answer in 5 (+1) steps.

1. Find a non-profit organization with an affiliate program

Usually, non-profit organizations rely on intermediaries, so you can look at the major affiliation sites to find which of them has an active affiliate program in your country or worldwide (in Italy, for example, we have Save the Children and SOS Villaggio dei bambini). When you have found one, apply for it with your website.

2. Create an effective landing page

Probably the affiliate programs will provide quite convincing images, but you may need to supplement them with text, layout, graphics and calls to action. Before going online, you may have to test some different versions of your landing page with your friends and family (however, people not involved in web marketing) and ask them which of these landing pages convinces them more to make a donation.

3. Say that you also donate

Emphasize that for each donation you are going to add a contribution of xx%. This is the fundamental part, since what differentiates yours from other landing pages, is that you're not just encouraging visitors to support a charity, but promise to do some with them.

The percentage that you donate can be the one that the affiliate program recognizes for the lead (basically, you're giving back the earned commissions) but if you will, of course, you can choose to donate a little more. In this case, if you have a very visited website and you fear that the number of conversions can be so high to require a big contribution on your part, you could decide to maintain the earned percentage and add a bonus per XXX conversions.

4. Identify websites to ask for a link

Sites that support humanitarian causes will probably be happy to give visibility to your initiative and link to your site and your landing page. All you have to do is finding them. How? Here are three ways:

• Do some queries on Google (even better, Blog Search or Discussions). Based on the organization you are promoting, you could search something like "sponsor a child", "children sponsorship" and so on. You can also refine queries using advanced operators like allinurl and allintitle.
• Use the Search by image feature, seeking whom has published images of your humanitarian organization.
• Use OSE and find out which sites link to non-profit organizations and if among them there are some you can contact.

5. Send emails

Once you have collected a good number of email addresses, contact site owners to report your initiative. Be sure to mention a goal (eg. "we want to reach € 10,000 in donations and we'll be adding another 1000 €), this will make more concrete your request, that will be even more effective if you also show some first results (eg. "for now, through our page were donated € 1000, to which we will add another 100 €"). Don't forget to mention that you would be very happy if the other person wanted to help, but that also an aid to give visibility to the initiative would be appreciated: a link would be of great help to achieve the goal.

6. Be social

Obviously, don't forget to share (and invite to share) your landing page on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and other social networks. As it seems increasingly clear, tweets, likes and +1s, will always have more weight for rankings, and word of mouth will bring you a lot farther than you believe.

Conclusion:

I've shown you a simple method you could use to obtain spontaneous links. In case you want to put it into practice, I would be happy for two reasons: either because you found my article useful, and because you will - at the last indirectly - help someone in need.

I'm going to use it with an astrology website, Oroscopo.bz, with 160.000 Facebook fans: if you want to donate (or give us a link) you're welcome (/dem/save-the-children.html is the landing page).

PS. Please, don't cheat: if you set a landing page saying you will donate, I hope you'll really do it.