Social media has opened up a whole new world when it comes to link building.
Gone are the days of the massive directory link submissions,  begging anyone and everyone for a link, and praying to the DMOZ god of directories for a link (well mostly, anyway).

Contextual link building is not new, necessarily, just the more current way of building links back to your site.  For those who would like a definition, you see this all over the place; it is when you find a link within any body of copy. This blog is littered with them. People often link back to a product or interesting piece of information.

Bloggers are often sought after sources for contextual links, especially those bloggers who are  popular.  Some will review a product or service for a fee. Some have been successful in selling ad space on their blog because of their popularity, so advertisers know that their ads are being seen.  Most bloggers will only promise to do their best to present and honest and fair review of a product, so hopefully, if you would decide to go this route, your product is a good one. Might be wise to ask to review the post before it is published. You’ll have to pay the fee either way, but at least they should give you the option of whether you want it posted or not.

Other places you might find contextual links are articles, emails, marketing materials, breadcrumb navigation and most websites include them right in the copy, where appropriate (sometimes where it is not appropriate, but that’s up to the site owner).  You need to make sure if you are doing a contextual link in your copy that it is relevant to the page you are on, that the anchor text (the actual wording of the link itself) lets the user know where the link goes, or what type of content they will find. Also, make sure that the page it points to holds some type of relevancy to the page it is coming from.  It would be silly to just stick a link to a page about frogs when the page you are on has nothing whatsoever to do with them.  Also its not advisable to stick purely gratuitous links in for the sake of passing on link love to your boss.