Here at Ahrefs we decided to join the “expert roundup” craze and publish a monstrous piece of our own. And since we sincerely believe, that there’s no better topic for SEOs to discuss other than Link Building, here are the questions we craved answered:1) Please tell us about your favourite “white hat link building strategy that scales”.(What makes it your favourite one? How to execute it properly?)2) How do you scale it?(What tools do you use? Where do you hire people to scale it?)
We’ve reached out to 100+ SEOs and Marketers and ended up with a final list of 90 answers.
Boy that was fun!
All in all, I can easily drill down all 90 answers into a single screenshot:
Yep! Almost everyone was praising Content Marketing and baiting links with epic content.
But don’t get me wrong here, I’m not advocating against reading the answers below, just because they prove that “Content IS King”.
You’ll find tons of awesome tips below, I promise!
Here are just a few things you can learn from this monstrous roundup:
- Skyscraper technique seems to be the SEO trend of 2015. Lots of people are referencing it!
- There are quite a few mentions of tools that I personally never heard of. LikeWrike or Loot for example.
- You may also discover some new marketing strategies. I enjoyed the “Siege Media’s 2-step outreach process” mentioned by Nate Shivar and Skyscraper 2.0 by Gael Breton.
And just for your convenience, here are a few quick links to some of the Link Building strategies mentioned in this roundup:
- Outdated link building by Nimrod Flores
- Broken link building by Robert Mening
- Image link building by Gareth James
- Surveys by John Rampton
- PBNs by Doug Cunnington
- & many many more.
And because we have so many answers, we have created this handy list of experts with quick links to each of their answers:
90 Experts Share Their Favourite White Hat Linkbuilding Strategies:
So let’s jump right into the answers!
We’ll start from Rand (obviously)…
I love blogging, because for me/Moz, it’s something we’re good at, passionate about, and resonates with our audience.
However, this depends on the field you’re in and your personal strengths.
When I give advice about how to earn links/amplification/inbound attention , I urge folks to find the intersection of their strengths, what resonates with their audience (and their audience’s influencers), and what they love to do.
There is no use doing something you’re good at if you don’t actually love it, because you won’t want to improve and you won’t get positive energy from repeating and scaling it.
We’ve built an audience development team at Moz of 4 folks who focus on creating, discovering, and promoting the best blog content in our field.
They set the bar incredibly high, and then find ways to continually improve.
This includes the creation of a broad content strategy, a keyword research process, guest content strategy, a content calendar, and a unique metrics system we call 1Metric to help us optimize.
You can see that process/metric described here with illustrations: One Content Metric to Rule Them All
White Hat really means only one route:
“Provide better, easier to digest solutions to visitors’ problems than anyone else does.”
The way to achieve this is with killer content that entinces people to share!
You have two main camps: people who claim quality content isn’t needed to rank, and people who feel ‘write it and they will come’.
The problem is, neither is true. If you are not creating, or curating quality content, there is no way you will get people linking and sharing it of their own free will, meaning you will need to do things not considered ‘White Hat’ to get it ranking.
Of course there are long, long tail keywords and certain small local niches that will rank very easily, but we are talking about larger, income producing niches.
The second camp are also wrong, this infographic from 2012 (which means it is most likely much more than double these numbers today) highlights that there are more than 2,000,000 blog posts per day, over 500 million (yes, too many zeros to type out in number form) status updates (yes, this is a form of content too) and 800,000+ videos uploaded… DAILY!
If you think great content alone will move you up, you are in for a rude awakening. Here is the key:
1. Create Killer Content, your best stuff, even if it takes 40+ hours
2. Spend at least 4 times as long, promoting and repurposing that content
The reason this method works is because you create 1 killer, 2,000+ word post with quotes and citations from authorities in your niche, images, videos and even polls or research findings.
You then reach out to those influencers that you quoted and ask them for additional comment on your post (and a mention via their social media channels.)
Here is an example of a killer post you can create
For this post we contacted top influencers and asked them to answer the question about how to start an SEO business.
As you can see from the post, it has over 300 shares and the site is BRAND NEW (it is one of the first pieces of content) so all those shares were from influencers quoted, and their followers.
3. Split and repurpose the content
Turn the post into a PDF file that you:
- Give away in exchange for an optin;
- Submit to all PDF submission sites to generate traffic and backlinks.
- Turn the post into slides and make a video of the post content and share it on the top video sites, once again with links back.
- Take the audio file from the video and upload it to all the podcasting and audio sites (yes including iTunes) and link back (this will give you links from sources like Apple).
Bonus: If you want all the steps on splitting and repurposing content, I have created a free PDF for you. Get it from here, no optin required!
In future, once you have done the first couple yourself and know and understand the process, you can teach the process outlined above.
When you are scaling, aim to do at least 1 of these posts a month, if you have the resources, 2-4 would speed up the organic and social growth of your site.
There are three main moving parts to scaling this method
- Content Creation and Curation – for this you should hire an expert if you don’t have time to do it yourself
As you have done the first couple yourself, you know the work involved and can walk them through exactly what you would like.
- Reaching out to influencers you have quoted or asked for comment to add to the post, and larger sites that link to other content inferior, or less related to the one you have created
Suggest they replace the link with your link (this also works well for outdated content links)
You could either do this yourself, even when scaling, or a team member you trust. The reason is they are contacting on your behalf and therefore represent you.
Another option is a PR or marketing agency, but be careful they fully understand what you are looking to achieve.
- The splitting and sharing of content, this should be done by a VA that you can find online for about $450 a month
Each post, to split and share the content would most likely take them 3-4 days, so having a full time VA on this task will allow you to scale to 4-5 of these killer posts per month. (More than enough for any business).
Another option to spread the word and get shares is promoting the content on Facebook via the ‘boost’ feature.
Here is an example post that we did that got over 300 Facebook shares, just from a $10 ‘boost’
My favorite link building tactic is to focus on writing exceptionally good content.
If you shift your time, focus and money into creating great content that educates people, you’ll notice that you’ll get more links than if you manually built them.
In the short run it will be costly, but in the long run you’ll save money and see better results.
Read more here: Why Content Marketing is the New SEO
You can scale it by hiring writers and an editor to manage those writers. Typically you’ll find that the writers from the Problogger job board.
My favorite “white hat link building strategy that scales” is the The Skyscraper Technique by Brian Dean.
I combined parts of his technique on my first roundup post “80 Productivity Tips From Incredibly Busy Experts” with Jon Morrow`s advice on creating a massive roundup post.
And the results?
It was like pouring rocket fuel on a big bonfire.
*Kaboooom*
The roundup post resulted in the following:
– 5707 visitors in 6 days.
– 22 693 page views
– 72 comments
– Over 700 shares on social media
Here is the short version of my success:
Step 1: Find a keyword that you want to rank for, which will be within your target niche.
I chose the keyword “productivity tips”.
Normally it`s recommended to use a long(er) tail keyword.
However, I had a good feeling that the massive roundup post would be a success, so I chose the keyword that I wanted to rank for on Google in the future.
In other words: it`s a long-term strategy.
Step 2: Create epic content that is relevant for your audience
I chose the roundup post because I wanted to create great content, build relationships with other online entrepreneurs, in addition to getting social shares and comments.
I sent an email with the following question to the people I wanted to participate:
What is your best productivity tip that you use in your business?
Step 3: Make sure that your headline and content will fit your opt-in offer at your website
My free opt-in is the free eBook “Insane Productivity Hacks”, which helps people to DOUBLE their productivity within 7 days.
This means that the productivity question for the roundup post is spot on.
The same goes for the title “80 Productivity Tips From Incredibly Busy Experts”.
Step 4: Promote to participants when the post goes live
Send an email to all participants informing that the post has gone live, and nicely ask them to promote it.
Step 5: Promote blog post in all your social media channels + email list and forums (if you are in any).
The experts say that you should spend 20 % creating your content and the remaining 80 % promoting the heck out of your content.
What remains?
3 activities: promote, promote and promote.
Do you want to hear the crazy part?
I haven`t even gotten started yet by promoting the content to the top 100 social media influencers who shared a similar post.
The same goes for promoting the content to other websites that has created a backlink to a similar post.
The best way to scale it is to hire someone, like a VA to do most of the dirty work for you, like contacting the participants, putting together the body of the post and promoting.
I haven`t done this yet, since I want to crack the code by doing it myself first.
Only by having successfully done an activity myself, will I be able to teach other people to do it properly.
Outdated link building!
It’s similar to broken link building but it’s not as popular (yet) to SEO’s, at least to my impression.
And being not that popular (yet), makes it my favorite right now.
Because there’s not too many SEO’s doing it right now, I’m getting a really good conversion rate with my email outreach.
It works like this:
Basically you’ll just be looking for websites that have gone under but the domains are not dropped yet. This is different from broken link building since you are not looking for links on people’s sites that are pointing to pages that return 404 error or DNS lookup failed.
These things cannot be found by looking for broken links first.
Instead, what you’d want to do is the opposite – find those well-linked, recently out-of-business sites first. After finding them, use Ahrefs to find out their most popular pages.
From there you’ll know the most-linked pages that were previously on those sites which are now non-existent. What you have to do then is to find out what the content on those pages were and create similar and better ones.
Afterwards and finally, reach out to the owners of the websites linking to those pages. All you have to do is tell them the pages/resources they are linking to are not available anymore or the businesses operating those sites already closed shop.
Then introduce the alternative/replacement, which is the content on your site.
How I scale it
This strategy is easily scalable with proper and effective use of tools. In fact, you can even just have a good VA read this and have him/her implement the whole process all by him/herself.
For finding those well-linked, recently expired domains, you can use sites likeExpiredDomains.net.
What I really like about this site is that you can search for domains that contain your niche keywords.
And you can refine your search further with a comprehensive list of filters. To maximize effectiveness and quality of the domains returned, I make sure I get only those domains that are currently still on auction:
There’s already great chances that the domains that come up from this are all about the industry/niche you’re targeting and that they are still fresh (not likely to have been used for PBN’s yet.), so that’s a huge time-saver right there.
And then you get the domain stats right along with your search results. So you’ll know right away which ones are worth checking out further.
And then I use Ahrefs to find out the most-linked pages from those domains, like I’ve described above.
For finding out what the contents of those pages actually were, the siteArchive.org comes very handy.
When it comes to producing content, I use the team of excellent and experienced writers I formed from the vast pool of writers at WriterAccess.com. You can form your own team there for any niche/industry by posting a casting call and selecting the best applicants.
This took away a great headache for me.
Finding excellent and easily scalable writers for your SEO needs isn’t that easy as you may already know.
Lastly and most importantly, for finding out exactly what websites and pages link to those outdated and unavailable content (which is the whole point of this all), I use Ahrefs again.
Visiting those sites usually gives you info on how to contact them – email, Twitter or Facebook, etc..
Surveys!
I conduct surveys and collect stats to create visually appealing data for journalists and pitch them out.
Figure out which publication (major) that you want to target and collect data on your users that they’d want to report about and find interesting.
Data is something people can never take away from you and is interesting if you frame it right. I execute it by using Survey Monkey or like software.
Gather data and make it visually appealing. Next put together a post on this for your site and for theirs (so they don’t have to do the legwork).
It works most of the time.
Scale – don’t overdo it.
Plan 1 a month and 2 target publications to run with it. Hire a freelance writer to write up your posts. This will help take a lot of the workload off your back and allow you to become more creative with your mind.
I’m a huge fan of putting together a long white paper on your business blog.
Make sure this is 7-10k words long.
Then putting together 5-10 different guest blogs that talk about the data (you need to have stats and data in there) that’s in your white paper.
These will be put up on other sites to really help people learn as well get people back to your site and the post ranking.
I’ve found that this gives the readers a lot of really good information while helping your site rank for a variety of keywords and searches.
Scaling it is as simple as hiring the right person and pumping out the right types of content that are amazing for your brands. I use wrike.com for managing the process. I have used loot-app.com for crowd sourcing content.
My favorite “white hat link building strategy that scales” is broken link building.
I think re-building broken links are a win for everyone. A successful broken link building campaign helps improve user experience (better for webmasters).
It strengthens the overall Web (better for search engines). And it gets relevant, contextual, editorial links for website owners (better for SEO).
I think many SEOs discount broken link building as something that can’t scale. Traditionally, it’s been known as the safe but tedious link building strategy.
But I think the tedious part simply not true. The key is to break it down into parts and scale each part of the process.
Scaling Broken Link Research
Instead of loading webpages manually and running a broken link checker, scale broken link research by mining websites that are disproportionately more likely to have broken inbound or outbound links.
In mining terminology, it’s the difference between sifting for gold nuggets and searching for a motherlode.
But with tools like Ahrefs and WikiGrabber, there’s no real reason not to scale broken link research.
Use high authority sites like Wikipedia to find your first broken link that will lead you to hundreds and thousands of others.
Each one of these broken links will have even more websites that link to it.
Pro tip with Ahrefs: Be sure to use the Broken Outgoing Links feature. Pair it with high authority sites in your niche that link out, and you’ll be set.
Scaling Content Replacement
In order to pitch a website on replacing a broken link with a link to your website, you have to have something for them to link to. And as many SEOs know, there are few things do not “scale” like high-quality content assets.
The key here is to do a couple things.
First, making sure you are setting yourself up for success with broken link research.
Again, the goal is to find broken link “motherlodes” where you can build a single content asset and get enough links to recoup the investment.
Second, make sure broken link building isn’t a strategy that operates in silo with its own resources.
Broken link opportunities should be integrated into your content strategy. It should make use of past assets.
As you scale and add resources to other parts of your marketing, you should use them to complement your broken link building.
The aggregate effect will be a campaign that can go well beyond getting one or two links to dozens and hundreds in a scalable workflow.
Scaling Broken Link Outreach
First off, scaling outreach shouldn’t be measured by how many emails can you send out, but by how many links you can get.
The key is spending a lot of time on prospects that are more likely to replace the broken link, and less on sending a sheer volume of pitch emails.
I get to that point by borrowing Siege Media’s 2-step outreach process.
Send out lots of short, introductory emails that pre-qualify your contacts. See if you can even get a response.
Once you get a response, then spend time on a manual, custom pitch.
Since you’re dealing with pre-qualified prospects (aka, they’ve responded and are interested), you’ll be able to get more links in less time than you have by simply focusing on the number of pitch emails sent.
There’s an ingrained belief in SEO circles that that link building is incredibly hard to scale. The truth is that it’s hard to learn effective tactics, it’s actually not that hard to scale.
Until two months ago, Expert Round-Up Articles (ERAs) where one of my primary white hat link building tactics.
What’s an ERA? You’re reading one!
ERAs are fantastic for generating links for three reasons:
- When you feature the advice of experts, they’re infinitely more inclined to link to your content, or to respond favourably to a guest post request
- They generate a ton of social shares, which means your content reaches a ton of new eyeballs which likely includes other bloggers who have never ready your blog before and are now more likely to link to your stuff
- The content is usually very high value, which makes sense because it’s the thoughts of a group of experts on a particular topic. So because of this, the content itself is very link-worthy
The downside of ERAs is that they take quite a bit of coordinating.
It’s hard to make them super-efficient. There’s identifying the targets to feature, the outreach, the compiling of responses (which come in at varying times), formatting the article and so on.
ERAs are effective, but even when very streamlined, get trumped for efficiency by another of my favourite tactics:
Top Lists
Efficiency and a clearly defined process is the key to scaling and I choose Top Lists as the weapon of choice for a white hat link building tactic because of efficiency.
They achieve exactly 1, 2 and 3 above that an ERA provides, but they take about 1/4 of the time to execute.
The outreach component is completely cut out, the compiling of the article is far quicker and although the final piece of content is lower-quality than that of an ERA, they build new connections with influencers just as well in a fraction of the time.
Summary of My Process:
If I do not know the niche well, I get a VA to provide a list of potential bloggers to feature in the list.
I will usually choose the final list myself because I strategically choose influencers I want to reach + bloggers I feel are a high probably of accepting a guest post request after I publish the article.
Top lists will usually feature an image of the featured blog/blogger, links to their website and social profiles along with a description of the blog.
This can eat a lot of time, so I get a VA to insert the images and create the links. I will usually do the description of the blog/blogger because I want to make sure that’s accurate.
I have a draft email template that is sent to featured bloggers (see below for that template!).
I have this loaded into Buzzstream (not essential) and a VA will send it for me. This template includes a request for a guest post or guest post swap.
I handle all the comments and questions that come back as these are usually related to guest posts which is exactly what I aim to get from the tactics.
I will usually write the guest posts myself because aside from a link building tactic, they provide an opportunity to expose my site to a new audience.
Scaling is cool, but I choose to make the creation of the Top Lists efficient and don’t mind putting in the hard yards on the actual guest post to create a quality piece of content
Bonus Tip: Get a badge made up that and email that to the bloggers featured as well. Some will place it on their site and link to the article from it.
Bonus Tip #2: This is a link building tactic after all, so I create them with links in mind.
I usually prioritize including bloggers that have evidence of linking to articles they’ve been featured in because I know I’m a good shot at getting an easy link from that.
Tools Required:
Zero! You can use Buzzstream.com, but it’s not essential.
Template that I use to advise people they’re been featured in the Top List (includes guest post request):
Hi {name}
Just a quick email to let you know that I featured you in my list of the Top {insert relevant details of the top list}
Here’s the article {insert relevant details of the top list}
I really hope it delivers some new visitors to your site!
I would also like to invite you to publish a guest post on my site in the near future as I’m looking for experts like yourself that can add value to my audience (currently around 14,000 visitors per month).
If you’re open to it, I’d love to create an article for your site also so please let me know if that is of interest.
Once again, I hope your inclusion in the list drives some new readers to your blog and I look forward to staying connected!
Regards.
My favorite white hat link building technique that scales is expert round ups.
This is my favorite one to do because it allows you to get great links, connect with really influential people, and it helps promote you as an expert in the industry.
Executing this is all about building relationships with the experts. This can usually be done by personally connecting with them or by connecting with them through someone you know.
After you have made the connection, you ask them to be apart of your epic round up and let them know which other experts will be involved.
Once you get their responses, make sure to let them know when their post goes live and make it easy for them to link back to your content.
If you get enough well known individuals rounded up, you’ll be able to get huge traffic, social shares, and backlinks from their followers and from all the people that end up hearing about the post.
If you’re thinking about scaling it, there are some services that offer help such asthis one.
By far our favorite link building tactic over at Authority Hacker is the Skyscraper technique.
It’s not always easy and a lot of people are struggling to make it work and your content certainly needs to be top notch to pull it off but if you do, it scales so much more.
You can then reverse engineer the sites linking to everyone ranking for your target keywords and show them your content.
In the health niche, some of our skyscraper campaigns allowed us to get over 40 linking root domains to a single piece of content using that technique alone:
In order to run the skyscraper technique successfully we use a combination ofAhrefs for data mining and Buzzstream for outreach (the 2 tools plug together perfectly as you will see in the tutorial).
Here is a summary of the process in case you are not familiar with it:
1. We find a piece of mediocre content on a competitor’s site that received a lot of link love, preferably targeting a keyword with some search volume. You can use the Ahrefs top page function for that:
2. We craft an epic piece of content on the same topic, we always go above and beyond for these.
Here is an example of a recent piece of that type on Authority Hacker targeting the “how to make money blogging keywords”.
Given the fact that one successful piece can generate dozens of high quality links for your site, it’s really worth investing a lot of resources in a single piece of content.
I highly recommend you work on your formatting skills as well. We found that content design is almost as important as what you actually say.
3. Collect the information of the sites linking to ALL the top 10 sites ranking for your target keyword inside Buzzstream (find them using Ahrefs) and email them saying that you like their content and you’d like to show them something they might like.
4. If they ask to see it, send them the link to the piece and offer them to include it in their content (and to write a paragraph to fit it in the content).
5. Rinse and repeat 
We actually developed that process further into what we call a “Skyscraper funnel” where we also offer the people that said yes to become regular sharers of our content and to also contribute content to our site (which they then share).
This allows us to go past building links and to actually build content partnership with influencers in the industry.
Here is a little diagram of what this process looks like:
If you’d like to learn more about this process, we recently did a free webinar about it, you can watch the replay on Youtube if you want.
My favorite white-hat link building strategy that scales is writing content.
I know, as an advanced (or perhaps black hat) SEO you are rolling your eyes right now.
But the thing is – it is true.
Creating content that people care about and want to share amplifies the social reach of your content 100 fold, and helps you gain valuable links that you otherwise would not have.
Would you rather write emails and perform outreach to webmasters with a technique that likely has a less then 2% response rate?
Or, would you rather reach targeted people in your audience through keywords they use, and speak to them in an effective way that will get them to close on the deal on your website?
Personally, I’d much rather use the latter.
So what if you are not a writer?
If you are not a writer it is still very easy to find writers and pay for content so that you can scale this link building properly.
Wait a minute, you may be asking. Content and links are two different concepts.
Why are you talking about them in the same article? I am talking about them because combining them into a white hat process with solid market research behind them is what is going to help you set your site apart from the competition, and ultimately beat them.
So how would you build a process like this?
First, Perform Research Into Your Market Niche
This part is important. The best way to accurately scale your content is to first find out what the top competition in your market are doing.
This is done through market research. Find out who the competition is, what they are writing about, when they are writing about it, why they are writing about it, and how much they are writing.
The amount of words alone don’t always equate to high quality content that’s going to garner links and scale in your industry properly, so it’s important to understand how the content is written and the approach your competition is taking towards their target market.
When you perform a deep dive like this, you gain valuable insights into who their customers are, what they buy, when they buy, where they go to buy, why they buy from them, and how they persuade them to buy from them.
Researching social media is another important aspect of research that should not be ignored. Perform research into the influencers in your niche.
These are the people you will need to make connections with if you hope to be able to share your content effectively.
The more you make those social connections, the easier it will be for you to amplify the social reach of your content.
By obtaining this kind of information, you can BE BETTER THAN YOUR COMPETITORS.
Don’t ever be the fool who “just writes great content” who only does just enough to get by. Be the leader who writes EXCEPTIONAL CONTENT so you can obtain the best , most valuable links to beat your competitors.
By taking this approach, you can literally rise above your competition rapidly and become an authority in your niche in a shorter amount of time than it would take otherwise.
But, the key here is not to just pad your content with worthless information. It is important to make sure that your longer content is also valuable and meaningful to those who will share it.
After Research, Hire Writers
When you expand the reach of your content, you need to think big.
Is your content national? Or local? If it’s national, you need content writers with breadth of experience and knowledge in every area of your country.
This way, you can scale your content writing approach to fit the wide audience you are going after.
Decide on how much quality you will accept and how much you are willing to pay for it. The better the quality, the more you are usually going to pay.
How Do You Find These Writers to Scale Your Project?
You can place an ad on Criagslist in the areas that you wish to hire writers from. Be sure to specify what you are willing to pay, how many words your article will take, the topic you want them to write about, and how you intend to use the content.
You can find writers for industry expert posts by contacting writers in your niche, and having them write content for you this way.
You can interview industry leaders and ask top 100 questions posts about things that make them tick, and these will offer significant insight into how they became so successful.
The trick is to assess how much content you plan to writer
Building the Machine
Let’s be honest here for a minute.
To scale properly, unless you are a programmer with a fortuitous skillset and can put together the ultimate content automation machine, you are not going to be the type of person who can automate every part of this process on your own unless you are also a good manager.
This is where the non-programmers can shine and build a massive machine for their company. For this process to work you need people.
You need to be able to manage a team, and you need to be able to constantly keep track of a wide variety of different cogs so that the machine can function properly.
Let’s take a look at what an example content writing machine may look like using a fake California personal injury lawyer website as an example.
Say we have a California personal injury lawyer website – we want to think big and make it a huge social presence in all of California.
Content is but one small cog in a large machine but this should give you an idea of how to think so that you can build your own machine:
With this in place, you can then create an editorial calendar spreadsheet that will have the details of every part of your machine – who is writing what, who is sharing what, etc.
The last thing you need is to reach a point in the process where you have a bottleneck occurring that disrupts deadlines, or, even worse, derails the entire project completely. Use the editorial calendar to keep your content machine in check.
When you setup the machine with the amount of writers you will need to complete this task, the rest of your steps become clear. Unless you can type 250 wpm, you need to hire people to execute your project through Craigslist, Odesk, or Elance.
Finding writers online is not hard at all. The hard part is bringing them together and organizing the machine as such so that you can ensure that the process continues to work for you towards the end goal you have in mind for the project.
Keep weekly checks in place in your editorial calendar to make sure that you are making proper milestones and continue to post the content and share the content to your social media followers
(by this point you should have already performed all the research necessary to perform this task effectively).
Then, from the editorial calendar comes the social media execution calendar.
This is where you will take all of your editorials and have them in a spreadsheet arranged in such a way that builds a solid foundation for you to hire social media posters to share your content.
Or, you could do all of the work yourself and schedule & automate posts ahead of time through programs like HootSuite or SocialOomph.
This is where the magic of the social automation happens – so long as you observe proper pacing in scheduling the sharing and posting of your content to your massive social networks, you should not run into any problems with Twitter when it comes to being marked as spam.
By scaling this approach – you can try using different values depending on how large your website is going to be, how many people you want to reach, and whether or not you want to be #1.
Play around with them and see how much of a difference these numbers make to your link building.
When you work with these plans effectively, you will be able to see how much an effective white hat link building plan that scales properly will help your website continue its meteoric rise in the search results.
Remember, search engines want high quality content to give to their customers.
Give it to them, and you will be rewarded through an ever-increasing natural, white-hat link profile that scales. Ignore them and do a haphazard content program that sucks, and you will be unable to take your website anywhere.
I’m a fan of using group interviews (a lot like this one) because of how well they work.
This involves curating a list of the top folks in your niche and asking them a single question that your audience would love to know the answer to.
You can then publish the answers in a single post and the fact that people have contributed to the post makes them more likely to share it or link to it.
This can be a great way to get editorial links when done right.
In the past I’ve used this tactic and earned links from some quality sites that would be difficult to get a link from using any other tactic.
Don’t do this for link building though, there’s a much bigger benefit to doing these types of blog posts.
They typically generate a lot of social shares and traffic thanks to so many people contributing.
They get people talking and they can contain a lot of valuable insights (Yep, SEO continues to evolve as it has done for a long time, I share some additional insights in this post).
Aside from all of these benefits, you can use these types of posts as a way to get talking to influencers. From there, you can forge and develop a relationship.
But the key is making it a mutually beneficial relationship.
Your goal should never be to get a quick link and you should never ask people to link to you. You’re playing the long game here.
You’ll get more from creating good will in the market place and forging relationships with influencers than anything else.
I haven’t scaled this tactic, as I prefer the personal approach but it can be done.
One of best ways to scale this while still using a personal approach is to reach out to people with a well written email and ask them to fill in a form via Google Forms (or something similar).
A spreadsheet in Google Docs can then be used to populate a spreadsheet with all of the responses, making it very straight forward to compile the post.
I can’t help but go all “local search” on these questions.
That’s my foundation, and I am going to stick to it.
With every link that you build, acquire, or already have, get a citation (business name, address, phone number) with it. If you got written up in the Globe and Mail, received a link, but didn’t think to also ask for a citation, you’re not doing it right.
Likewise, if you have a citation, are seeking a citation, and are not trying to get a link there too, well…you know.
When we start working with a new client we run a link and citation audit, find the links without citations, and the citations without links. Outreach. Quick win, very little work, easily scaled.
Citation audits, the NAP Hunter tool is great, but even just straight up manual search will get the job done.
Or, a $7 audit via Loganix.
Very basic stuff, but too often overlooked. Even by myself, it took Brian Dean of Backlinko to remind me today that I told him about this 4 years ago.
The best was to create a healthy link profile is through an organic approachwith a clearly definitive content strategy.
You have to be committed to creating and promoting content through your digital roadmap. That means a lot of research before you start the process.
Consider that a strong content strategy in today’s digital world isn’t just about the written word, it includes videos, infographics and evergreen articles.
Sure, getting links from authority websites in your niche doesn’t hurt the process, but that takes building relationships.
There’s no better place to start those relationships than on social networks. This is sometimes a long process, but it can establish your authority and your ability to get your content and services out there. Ultimately, your content has to be worth linking to.
Scaling anything, particularly content, requires organization. You have to define the content roles and the goals of that content.
Sometimes, curating content is enough, while with some clients, you have to include a more robust strategy, based on their immediate needs and goals.
We’ve used a variety of tools but nothing works better than a custom editorial calendar. There you can insert authors, research, start date, published date, publishing venue, etc.
Some tools below are a few we have used from time to time.
Ultimately, when you’re looking for a large reach in the shortest amount of time, then contributing to well known publications is one of the best methods we’ve found to establish long-term readerships.
Link building involves a set of multiple techniques used to promote a website, but I will focus on our favorite ones.
The first part of link building is finding the link opportunities, i.e. the websites that are likely to link to you.
Although search results can help you with this, you need an additional tool in order to assess the value of the links in question.
One of the tools that can be used for this purpose is ahrefs, because the report generated with this tool includes backlink analysis, as well as the list of links and broken links.
Secondly, you have to have very good content, the kind of content that will attract the users to like, share and comment.
These are some samples of great content:
- How To Get More Search Traffic With Long Tail Keywords
- Advanced Content Analysis in Google Analytics
- SEO Tutorial. The ultimate SEO 2.0 guide
Explore the competition
This link building strategy involves exploring your competitors’ link profile in order to find out how to improve your link opportunities by focusing on links you can earn.
You should only seek link opportunities from websites of higher quality.
This strategy consists of several steps:
- Identify the competitors
- Identify the competitors’ link profile
- Identify the achievable links
- Establish the contact
Authority websites
Another strategy used in looking for new link opportunities is reaching out to authority websites. This strategy is based on the premises that authority websites’ links are more valuable and thus worthier in the link profile.
In the process of obtaining links from authority websites, follow these steps:
- Identify authority websites related to the topic of your website
- Identify the achievable links
- Establish the contact
Influence marketing
The final stage of the process of reaching out and seeking link opportunities is a strategy where you find individuals who would be willing to recommend you and link to you.
This includes contacting journalists and influencers in the same sector your business is in.
The following steps will facilitate this link building technique:
- Use search results to identify journalists / influencers related to your industry
- Use social media to identify journalists / influencers related to your industry
- Search using the keywords related to your website
- Establish contact
Establishing contact
As previously mentioned, most of the times you will need to get in touch with the webmaster/owner of the site you want to get a link from.
It’s very important that you personalize each message, otherwise you’ll message will be seen as spam and deleted.
Do not use generic personalization like “I like you blog “love your posts”… be more specific, check their Twitter or Facebook or G+ accounts and mentions things like:
- “ I saw on Twitter you ‘ve been to xxx place, hope you liked it!”
- “Congratulations about your new car”
- “I really enjoyed your xxx post”
- “ by the way, I also love Celtic basketball team”…
I’ll give you an example:
Subject: Hi John, let me have your opinion
Email: Hi John,
Your conference at xxxx was really great, I really enjoyed the video. I’m getting in touch with you because I saw on your post xxxx that you mention several SEO tutorials.
I’ve spent several days preparing my own SEO tutorial and it would be great to have your opinion.
Do you mind if I send you the link?
Anyway, take care and good luck with your trip to yyy.
This is an awesome, but extremely difficult question to answer.
That’s because there is an inverse relationship between scalability and effectiveness!
My most effect tactics are the least scalable and most difficult to replicate.
But here is my favourite:
Original Research!
1. Find a common assertion in your industry that is frequently stated but rarely supported.
It’s probably a bit of conventional wisdom.
For dentists, it might be “electric toothbrushes are more effective”
2. Conduct a survey of people in your industry to produce a data point that supports (or rejects) the assertion.
For example, ask 100 dentists if they believe that electric toothbrushes really are more effective.
3. Publish the answer on your site
4. Reach out to relevant bloggers, journalists and editors, sharing the insights you discovered, such as “Most dentists don’t actually believe that expensive toothbrushes are better” or “4 out of 5 dentists say the investment in a fancy toothbrush is worth it”
If the content is relevant, you’re about to become the center of a link bonanza. Your site is the only place on the internet with this statistic.
You are the original source of the research. Anyone talking about this topic is likely to link to you.
We produced a piece of research using this approach and it quickly became the 3rd most linked-to page on our site.
Attracting coverage (and links) from hundreds of sites.
It was a survey of bloggers, which produced statistics like “The average blog post takes 2.5 hours to write,” addressing the common assertion that blogging is time consuming.
You can scale it by repeating the research the year after year. This way you can produce longitudinal data showing trends over time.
You can also repurpose your list. Anyone that reported your statistic (and linked to it) the first year should be notified the second year.
It’s not easy, but it’s a reliable way to generate a lot of links and attention. So go find the “missing stat” and publish it!
Stealing competitors backlinks, Superb Web 2.0 Backlinks, and the beast – Private Blog Network (it can be used ethically, too).
Backlinking has always worked for me when it comes to ranking mine as well as my client’s keywords at the first page of Google.
The success and failure of backlinking methodology depends on few aspects and not following them would be insane.
They’re:
1) More referring domains.
2) More anchor variations.
And many fails, for:
1) They’ve build dozens of backlink in singular site. Higher backlinks, less referrings.
2) Over-optimization with primary keywords.
And IF you really want to shoot your site to the TOP, believe me — don’t get in prey of guru’s. Social Signals, blah, blah, doesn’t matters.
1) 40% Backlinks (Blog commenting & Super Web 2.0 Backlinks with spicy taste of PBN)
2) 40% Anchor Variation (The many variations, the better)
3) 15% On-page (H2 Tags, H3 Tags, keyword placements, variation of keywords, alt-tags of images)
If you REALLY want to rank at top of Google, and not decay within 3rd or 4th or 5th page, try this.
It works!
How do I scale this?
Thanks to Ahrefs & OpenLinkProfiler for letting me to crush the competition by getting their backlinks profile.
I simply love ’em!
My current favorite “white hat link building strategy” is something people are not going to like… it’s called content marketing.
Yes, you heard me right.
For me personally the days of hunting down high PR links and checking dofollow/nofollow are no more.
I have found that if I pump out quality content I actually can acquire more links than if I spent that time building them. And they are usually higher quality as well.
I can then also rank long term on dozens of long-tail keywords with the high quality content. So it scales in the sense that it is like a snowball effect.
My personal blog just reached over 35,000 visitors a month and that is all organic traffic.
And guess what? I have never manually built a single backlink.
I have started using this approach for my clients and they are also now acquiring backlinks naturally and more of them! It works in any niche.
I think people need to stop obsessing over links and start obsessing more over their content. If you have great content, the links will follow.
Of course you still want to monitor your backlink profile because negative SEO is still rampant everywhere.
I use Web CEO + rmoov to keep my backlink profile clean.
The great thing about Web CEO is that it’s backlink tool is powered by Ahrefs, which in my opinion is the best source.
There are a couple ways I scale this.
First I hire high quality content writers. And I’m not talking about buying gigs on Fiverr.
I’m talking about finding good quality writers on Freelancer, Elance, or UpDesk and investing in your content.
Some of my clients in the medical niche I will pay upwards of $150+ for a 2,500 word post.
But again, over time this pays off.
Also you might have to go through a few writers before you find one that you like and produces quality work.
Look at your content as an investment rather than just an expense. If your content is good enough it will eventually create a snowball effect.
Also don’t forget to do keyword research.
I increased my reach by 170% on a post just by taking 5 minutes to do some quick lookups in SEMRush and KWFinder.
Another strategy I use is Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique.
This is something that can easily be done without hiring more people and it works great for scaling!
Take what you already have, and make it better.
Reach out to influencers to get help spreading your content. If your content is good don’t be afraid to ask people to share or link to it on their site.
I wouldn’t consider this manually building links (we aren’t buying links, scraping domains, or creating accounts on web 2.0 properties), rather it is making others aware of your content, and if a link follows, great!
Right now, my favourite white hat link building strategy is guest posting.
I like it because—contrary to popular belief—it’s easy to get guest posts accepted if you write something good, and because guest posts give me a lot of control over relevancy, which is working really well right now.
On the surface guest posting seems difficult to scale but if you have a good process in place, it scales quite nicely.
I like to come up with a topic and create a post template around it. This way it’s easy to produce a lot of unique content quickly.
Here’s an example.
Let’s say you sell tours in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica. Guest posting on travel blogs would be great because not only will you get highly relevant links, you’ll also get targeted traffic.
Here’s a template you could use to guest post on dozens of travel blogs.
- Section 1: Why Guanacaste is a great place to visit
- Section 2: General remarks on X in Guanacaste
- Section 3: The Top Five X
- Section 4: Conclusion
With this template, you could do the top five cities, the top five beaches, the top five sodas, the top five hikes, the top five places to watch the sunset, the top five activities, the top five places to stay, the top five animals to see, the top five bars—the possibilities are basically endless.
Writing becomes easy when you don’t have to come up with a new idea for every guest post, but you can also hire someone else to write them.
In order to streamline the the guest post outreach, I use BuzzStream to both build and pitch a list of prospects.
If you’ve created a template, you can basically send the same pitch to all your prospects and choose a different variable for X every time a blogger says yes.
Build content that people will want to share and engage with!
Good question. It’s a difficult question to answer as there are many variables and differing strategies which can yield success depending on your objectives, some of which are more scalable than others.
We also know that Google are all over certain link building strategies like a rash.
Anything which can be defined as “strategic link building” can often (in Google’s eyes) be seen as unnatural as it’s often planned (i.e. forced) link acquisitions rather than natural acquisition.
By this I’m referring primarily to techniques such as directory submission, guest posting etc, each of which can still provide value but unlikely to be utilised on a mass/bulk scale.
The acquisition of local links through local citations for example can be a great way to gain local exposure and a great way to generate relevant, potentially valuable, referral traffic and lead generation, whilst also picking up a few links.
This is great for local search marketing campaigns and can be scalable on various levels, but opportunities will no doubt eventually be exhausted.
So what do you do that will stand the test of time and which you can scale? Build content that people will want to share and engage with!
This approach is nothing new and should not come as a surprise. Industry voices have been preaching about the benefits of creating great content for years, long before Penguin existed.
But it’s only since Penguin and Google’s clamp-down on unnatural link building that people have started looking towards content for the solution.
In 2013 Cyrus Shepard’s ‘How to Rank’ blueprint stated:
“90% of your effort should go into creating great content, and 10% into link building”
Even Chapter 7 ‘Growing Popularity & Links’ of Moz’s Beginners Guide to SEO states:
“Create content that inspires viral sharing and natural linking”
If done correctly, creating great content which is valuable for the reader will attract natural links and make your link building efforts much easier in the long run.
Furthermore great content can generate better user engagement signals, from analytical signals such as bounce rate and time on site through to social signals and direct engagement.
The approach to creating content can of course take various forms such as
- written content (research, guides, tutorials, expert roundups)
- videos
- infographics
- creative/interactive content
… or a combination of more than one technique all of which will require investment – not just financial investment but time and effort to ensure the content offers value and is marketed correctly to strengthen/broaden its reach.
That’s how to do scalable, long-lasting link building the right way!
My personal favorite white hat link building strategy is a scholarship .edu link building campaign.
Not only do you raise money to help pay for the ever increasing costs of a college education but it’s also great for PR and a fantastic way to obtain some very powerful backlinks from extremely high domain rank websites.
It’s pretty simple to create but takes quite a bit of time to do effectively.
Here’s what you do:
- Create a page on your website with all the information about the scholarship, the eligibility requirements, submission details and deadlines. (Example:http://www.levininjuryfirm.com/scholarship/)
- Identify what colleges have financial aid and/or scholarship resource pages.
- Outreach to those universities to let them know about your scholarship by email or phone.
- Answer all emails from the colleges and student entries. That’s. it
At our agency we use Ahrefs to identify what colleges link out to businesses within our industry.
We keep a spreadsheet of those websites, their resource pages and contact information.
You can scale the scholarship campaign a few ways.
You can create one for specific cause and outreach to those associations.
Anthony Castelli created one for Military Veterans (Example:http://www.castellilaw.com/anthony-castelli-attorneys-veterans-college-scholarship.html) but you can pick a cause of your choice.
- You can also scale by getting the media involved with strategic press releases
- Reddit has a scholarship subreddit
- Social media can have a large impact.
We’ve even started doing the large check pics and video essays to make them more shareable on social as well.
While there are many ways to generate links, my favorite white hat link building technique is broken link building.
If you are not familiar with broken link building, it is essentially the process of finding links that are broken or no longer work that websites are still linking to.
What appeals to me for this approach is the fact that many of the sites that are using outdated links on a page in fact already have decent page authority.
This means if you can successfully inform the webmaster of the broken link and get them to swap your link in place, you should get a link with decent strength.
This is an approach I typically recommend for clients who work with me in addition to making sure they own branded search terms.
You’ll be helping the webmaster out by not only letting them know something isn’t working right on their site and provide them with a solution at the same time.
More often than not the webmaster is more than happy to swap out the link for yours as it saves them the hassle of hunting down a working link.
Then what you can do is take the broken link you found and plug it into a tool like OpenSiteExplorer to see who else is linking to this broken link.
Here is where you can really scale the process.
Download the list of sites who are linking to the broken link.
You can then take this list and hire someone from your favorite freelance site to find the contact emails of the URLs in the list.
This of course, unless you are into looking for this type of info.
Once you have this info, you can build a spreadsheet with the email address, the URL where the broken link appears, and the broken link itself and build out a Google Sheet to use this mail merge plugin.
You can then easily send out emails to these contacts in a few clicks.
Then rinse and repeat as this works great when you come across hundreds of sites you need to reach out to.
However, with a standard Gmail account the mail merge plugin only allows 100 emails to be sent a day.
For me, this works fine as anymore and it can start to be difficult to manage.
I’m a strong proponent of blogger outreach, which is reaching out to blogger fo guest posts, product reviews, giveaways, but also social shares and links.
It’s incredibly white hat (unless you are paying for sponsored posts, with rich anchor text, that sort of thing), and more importantly build relationships in the process.
By connecting with bloggers you are more likely to get natural, organic mentions going forward beyond the initial request. Executing it properly requires a personal approach i.e relationship building and adding value.
In order to scale it I use my blogger outreach software NinjaOutreach, which helps you find thousands of bloggers in your niche. Additionally I might use a tool like Ahrefs for find linkers who are potential bloggers I can reach out to.
For example, when I published my guide to traffic generation case studies I found some related articles, then found the people who linked to them, then reached out to them to see if the were interested in linking to or sharing mine.
Hiring people to scale it comes AFTER I have proven that it works, and I can use my tool’s team collaboration function to scale it.
I like using multiple images per blog post.
This is an advanced technique that is way beyond what most bloggers are doing with images, and part of the reason why it is beyond most bloggers is that it does require some investment up front.
Why it is so powerful is because it combines a number of different elements that you will read about in content-marketing posts all over the Internet:
- Include an image in every post.
- Make sure your image is appealing and original (avoid stock photos like they are soaked in acid)
- Use text on images to make them more eye-catching, as I wrote about here.
Multiple images gives you multiple ways to attract attention.
For instance, when I recently blogged about the health risks faced by writers, I did up a stunning orange-on-black image meant to catch people’s eyes quickly in social media.
Then I purposefully did up a second image geared specifically to one segment of my audience – authors – much less stunning, but based on an image of Hemingway, who is an icon for most fiction writers.
Because it is a quote image, it is also highly shareable.
The two images in that post will appeal to different people, doubling my chance of getting social shares that ultimately lead to backlinks; so far it is one of my most-shared posts.
I really should have added one other image addressing back-aches or repetitive strain injuries, and specifically geared it to bloggers.
The beauty of this is that it is not scalable in the traditional sense of the word.
Anything that is scalable by hiring cheap, offshore labour will get massively abused and will end up hitting you in the face like a boomerang when Google gets fed up with the resulting pollution in its SERPs.
We have seen this with article submissions, comment spam, article spinning, directory submissions, forum submissions, blogging contests, etc.
But this is scalable in a small way. For each post you write, you have two or three opportunities to post to Twitter, FaceBook, Google Plus or wherever else, each time with a different image.
Write once, promote twice or thrice.
If you use a VA to post to social media, it is even more scalable.
If you hire a Fiverr artist, you can also cut down on your work, but I would not delegate the strategy to a Fiverr artist, just the graphics work.
But delegating the artwork on the social submissions won’t come back to slap you, because the extra shares you get and any links you attract will all be genuine and natural.
Though I like using suggestions and creating stuff for my audience, like what I did for the schema plugin, it has to be using infographics.
I actually recently released one on my blog about using an SEO checklist and it got really cool links.
Imagine if this was in a different niche that had the tendency to link to images more. It’ll be amazing and really viral!
I know, I know, it’s an old school way of doing things but people often forget that the barrier for entry for this type of content is smaller as there is a cost involved, especially for nicely designed ones.
There are a lot of infographics out there, but there are only a few that stand out and catch traction. Be one of those.
This is how I scale
I have an in-house designer but you can get it done outside using freelancers, heck even Fiverr.
The important part is to actually do research, find what’s lacking and deliver with great information, graphics and make it memorable.
I basically have a workflow using Trello, which is my project management app of choice. We have a checklist in there if we have to do this.
We do research, find a topic, break it down into sections and sub sections. If it’s really long, I will use WorkFlowy to make it easier for me to see things in one glance.
We then write/describe 1–3 design ideas on the look that can be used and pass it along our designer.
While that is being done, we can then proceed to check how we will be promoting this content.
We will look for other similar topics using BuzzSumo, grab the pages that got the most shares and links.
We compile the links, the commenters, the sharers.
We proceed to do this for the results that Google show when you type in the keyword.
We now have a list of proven linkers/sharers/interested people. Once the infographic is done (it’ll take 1–2 revisions) we can start promotion!
As a bonus, there are also high quality infographic directories out there.
Doesn’t hurt to get those links, too.
One of the things I’ve found to be the most scalable time and time again is guest blogging.
This is something a lot of people use and it’s the go-to link building tactic for a lot of people. Not only does it work, but it’s quite easy to scale.
It’s my favorite because the process of getting it to work correctly involves outreach and networking. As a result, you end up with a few new friends and fellow bloggers who might link to you time and time again.
It also gets you in front of a lot of new people, which in turn can result in more links and traffic.
In order to properly execute guest blogging, you need to build a relationship with your target bloggers first. I’ve seen some success with “cold” messaging people too though.
The best thing to do is find high quality blogs in your niche and just starting hanging out there more often, commenting on their posts, re-tweeting their tweets, and generally getting to know them.
You’ll soon know whether or not they accept guest posts and how approachable they are.
With practice, you’ll get quite good at emailing them and seeing if they accept guest blogs. If you’ve befriended them a bit, this feels natural and you won’t particularly feel out of place.
Success isn’t guaranteed, but rejection hurts less when you have put the ground work in first.
To scale it, I usually hire a VA, create them a profile on my site (usually on the about page), give them an email address, and teach them what to do.
They will then try to comment on 3-5 blogs per day, and once 3 comments have been accepted on a site, they email them (from a template) asking for a guest post opportunity.
Tools I might use are Google Spreadsheets for tracking the whole thing, and something like Ninja Outreach for finding people to reach out to in the first place.
It goes without saying that the comments need to be high quality and the email templates need to be personalized slightly for each site.
As a backup plan, you can also find people who have a “write for us” or similar section on their blog and just directly message them according to their requirements. This is also easy to scale.
There are a lot of ways to build links and it can be subjective as to what is “white hat” versus well done “gray hat”.
I like to have a private blog network that is built in a conservative way to reduce risk and execute the following strategy at the same time:
(One can argue that a PBN is like a media company building out a network of websites…)
- Comment on many (dozens or hundreds) of blogs related to the topic. You can find blogs to comment on using this method that speeds up the process a lot.
- Use the Ahrefs Site Explorer to get a list of what comments are approved. You can export a CSV that has a lot of information about the specific page that your comment is on.
- Import the CSV to a tool like Ninja Outreach or Buzz Stream.
- Send out emails asking for guest posts and you can cite the post that you commented on
I have seen about a 20% conversion rate (2 out of 10 allow guest posts) using this method.
PRO TIP #1:
Mention that the blog owner can put in there own affiliate links if they want. This works especially well for topics that don’t have significant monetization methods, like travel, food, or other hobby based blogs.
PRO TIP#2:
Add backlinks throughout your guest post to your own site as long as the content is relevant. And, be sure to add some other authority sites in the text as well.
You can scale the process by commenting more often on more blogs, then subsequently sending more emails.
Using Ninja Outreach or BuzzStream makes sending out the emails very fast and they are well worth the money.
I currently handle the commenting and guest post writing in house but you could hire people for both very easily on Upwork.
I would recommend native speakers for whatever language that you are targeting. That way you stand the best chance to get your comments approved and your guest posts accepted.
Technically, you can outsource the whole process with 2 to 3 virtual assistants. And, there are really is an unlimited number of blogs to comment on so this is fully scalable.
I’m a huge fan of content curation and interviews so I have to say that my favorite strategy would be the expert round up blog posting.
I was fascinated with Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique so I have decided to use the method in my own seo blog.
Some of my expert round-up posts include the Best Kept Secrets Of Prominent SEO’s and Internet Marketers and 8 Well-Respected SEOs And Marketers Share Surprising Tips where I got the chance to interview the best minds in SEO and internet marketing.
The idea was just plain and simple – you build up one gigantic blog post using your interview questions and answers.
How I executed the strategy:
1. Listing up name of prospects – I listed down the names of who I wanted to be part of my expert round up blog posts.
They were all experts in the SEO playing field and are my influencers. Most of the people I have in my list don’t know me at all so the success rate was relatively small especially if you put yourself as the “spectator”.
To increase my chances of getting more answers in my round up interviews, I had to reach out to more targets.
2. Research background and get all active social profiles – this gave me the idea of what social media sites or forums my prospects are most active.
I used those platforms to engage with them. I’ve added them in social media for me to be part of their circles.
Most of them were active in Google+ and Twitter so I was frequently doing retweets, +1’s and reshares on their blog posts and status updates.
3. Comment on their most recent blog posts – blog commenting was quite popular in link building before but I have preferred to use the method in marketing myself to my prospects.
Commenting helped me heighten their awareness about me from “spectator to acquaintance”. This kind of complements to actively doing social shares/reshares.
4. Subscribe to their newsletters – to understand and directly engage with my subjects, I wanted to know what they are up to on a regular basis.
Subscribing to their emails was also part of the plan to get their active email addresses.
5. Engage with them through email – I was able to catch up the email addresses of my targets after subscribing to their newletters so I made a point on actively conversing with them via email – sending response of thanks for sharing some helpful posts.
This was the part where I actually got their attention so I have asked them about my motives for interview.
6. Send interview questions – So when I got some “yes” in my interview offers, I sent them the list of questions I prepared for them. I have limited the questions to less than ten to have lesser turnaround time.
7. Be patient and wait for response – I gave my targets a week as time allowance to help them spare some time answering my questions.
8. Once your list is ready, publish in most convenient time – I got more traffic during weekdays than in weekends so I had some thoughts of publishing the posts within Mon-Fri.
9. Supplement post with social shares and promotions – The actual blog posts are likeable/linkable now so I haven’t had a hard time in promoting them.
10. To spread the word – I did some promotion on the content via my social media channels as well as some marketing related bookmarking sites such asKingged, Growth Hackers, Inbound.org, AllTop and Reddit.
I was the one who made it so I didn’t hire someone to do it for me.
If in incase you don’t have much time to do it yourself, get someone who’s great with people to help you do the outreach. You can find a lot of amazing VA’s in Upwork (formerly oDesk).
To scale the results of my strategy, I needed Google Analytics, Majestic, Sumo.me and BuzzSumo.
Tangibles
1. Traffic acquisition of posts – the posts generated some decent number of traffic.
2. Social shares and engagement – number of people who actually comments and shares your post can help you scale if your strategy is effective.
3. Numbers of email subscribers – After publishing the posts, I have generated more email signups. I used sumo.me and hello bar to capture the emails.
4. Backlinks – didn’t really focus on building up links to my expert round up posts but I had some decent links indexed.
5. Leads generated – there were good number of leads generated with the help of the round up blog posts.
Intangibles
1. Additional authority of your blog – there was a great trade behind the effort in doing the interviews.
I wanted to have a collection of content assets in my blog and part of it was publishing huge posts with great content ideas.
To improve the trust and authority of my blog, I needed to initiate the round up post as part of my SEO campaign.
Happy to say it was successful and some people considered my blog as a helpful SEO resource.
2. Relationship built with prospects – since my prospects already knew me even in acquaintance level, I didn’t had a hard time connecting with them.
Seeding the relationship with my prospects really helped improve my personal branding. I got the chance to meet my SEO influencers in person.
They became my good friends and drinking buddies. The good times and the best ideas in online marketing came out during our drinking sessions. 
I honestly believe that there is no single approach to doing link building that would guarantee success.
The reason behind it is that not all niches are the same, which makes it more reasonable to approach each one differently.
Thus for a website that wants to rank for the keyword “Advanced Dew Point Hygrometers” employing guest posts and looking for websites where you could place your link, would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Fortunately, there are some approaches that one might find generic and could be expanded in the context of creativity.
In my case after reading the book: It’s Not All About “Me”: The Top Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport with Anyone by Robin Dreeke. I began to approach link-building in a much more “ME” approach, that is the “ME” of the person you are trying to market to.
Instead of looking for guests posting sites and building authority from them and hoping and waiting that they agree for me to post my content.
I decided to reach out to influencers and look for professional advice that would give value to my target audience and niche.
I looked for pre-existing interviews in the web and searched for the contact details of the people who previously answered and then asked them questions that has not been asked of them in their previous interviews or if there is something that I need to clarify regarding their answers I place it in the interview template that I make.
The advantage of this approach is that these influencers are the most sought after people in the industry. Thus their point of views and ideas are treasured by their followers.
I thought that doing this approach would be more of giving value and relevance to your niche and your industry thus raising the authority of your website.
As for traffic and rankings, I made them all secondary because I thought that marketing should be about the person you are targeting and not about the product or service you are selling.
Now one may need to be more creative when dealing with a website that deals with “Advanced Dew Point Hygrometers”, but I am not saying that it is impossible to use this approach to the same website.
Starting out with the leading brands selling them and connecting with their people would be a good start of conversation especially when they want to highlight their superiority over others.
To my surprise, the interaction and open rate of this approach are surprisingly high as the interviewees had prior experience dealing with other interviewers thus my success rate is as high as 30-50%.
But then I scale it by using social media as an avenue for increasing my reach and engagement thus resulting to more natural social signals for my website and campaign.
In layman’s terms, this would be the second level of engagement as a supplement of the first which was the interview.
As for the tools, I do it manually, just the regular email and send. The same goes with searching for influencers and other interviews online I just use Google.
As of the moment, I have a team of people doing it for me they are from the Philippines as well.
I use most types of white hat link building techniques, but believe high end link building cannot be scaled.
If you can scale it then so can a competitor.
Most techniques are labour intensive and I don’t like working. I like to try and build or create something that is useful and likely to attract links without any effort once live.
One effective method is using images or graphics.
Here’s a technique I used a while back on one of my travel sites:
1) Found a cheap VA on Odesk (Upwork). Got VA to find lots of travel images in the ‘public domain’ with no copyrights.
2) VA uploaded all the images to a pro Flickr account, allowing images to be used with attribution.
3) Added in each image description that link attribution must be given to my site.
4) Created an image gallery on my blog using a Flickr plugin, giving bloggers a url to link back to.
Next step was to just sit back and wait.
I then regularly checked for attribution links by just searching Google for “source:mysite”.
The main problem was webmasters and bloggers were linking to the Flickr account, but outreaching to them and giving them the correct url to link to had 95% success rate.
This technique is not specifically about image link building, it’s about repackaging something and giving it away for free.
This could be images, graphics, scripts or tools which I have all used in the past.
If you get creative you’ll find many different applications for this which can be used across different niches.
Quality content & Infographics are my favorite two ways to get links.
I focus on Quality content & come up with content that are important but is not touched in my niche.
Most of the content are based on experience & my need as a blogger. Infographic is something that I’m testing right now again, and will share the results soon.
I do hire quality writers who can churn well-researched content along with me.
It costs me a lot but by the end it is totally worth it.
Here is one example of such content.
This post has more than 4.5K words & you can see the quality yourself.
BuzzSumo is one tool that comes out to be very handy for researching content.
My favourite linkbuilding strategy is ‘Create something your visitors want‘.
It doesn’t mean that you have to go out to the market and perform lots of interviews, but it does involve a certain amount of research.
You want to find who are the current SERP winners and why.
The easiest way to do this is by using BuzzSumo.
OK, it is a paid service, but one that allows you to really see what content is being shared the most, based on your requirements.
This is hugely powerful!
At a glance, you can see if an article has had 1 social share, 100, or 1000. This then allows you to see if it is something you can better.
Can you create more up to-date data? A more insightful view? Some additional testing that shows a different view point?
Then comes the fun bit – creating the content.
Depending on your market and niche, you might need to think outside the box a little.
Always check the articles you are researching and look at the comments. Are people disagreeing with something? Are they asking for additional confirmation on something? if they are, make sure to include it in what you do.
Buzzsumo then allows you to check who has shared an article, allowing you to reach out and make contact with them – this is huge!
For a very modest investment, you can find out what is popular, why and who has shared it!
Not only can you check for social shares, you are also able to check and see if it has lead to backlinks. Get in touch with those sites that have linked to it and tell them you have something more current than what they already have in place.
This can sometimes lead to a competitor losing a link, while you gain one – it’s more common than you might realise.
The scalable aspect comes from repetition and diversity
.
Depending on your market, it might be near on impossible to appeal to the same people every time, so you need to think about how you can scale this to reach a larger audience.
If you take ‘Minskin Cats’ as an example, there are unlikely to be a huge group of people interested in this rare breed, so you need to think more about how appeal to a larger audience.
Instead of ‘Minskin Cats’, you could talk about the more generic field of ‘Domestic Cats’ where you could reach out to a much wider audience.
The more you can diversify, the more you can repeat your searches for content types related to your field.
My favourite “white hat link building strategy that scales” has to be theskyscraper technique.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s the perfect way to earn links through high quality content.
The common problem people experience with content marketing is that they create great content assets (be that an infographic, buying guide, video or something else) but then fail to do anything with it!
To me, a great asset is only as good as it’s outreach and distribution strategy.
The bottom line is that regardless of how great a piece of content is, if people don’t know about it, how can they be expected to link to it?
It’s simple; they can’t!
For those of you not familiar with the skyscraper technique; head over and read Brian’s post on Backlinko (linked above) and you’ll quickly see why it works so well.
In short, you’re taking a piece of content which a competitor has put together which you have identified to have a large number of quality links pointing to it, making the content better and reaching out to those who linked to the original piece.
Of course, the ‘difficult’ part is finding these popular posts in the first place, but with tools such as Buzzsumo, you can’t really go wrong and it turns a labour intensive task into something quick and easy.
The reason why the skyscraper technique can scale is the approach in itself – rather than having to research which topics work or don’t work for your audience, you simply take someone else’s concept and make it better.
The time-consuming part of the technique is the creation of FANTASTIC content assets, however surely the requirement to do that as part of a digital marketing campaign in 2015 is a given?!
From there, you just need a good link checker (I’d recommend either Majestic or Ahrefs) in order to be able to identify who is linking to the content.
To scale, there’s no reason why a virtual assistant couldn’t provide a list of contact details from the sites which you’ve identified and exported from your chosen tool.
Scaling link building is certainly harder than it used to be. Different strategies work better in different industries, but if I was to pick one that works across the board and I start every campaign of with would have to be competitor backlink analysis.
Not only does this give you tons of awesome link opportunities, but it also gives you an insight into how your competitors are acquiring links which you can utilise later on.
What’s also fun is whilst going through your competitor’s backlinks is seeing all the spammy links they (sometimes) have.
Although if they do, it will leave you thinking how the heck they are ranking where they are and haven’t been penalized.
There isn’t much you can do about that unfortunately… just concentrate on building your own website up.
My process for competitor link building
… is fairly simple.
I’d find the top 10 or so competitors from an organic search point of view, then download the competitions links through backlink indexes like Ahrefs here.
Now we have lots of links to go through, MANUALLY.
There’s no way to automate this part I’m afraid.
I load them all up into separate profiles in BuzzStream for easy management and outreach, but alternatively you could use Excel.
As you go through the links see if there is an opportunity for a link to be added back to your website.
The majority of the time there won’t be, but for the times there are, it’s worth it. As these links are what’s making your competitor a top competitor in search.
Some of the links you might not be able to get a link straight away, such as a website where they have been featured in an industry news article.
Make note of this though, as in the future when you’ve got some news or content to promote you then have a list of hot leads to distribute it to.
This is scalable in the way that it’s applicable to any website and you can constantly monitor your competitor’s links by downloading a fresh set of links going to your competitors every month for new opportunities.
My favourite link building tactic is infographics.
I often find that many businesses create infographics which are just a bunch of facts and figures with very little practical advice and then are left confused when their infographic only gets 5 links all from infographic directories.
Some of my top performing infographics have actually being useful guides and cheat sheets which people find useful.
This type of content is also evergreen which gives me an opportunity to outreach them all year round.
In order to increase my placement rates I often offer guest posts orguestographics in my follow up pitches as recommended by Brian Dean.
Before I did this I was lucky to get 5% placement rates, now I can be confident of getting a much better response on my second or third emails just by offering 300 words of text.
Bloggers are busy people if you can offer them something cool to share on their blog for free they’re very likely to say yes!
I handle all the design, research and outreach myself for this process but use a few different tools to help me scale.
I use Ahrefs to look for similar infographics, blogs and pages which might be receptive to my content.
I use Link Prospector from Citation labs to find placement opportunities such as resource pages from libraries & colleges.
I will then manage my contacts and pitches with in Buzzstream to make sure I follow up in a timely fashion and don’t email the same person the exact same pitch twice!
My favourite white hat link building strategy has to be gaining links via great content through social media.
Here is what I mean.
Research your market and then create a piece of content that is far better than anything else out there.
Now spread the word via social media, get in touch with other influential figures in your niche and use sharing sites to spread the word.
Now if your content is great then other sites will start to notice and link back to your article.
Here is a screenshot of one article that I did that proves that this technique works:
Apart from my home page, this article has the most back links out of all the pages on my site.
Here is a screenshot from Ahrefs of the referring domains to this page:
But don’t be fooled into thinking this will work with every niche because it won’t.
I have been involved in certain niches where nobody wants to share anything or link to others!
In this case you have to think outside of the box.
Maybe create a competition or giveaway or do something for the site owner that you want to gain a link from. Write them a great piece of content or help them improve their site.
The tools I use to scale this method.
Get people discussing your topic and create some controversy.
Use social tools such as buffer to schedule tweets.
To scale this operation its important to stay on top of the latest trends, this is when it’s a good idea to hire a VA to research topics and present ideas, you can then hire a quality writer to compile the articles and again a VA to spread the word via social media.
White hat link building is a touchy subject as any form of link building is not ‘white hat’. So acquiring links naturally is key.
There are lots of other link building and SEO techniques here.
People often think that building links is difficult in “boring” industries. However, there is a benefit to working for clients who’s peers and competitors are not at the top of their online marketing game.
For example I came up with this idea for a steel door company I’m working with on their marketing.
Leverage Your Product/Service’s Benefits For Links
One of the benefits for building to utilize steel doors is an improvement in fire safety. So that opens so many possibilities for links and visibility!
Let’s open up BuzzSumo to find some of the top influencers when it comes to fire safety.
From here there are a couple of different paths you can take to turn that concept into links and social shares here’s my favorite way.
Come up with a “question” you want to get answered about fire safety. Then you do need to dig for some contact information.
For NFPA, I went to their Press Room page to get their media email. For the question I came up with this:
“We’re putting together some resources for our customers about fire safety, specifically around steel doors but general research and statistics could help too, can you point us to your best resources or have a quote from one of your officials that we could include?”
Once they reply with a resource, keep that conversation open with a thank you, and let them know you’ll share that resource when it becomes available online.
Repeat this process with other influencers until you have sufficient content to make a page, post or infographic and then share it with the contributors, who now have a vested interest in sharing it.
Since they’re not direct competitors, they will not feel anything holding them back from sharing it and often mentioning it on their own site or blog as well.
Remember to tailor your question’s difficulty and focus based on your target, and the less sophisticated the website the less sophisticated your question should be!
In a nutshell, my favorite white hat link building strategy is inviting content providers to link to their content on my sites from their site and their social media channels.
Much of the content I publish on my B2C niche sites is contributed by thousands of individuals and companies.
I invest a great deal of time reaching out to these people and organizations inviting them to provide content. Also, some find us and ask to get published on my sites.
Once their content goes live, I send a personal email letting them know their content is published. In that email I invite them to link to their content from their website and social media channels.
The process is a form of networking within the industry. Instead of blatantly asking for links, I offer an opportunity for free exposure on my sites.
Once I deliver the free exposure to them in the form of getting published on my sites (for free), I then invite them to link to the content and promote the content.
This is what we have been doing for our clients and for our internal marketing as well.
I call this “Outreach Marketing“.
1. Research and find the best topics your industry is talking about.
Take note of those topics and create content titles out of those topics according to their importance.
2. Create a linkable asset using these content titles.
The most popular one right now are infographics. The infographics must be contextually accurate, well-research, back-up with proper citations and more
Hi. I’m Designer of Blog Magic. I’m CEO/Founder of ThemeXpose. I’m Creative Art Director, Web Designer, UI/UX Designer, Interaction Designer, Industrial Designer, Web Developer, Business Enthusiast, StartUp Enthusiast, Speaker, Writer and Photographer. Inspired to make things looks better.
0 comments:
Post a Comment