In 2011, Google introduced the Panda algorithm, changing the face of the Internet forever. Since then, businesses and websites have learned to focus on content as the foundation for any and all marketing. Everything relies on content.
It is now 2015, and the tides are turning once again. With millions of websites publishing anywhere from one to 20 blog posts per week, the Internet is absolutely saturated with content. It’s generally all useful, high quality stuff, to comply with Google’s rules. That, my friends, is a problem.
Why is it a problem? Well, how many blog posts can you read in a day? How many could your entire audience read in their free time, if they were all given unique posts and no one read the same thing as anyone else? Even if that scenario happened, there would be content left unread.
As a business, you need to find some way to get your content up to the top of the list, where it will be read and seen rather than ignored in the press of content. The way to do that is with links.
Of course, link building is not a new concept. However, both websites and the people who share and link to posts are growing tired of the flood of links people want them to share. It’s growing harder and harder to get links in any artificial way, at least without paying. That’s why today, the content economy is shifting away from link building and towards link earning.
The techniques I’m about to detail below are all methods you can use, not to build links artificially, but to increase the chances that other users will willingly link to your content. You’re working to earn links, rather than forcing those links to exist. They’ll all take more work than just paying for ads or premium link placement, and you’ll notice that none of them rely on social media. While both of those methods will help, they aren’t earned links.
1. Link to Other Relevant Blogs
You’re a content creator. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be reading this. So, what would you do if you received an unsolicited email with “link” in the subject line? A lot of times, you’ll just delete it. What if, though, that subject line was “I just linked to your blog post.”? I’d check it, to see what this site is and how they linked to my site.
What would you do, then, if you discovered that you were linked in a pretty darn good blog post, on a good quality site? I like to keep an eye on those sites. They may be smaller than mine, but as long as they produce quality, relevant content, they’re fine to link to me as far as I’m concerned.
By being aware of that site, by reading it, subscribing to its RSS, or opting in to its mailing list, I’m a lot more likely to link to that site in return. It’s partially out of gratitude, and partially out of the fact that their content is good enough to be cited.
Now consider yourself on the other end of this transaction. You’re creating content; link to blog posts on other sites. I’m not talking about Moz or Wordstream or Hubspot; I’m talking about smaller blogs, on par with yours in terms of traffic and readership. Moz isn’t likely to give you a second glance; they get hundreds of links each week. A smaller blog will pay more attention.
As icing on the cake, send out those e-mails. Don’t ask for a link in return! That defeats the purpose of earning a link, and makes you look desperate. Instead, just inform the blog owner that you liked their content and you linked to them, and you thought they might be interested to see what they have to say.
At worst, you’ll be ignored. Anything else is a bonus. They might just come and read your post; free traffic. They might read your post and share it on social media; free engagement. They might read and comment on your post natively; free interaction. They might like your blog and subscribe, or link back in the future; free links. Who knows; it might be the beginning of a great partnership.
The key is to be nonchalant. You’re not sending the email out to beg for a link, you’re just informing the site owner of what you consider to be a good backlink to their site.
2. Produce Lengthy, Resourceful Guides
Who doesn’t like a good guide? There’s are a ton of things you can write about in pretty much industry. How to use common tools, how to repair something, how to create something, a rundown of your business processes; the sky is the limit.
If you write a sufficiently length guide – I recommend somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 words – you can get a lot of exposure. These kinds of guides become evergreen content very easily. The best part is, evergreen guides tend to be linked very frequently, and every link is another means of exposure, which is another possible vector for another link.
What happens if you come up with an idea, but it’s been covered in another guide already? Well, it’s going to be hard to fight against an existing guide. However, you can use the existing guide as a template and writer a longer, more detailed, better guide. Don’t copy or steal content. You can, however, reference the older guide. Yours may have more up to date information, a new perspective, or just more detail.
By adopting the “anything you can do, I can do better” attitude, you can supplant even some of the best old legacy content.
3. Encourage Conversation with Readers
In many ways, blog comments are one of the most valuable pieces of engagement you can get. They make your blog look alive and valued, which is more than many blogs have going for them. It’s often surprising how much traffic it takes to get a single blog comment, to the extent that some blogs even seed comments on their own articles just to start a conversation.
You don’t have to go that far to encourage comments, but you can take some advice from this old Hubspot post – speaking of old evergreen content that could be supplanted – and work to start a conversation.
How do blog comments help earn you links, though? Well, for one thing, a sensible discussion in comments can lead to the inspiration for another post. If the person you’re talking to wants to write a post to refute your position, or even just to agree with you, they’ll often state that they were inspired by the conversation they had on your blog and will link to the post in question. It adds context to their post, and value to yours.
4. Monitor and Reward Backlinks
One of my favorite techniques to earning links is to reward the sites that link to me in some way. I like to run a monthly backlink check and look into any new links I’ve found. When I find a good one, particularly from a site I don’t recognize as having linked to me before, I reward them.
Now, I don’t mean I reward them in a physical way. I don’t cut them a check. I don’t link back to them in a 1-for-1 exchange of value. Often, all I need to do is give them a little positive reinforcement. I might go to their blog post, if they have comments enabled, and thank them for the link. While I’m there, I might compliment them on their post, or respond to something they said. The value they give to me with a link is returned to them in the form of praise and blog engagement. It’s a win-win all around.
As your blog grows, this can grow more and more difficult to do, which is unfortunate. On the other hand, if you’re large enough to be getting too many backlinks to respond to in a timely manner, well, the need for the minor value that comes from them is minimized.
5. Conduct Industry Surveys and Interviews
One technique that I’m surprised isn’t used much more often is the industry interview. It’s not actually all that often that I see posts with a bunch of expert opinions. Yet, they’re incredibly easy to create.
All you need to do is make a list of industry experts whose opinions you’d like to get. Send each of them a message, either via e-mail or by their contact forms. Ask them one simple question! Ask them their opinion on an industry event, ask them for one prediction related to X aspect of the field, ask them whatever. Say you send out 25 emails and 13 of them get back to you. Those 13 might have 2-3 sentences to share, or they might have written several paragraphs. Either way, that’s the perfect foundation for a valuable article. Paste their content, link to their sites, and analyze what they had to say.
Once you publish the finished product, send the link to the people who responded. They get valuable links, you get their attention and information. You might even get them linking back to you in a “hey readers, check out my prediction here” sense. Heck, they might start a conversation in your comments to discuss the other expert opinions.
6. Partner with Other Content Creators
Sometimes, you’ll be able to find other bloggers, other businesses in your niche that aren’t too far above or below you. These businesses might be competitors, but if they’re not, they’re potential assets. Why not approach them with a partnership offer?
It doesn’t need to be a big deal partnership. No money even needs to change hands. You can just agree to promote each others posts, on blogs and on social media. Don’t start off with “hey let’s trade links” though. Instead, just agree to promote each other. Become friends! Live a little! Meet for lunch! Who knows, maybe you’ll fall in love.
Okay, so you probably won’t find love over a blog partnership. What you will find, though, will be more exposure and links.
7. Expand on the Content of Others
A lot of people have a lot of advice about writing great blog posts. This is all great, but it all relies on having the space in a niche to dominate. It relies on you having ideas that haven’t already been done to death. My method is a little simpler.
Find content, find good posts, in your niche. Find posts that are perhaps a little out of date, but are maintaining top-ranking spots either due to more time spent gathering links, or due to the SEO clout of the site hosting the content. These are ripe targets.
Take the content and rewrite it. I’m not talking about spinning here. I’m not saying copy their content. Take their topic and run with it. Write something better than what they had written. Write it with more accurate information, more up to date statistics, more relevant resources. Systematically scour your niche for content and supplant what exists with more valuable versions of your own.
8. Promote an eBook with Review Copies
eBooks are valuable content, primarily because they’re like good blog posts, only longer and with more potent information. The two main things bloggers like to get out of their ebooks are opt-ins and money. Opt-ins are the usual “payment” for free ebooks. Any time you have to sign up for a mailing list in order to download an ebook, you’re paying with your contact information rather than money. For many businesses, that lead is better than the sale of a $5 ebook. Of course, for others the ebook sale is better, and they just charge for it.
I like to view ebooks as a means for links as well. Hype up your ebook as you’re writing it. Post excerpts in your other posts, just enough to tantalize without giving away all of the value. When you’re hyping it up, make it seem exclusive. And finally, send out messages to industry bloggers asking if they’d be interested in reading a copy for review.
You can butter them up however you want. Tell them you’d value their opinion or input. Tell them you’d like their exclusive promotional abilities on your site. Tell them you think they’d like it. Whatever you do, get them to read it and write a review of it. That review, naturally, links to your site.
9. Stir Up (Good) Controversy
Controversy is a very potent tool, because it kicks up a lot of conversation. Nothing goes viral quite as well as a post that makes people a little angry, or a little patriotic, or a little defensive. The key here, of course, is “a little.”
Controversy is the most double-edged sword in all of marketing. By taking a stance, or stirring up the right kind of controversy, you can immediately go viral and get an astonishing amount of traffic. On the other hand, if you try to stir up controversy over the wrong subject, you might as well have kicked a hornet’s nest while strapped to a tree, unable to flee.
Unfortunately, I can’t give you a good guideline for what works as good controversy and what doesn’t. Some discussions, like those over LGBT rights, over religion, over nationalism, over racism; those are debates that have “right” sides and “wrong” sides. Then again, some businesses can take one side or another and still come out on top.
Just be very, very careful if you’re going to stir up controversy.
10. Offer High Quality Guest Posts No Strings Attached
Guest posting is one of the more maligned techniques for getting links in recent memory. It used to be very good, and then Google started penalizing some of the worst instances, which led Matt Cutts to make a famous post about it, which in turn made webmasters abandon the practice in fear. Since then, a lot of posts have been written about how it’s still save, as long as there’s value in your posts.
That’s what I’m telling you to do here. Write high quality guest posts, for free, for other blogs. Only do this when asked or offered, though. Look for opportunities to contribute to other sites, and ask for nothing more than a mention, implied link, or byline. You don’t need a real link, and you certainly should not demand a followed link; that’s what gets your pitch ignored.
The point to this is three-fold. First, you get your name attached to valuable content on sites that aren’t yours. This builds your brand and reputation. Second, you get an implied link, which is essentially just a brand mention that Google might put weight on in coming algorithmic updates. Third, you get these blogs linking to you in other respects. Ever seen the phrase “frequent guest contributor Link Here”? I have.
11. Consider Trackbacks/Pingbacks
Trackbacks and pingbacks are part of a system WordPress tried to create, designed to automatically create links between blogs. The idea was that when one blog linked to or mentioned a post on another, that post received a ping, which was often displayed as a link at the bottom of the post. It was meant to make networking easier and to help spread the word about response posts. Think of them sort of like YouTube video responses.
The problem is, these were very easy to abuse. All you had to do was send a pingback, and boom; free link. Often, the other blog didn’t even know the pingback existed, not if they weren’t paying attention to their dashboard.
Trackbacks and pingbacks can still be useful, but only if you use them properly, you approve them manually, and you use them sparingly. They also, of course, require you to be using WordPress.
With all of these techniques, you should have no trouble earning several links per blog post almost automatically. What other ways do you have for earning links, rather than building them manually?
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