Let’s Talk About Links: A Fresh Approach To Link Building

6 Aug, 2013

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We’ve been discussing link building and how it has changed over the years. Since we all know that the old methods of link building no longer work, let’s get straight to the point about what works.

Some of you may be employing smart link building tactics, but here are some I employ and they work well for me.

Guest Posting

Have you had much success with guest posting? Those of you that have actually tried posting on sites that “qualify” and are worthy of your attention, should know that it’s not an easy task getting your content on there.

Some of the top sites have pretty strict guidelines and that’s understandable. You can’t just send out mails saying “I would like to do a guest post on your blog.” Most of the time, you can expect such emails to end up in the junk folder.

People with quality blogs/sites, who accept guest posts, have the potential to get you some fine links.

What two things do they expect from a guest post?

Relevance
Quality

Bad posts that freelance writers churn out at $2 a piece are not going to cut it.

Find That Busy Post

Another good way to make sure your guest posts are entertained is to have conversations with webmasters. The best way to have a good conversation is to find their busiest post. This is a post that people are sharing a lot and in turn enjoys lots of visitors. How do you know which post is busy?

Social Crawlytics is an awesome tool that lets you find the post with the most conversations. Once you find the busiest post, you should start having a conversation and ask the webmasters if they would like you to write a guest post for them.

(This is also great to find out which posts your competitors are having success with. If you’re into content marketing, this is a beautiful way of finding out great topics that work.)

Linking Within The Guest Post

When adding a link to the guest post, the first thing that comes to mind is the author box. That has been done to death and people now suffer from author box blindness.

Instead of the author box, use links in the article and link them to different areas of your website or blog. If you have 3 links linking back to your website, make sure they don’t all link to the same place.

If you approach someone for guest posting and if they tell you that you have to pay for posting, you could go ahead and pay them or you can write back saying “we don’t pay for links but we are concentrating on our content strategy.” Sometimes when they hear you talk about content being important, they may want to check you out.

Infographics And The Scrolling Share Bar

Infographics – everyone is doing them these days. Some good people who have experimented with infographics have found that a scrolling share bar on the left can get almost 40% more shares than infographics without it.

Paid Advertisements For Links

While paid ads have traditionally been used for making a profit, they can be as effective or even more so when used for link building. The idea is to use a paid advertising campaign that leads to content with the potential to go viral. You’ll have to look at the user metric to see how the audience is engaged.

You can try using Facebook ads, Reddit and StumbleUpon. I personally love StumbleUpon and have a lot of success with them.

But for this advertising model to work properly, start with the content. What are other top webmasters in your niche linking to? It has to be interesting content. Can you do something that others haven’t or can you at least match them?

Once you’re confident about your content, you have to find your target audience. On Facebook or some other blogs, where you could buy some display ads? During this process, you may even find some unpaid avenues.

Once your ads are running, make sure you concentrate on the data. If you’re using more than one ad platform, see which one is giving you more links and observe who is spending the most time on your site. This process not only helps you get links but also helps you understand if the topics you’re covering are good. What’s the point in investing time in creating content that’s of no interest to your audience?

The key is to be highly targeted and pay low CPC. Do it in smaller increments to test the waters on each campaign, rather than spending your budget on something you’re not sure is going to perform.

For people whose time is more valuable than their budget, paid ads can be useful.

Blog Contests

They can drive great traffic to your blog which is great for link building when people post content on your blog or write about it on their own blog linking back to you. One other way is to give them an incentive based on the maximum number of shares a person gets. They’re really effective for getting content and for link building (or both). You only give one prize but get tons of links from people.

Share monitoring

This one is mostly for Twitter. If you find that some content of yours is doing well on Twitter, use Topsy.com to find out who has shared it. Then there’s nothing wrong in asking them to add a link to it if they like. But before going ahead and asking them for a link, check their twitter profiles and if possible their websites detail including their domain authority and social authority, to see if their links make a difference to you. Some random person unrelated to your niche sharing your content may not be of any help.

You can use this method everywhere else on the Web, wherever you find you or your site being mentioned.

Broken Resource Recreation

I think this is interesting. I read about it last year but didn’t pay attention. Find pages within your target niche and look for broken links on those pages. You can use Broken Link Index for this. Next, go to the Wayback Machine to see what it used to be. Create similar but better versions of those pages. Then use Open Site Explorer to see the number of broken links the page has. Once you find the people that are still linking to that page, just get in touch with them and let them know the links are not working and that you have a new and better version. This works wonderfully, as long as your note to them is convincing. Just write a very short note.

Asking For Links

There is nothing wrong in asking. While this is looked down upon ever since the natural link building concept has taken over, it still works if done right. The key here is to find people using the same keywords as you. Your request messages cannot be a one-size-fits-all. Send them unique messages based on their likes and their business. So check them out first and send a personal message that hits them instantly.

You can’t just say, “You are in the same niche as me, can you link to my site?” Instead say “Hey, I see you’re also into blogging. I recently wrote about How To Promote Your Blog in 2013. I have the information on my site and I feel your subscribers would enjoy reading about it too. Why don’t you link to this? Believe me, it works.

Here, you know that the person is into blogging and you also know he likes reading about the latest news on blogging.

Get those links…

Links Are Correlated To Your Reputation

Regardless of what your link building strategies are; be a thought leader in your industry. Show people that whatever comes from you is worth their time and attention. It may take a little while, but once you’ve established yourself as a thought leader, as soon as you publish your content you will get links.