Inverted Broken Link Building SEO Strategy
How to acquire hundreds of links by banking on a “dead page”
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If you have never heard broken link building before, it’s basically a strategy wherein the steps are:
Step 1: Create a resource page for a linkable audience.
Linkable audiences could be students, parents, or job seekers.
Step 2: Find resource pages on the topic of your choice.
So if you have a resource guide for students, “How to Sleep Better for Students”, you wanna look for resource pages that can link to that page, either the page covers any “as a student tips or hacks.”
Step 3: Look for broken links on a page.
And see if there are links pointing to those broken links or pages.
Step 4: Get those existing links to broken pages.
And consider them as your backlink prospects.
Step 5: Reach out to the website owners.
Or people managing those broken pages and suggest your resource guide as a replacement to their broken links.
These five steps are what you normally do when you execute a typical broken link building strategy.
But let me show you a more effective way to do this - and this may be an advanced technique but it works pretty well if you want to maximize your efforts, time, and energy.
So here are the five steps.
How to Do Inverted Broken Link Building (SEO) Strategy
Step 1: Find broken pages you can recreate.
If a broken page has tons of links, you know for sure that you will get links. You actually find proof first before you invest in creating content. So many times, people would start with creating the content without really thinking if the topic of the content or the content itself has the potential to earn links as they promote it.
You can use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer to find content in your industry with backlinks to it.
Filter these pages by their http status, so you can only find 404 or broken pages.
That leads us to step two, which is:
Step 2: Check the page’s linking domains.
Again, you want to make sure that the page that you want to recreate has proof of links. So go check it out using Link Explorer, again using Ahrefs, and see how man referring domains are linking to that broken page.
Step 3: Check the page’s original version using Wayback Machine.
You can use archive.org for this one.
So when you plugin the page into Wayback machine, you’ll then see its different versions. What you want to look at is its latest version (maybe broken at the moment you’re checking it, but the latest version when it was still live).
Now, you have the assurance that the topic or content you’ll be creating has the potential to get backlinks, the next thing to do is to create an improved version of that broken page.
Step 4: Create an improved version of the broken page.
So go again and check the old version of the page and see how you can recreate it in such a way that the information is more updated, with more graphics and videos if you can add those things. Just make sure that the new page is a more comprehensive one than its old broken version.
The last is to reach out to the linkers of the old page. Given that you know there are existing links to the broken page, what you can just do now is to list them down in a spreadsheet.
So send them outreach emails suggesting your new content as a replacement to the broken link on their page.
How to Find Journalists to Cover Your Stories
How to find journalists who are looking to cover your stories without paying expensive PR tools like HARO.
By the way, you can use HARO. There’s nothing about the platform. But there is a way to find journalists and publishers without you even going to HARO.
It's a very simple platform where you only need is to have a list of phrases to search for, and there you'll see journalists, news writers, and publishers who could cover your story.
That platform, guess what? Is your social media platform - Twitter?
Yes, that’s right. Twitter.
So on Twitter, people are posting what they need - what they’re looking for. So in most cases, journalists, news writers, and publishers are using their Twitter accounts for work -- specifically looking for brands, and personalities who have interesting stories they can cover on their websites.
Now what you want to do is to use specific queries to find these journalists.
Examples of keywords you can use for Twitter search:
- “Looking to speak to” #journorequest
- “Looking to interview” #journorequest
- “Is there anyone” expert #journorequest
- “Can you recommend” interview #journorequest
If you notice, these are phrases they naturally use when finding people they can interview. Questions like is there anyone or can you recommend?
By using natural questions as part of your keywords, you’ll get more searches when finding journalists to cover your story.
7 Content Promotion Strategies (That Actually Work)
When it comes to content promotion, the first to get started is not knowing what channels to promote your content in, but rather having an understanding of your content piece.
Before you promote your content, you have to know what makes your content valuable.
The question you need to ask yourself is, “what makes your content valuable?”
Because if you see the value of your content, you can easily write captions for social media posting, you can easily write email templates to promote it to a cold audience, and even easily target the right audience -- because in the first place, you’ve identified what value your content offers.
Find that value proposition.
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Now, here are 7 effective content promotion strategies that actually work.
Audience Banking
First is through audience banking.
That is reaching out to your existing audience - this could be on social platforms or to your email list - if you have one.
You may have an existing following on social media services like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter.
Start promoting your newly published content to your social followers.
The key here is to promote your content based on the context of the platform.
You don’t copy and paste the same stuff you post on one platform to another platform. On Twitter, you’re likely to see preview-like captions to describe what the content is about in a gist.
On Facebook, long-form caption writing may work best for you. As people tend to read more long-form captions today on that platform.
Know the context of the platform, and think of how you can best serve your audience with your content promotion strategy.
Community Engagement
Second is community engagement.
Community engagement means you don’t go to a Facebook group and quickly post a link to your content.
Remember that community groups are more strict today than before. They have guidelines for posting to follow.
So it is best to have a few groups where you can engage with other audiences.
Find community groups where your audience hangs out.
On Facebook, you can quickly search for which group you can engage in. Same with Linkedin.
There are particular premium slack groups where you’ll get the most value from audience insights.
The key to promoting your content in all of these groups is to think of value giving than just value getting.
If there are questions that are relevant to what you’re doing, answer it with value. And if there is a resource that you think might be helpful for the audience, include a link to your content.
External Content Contribution
The third effective content promotion method is external content contribution.
What you’ll do here is create content for other websites to promote your content on your blog.
How is that possible?
When you write content for other blogs, you include a backlink to your content on your blog.
This is often referred to as “guest blogging”.
When writing guest posts, be sure to consider these 5 simple tips:
- Who is their audience? Who are the people they’re writing for?
- What topics will best serve their audience?
- Can I write about those topics?
These three questions can guide you towards creating external content for other websites to promote your content that’s in your blog.
Alliance Building
Another content promotion strategy that really works is alliance building.
Alliance building means that you know who are your networks going online.
If you’re marketing an eCommerce site, who are your partner retailers, manufacturers, or suppliers you could reach out to promote your content?
Here’s the thing: it’s easy to promote content to a person who knows and trusts you.
So why not start with people you’ve known for months and years, and send them an email, telling them of your latest guide, infographic, or resource.
Start by having an inventory of your friends and networks working in the same industry as yours.
You can create a spreadsheet to track these people. Find their email addresses. Send them outreach emails. This leads us to the 5th content promotion strategy.
Cold outreach
If you don’t have an audience yet, this is the content promotion method for you.
If people don’t know you, then let them know you exist and your content exists.
So start looking for people who might be interested to link or share your content.
One good strategy here is to know publishers who’ve created similar content and see who has shared or linked to their content.
So if I am writing a piece about a sleeping guide for kids. I want to know who are other publishers created a sleeping guide for kids.
So I go on Google and type in, “sleep guide for kids”.
Here, I see different pages for that same topic.
Then if I want to know who are the people who linked to those pages, I can use a tool like Ahrefs to find who linked to those pages.
Given if they linked to a page similar to my content, they’d be more likely interested to see, share, or link to my content as well.
Dream 100 Promotion
Have you ever wondered how others get more attention quickly even if they’re just starting out?
The reason is that they associate themselves with influencers and thought-leaders in the industry.
These influencers and thought-leaders are your dream 100. They are the top 100 personalities in your industry.
If you leverage other people’s influence, you attract more eyeballs and get more massive attention than what a usual marketer can get.
But one question that will arise is this:
How could they interact with thought-leaders and top industry practitioners if they’re not of the same level?
You don’t send them spam messages to do a favor for you without even providing them with value first.
Here are some examples of the value you can give to your dream 100:
- Free product/service (e.g. 6-month access to a SaAs premium tool plan)
- Interviews (e.g. guest on your show featuring industry experts)
- Free content format (e.g. infographic version of their top blog post)
Start promoting your content pieces to Dream100 by giving them initial value.
Ad Retargeting
The next effective content promotion strategy is ad retargeting.
Basically, Ad retargeting is creating ads to target people who’ve visited your website.
Because they’ve known about your brand or content, the cost of your ads would be much lower than if you target a cold audience.
Ad retargeting is hitting warm audiences, which is an effective strategy to constantly build up your audience by showing your ads to people who are familiar with your website.
Start setting up your Facebook pixel. There are many tutorials on Google that show you how to do that. Then start creating ads to retarget website visitors.
How to Use Where to Buy Pages for eCommerce Link Building
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The eCommerce strategy to build backlinks to money pages without paying bloggers.
It’s actually one of the overlooked strategies when building links to online stores...and this is targeting where to buy pages.
Where to buy pages are basically pages where people search for places to find products or services. It includes lists of retailers, suppliers, affiliate partners, or anyone who distributes products you’re selling.
In different industries, there are where to buy pages that you can find. In the health industry, we have examples like “where to buy” diabetes care products.
In the transportation space, there are where to find transport options page, where people could just check the page and see what are the available options for traveling to and from the place.
You can also be as local-specific here like there are transport options page Adelaide (if you’re in Australia).
In the music industry, there are middle school and college websites that have vendors list pages. They have pages dedicated to sharing vendors of musical instruments with links pointing to each of their websites.
What you want to do is to check these link opportunities -- where to buy pages in your industry.
So start with knowing your current and potential partners.
Who are your manufacturers? Who are your retailers? Who are your distributors? Make an inventory of these people, these brands. You also want to check if they have their own websites, and if they have “where to buy” pages on their sites.
To see that, you can use advanced search operator, site colon:domain of the site. space, where to buy, For example, site:onlineshop.com “ where to buy.
You can also add more to your list by first checking your product categories. If you own a music online store, you have product categories like violin, viola, double bass.
Then check on Google to see if there are where to buy pages for those product categories.
Find where to buy opportunities with product categories, so you can do a Google search for “PRODUCT CATEGORY” inurl:links
For example, “classical instruments” inurl:links.
You may also go as specific to your product, and not just product category.
So here are some keywords you can use for that specific purpose.
- where to buy INDUSTRY OR PRODUCT
- online retailers INDUSTRY OR PRODUCT
- online dealers INDUSTRY OR PRODUCT
- find our products INDUSTRY OR PRODUCT
- additional retailers INDUSTRY OR PRODUCT
- internet resellers INDUSTRY OR PRODUCT
- preferred retailers INDUSTRY OR PRODUCT
Vary it on your partner type and your industry.
Once you have the list, go and ready to reach out to them and let them know that you distribute one of their products (if you’re a retailer or distributor) or get them to include a link to your product or product category page (if it’s a resource page).
How to Get Quality Backlinks With This HR Strategy
There is one thing that HR people do every day that can help you generate high-quality backlinks.
And that is using job boards to hire people.
You won’t do the hiring here. But you will use HR assets online to be able to get backlinks to your website.
Here is how you can start.
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Find job boards list in your local city
There are resource pages that list down all of the available job sites and job boards within a local city or area.
For instance, there is a job board list page for anyone looking for work in Massachusetts. On that list, you’ll see different career websites and specific job board links from brands looking for hires.
This link building strategy is mostly applicable to startups, particularly tech companies.
There are a lot of job boards list pages that you can find online. Here are some keywords that you can use to find them:
- “Job search” “resources” “CITY”
- employment” inurl:resources “CITY”
- “job hunting” resources “CITY”
- inurl:careers “CITY”
Let’s say you have a job board list on your site. What you can do now is offer your job board as an additional resource to prospected resource pages.
When you do outreach, simply make a suggestion for your resource page. You’re not coming off as someone pushing them to link to you. Making a quick suggestion is a more effective strategy than pushing these people to link to you.
How to Find Someone’s Email Address (In Seconds)
Today, I’m going to show you how to look for someone’s email address with supreme accuracy without spending minutes finding it.
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Step 1: Use Voila Norbert
Once you have an account, you can use it quickly. Landing on a website,
Voila Norbert is a free chrome extension tool that helps you find email addresses in seconds.
So install hunter to your chrome extension.
Once installed, it’ll appear in your Chrome toolbar.
So when you landed on a website, you click on it. And now you have to enter the prospect’s name and the domain of the website. Then click “Go ahead, Norbert”.
In as fast as 1 second, you’ll quickly see if there is an email attached to the domain.
You can best use Voila Norbert for single-author sites or blogs if you know the specific name of the person you’re reaching out to - which you can quickly see on the blog’s About page.
But for larger companies, you may want to contact a specific person like the content marketing manager or editor in charge of the blog.
Step 2: Try Hunter
Go to Hunter. Create an account.
When you landed on a website, you can quickly find email addresses associated with the domain by clicking Hunter tool in the toolbar.
Now, you’ll have a list of email addresses to choose from, depending on who you want to reach out to.
So let’s say for this website: siegemedia.com; I want to find the content manager.
And by clicking Hunter, it quickly shows me this person to reach out to for email outreach.
Step 3: Find it on About or Contact page
Not all email addresses are hosted in domains.
There are non-domain.com email addresses, such as Gmail accounts.
Here are ways to find these non-domain.com email addresses.
First is to check the website's About or Contact page.
Oftentimes, small blogs or websites will just leave their contact details there.
Step 4: Utilize site advanced search operator
Another way to find non-domain emails is by using a search operator: site:domain.com and then “gmail.com”
Google this exact search, then you’ll be able to see on the meta description in one of the pages in the search results - the exact gmail address.
Step 5: Search Twitter Feed on Google
Another email hunting approach is to first, find the Twitter handle of the author.
Then do a Google search for:
site:twitter.com/twitterhandle/status
And then some footprints like gmail.com or yahoo.com or hotmail.com or anything else.
There you’ll see the Gmail address included in one of the author’s tweets.
Start Email Hunting Today
So those are email hunting approaches that you can use to find email addresses in seconds.
The next thing you also want to do is to verify the email addresses you’ve collected.
For domain-email addresses, you get to see if the email address is verified when you use Hunter or Voila Norbert.
For non-domain email addresses, you may have to use email verification tools.
Email verification tools like Never Bounce and Verfiy Email Address.org are some recommended websites where you can verify your collected email addresses.
The #1 Question You Need to Ask Yourself When Doing Email Outreach
Why should they care?
This is the #1 question you need to ask yourself when crafting an outreach email. This is huge. And if you ask this question before you write your outreach template, you know that it'll significantly impact your response and conversion rates.
Most people would start with copying and pasting outreach templates they saw on Google. The thing is it the outreach copy doesn’t match first to what you offer, you’re missing the opportunity to highlight your offer and what it does to your target prospect.
Why should your prospects care? What is it in your content they have to pay attention to? Is it something they can distribute on their web properties like blogs or email lists wherein their audience can find value in it.
Highlight in your pitch the answers to this question “what’s in it for your backlink prospects?”
Content Gap Analysis in Guest Blogging
The first link building strategy is using content gap analysis in guest blogging.
Have you ever received this kind of email? People sending you a pitch for your blog without even having any specific topics. Or even if they sent you topics, they're mostly generic and not thinking of your audience.
This is what we want to avoid, right?
So the first step to pitch topic ideas that your prospects' audience actually need.
You can use Ahrefs, it's an SEO tool that has this Content Gap feature. So what it does is it helps you find keywords that you don't rank, but other websites are targeting and ranking.
So given we are using for guest blogging purposes, you want to look for keywords that your guest blog isn't ranking yet, but its competitors are ranking already.
So now once you pitch to that blog. You don't offer any generic topics. But rather list of topics brainstormed from keywords you know they have the tendency to rank.
And here's the good thing. The moment your topic was accepted, you submitted your guest content, and because it is targeted to a specific keyword, it now has the tendency to rank for its keyword. And once it ranks, your guest post gains more visibility. It gains more eyeballs from the blog's target audience. And given you have a link from the guest post, you can receive constant referral traffic.
Source to Content Creation Strategy
This is where you get publishers to link to you without begging. Instead of you reaching out to people who might link to your page, you might as well want to let them come to you and give you links, without you even noticing that you even got those backlinks.
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How can you do apply this link building strategy?
First is to find source-to-cite- queries. These are keywords, words, phrases that people are searching for when they are looking for more references to consider when they’re creating their content. It’s like when they are in their research phrase for their content. So normally they would go on Google and type in reference-like keywords.
So you want your content to be on the top spots when they search for their keywords. Because chances are your content will be picked as one of their references (giving you links from their content).
So those keywords are statistics, templates, letters & proposals. For example in the career space, bloggers who are writing about job hunting might go to Google and search for resume templates. So you as a content creator, you want to rank for those keywords, because other content creators might use your resume template page in their content (with links to it).
You wanna make sure to check those keywords if there are linking opportunities. To do that, you use Mozbar which helps you quickly check on the search results the number of referring links to the pages ranking for the query.
The reason why you have to do this is that you want to make sure there is a linking potential in that keyword that you’re targeting.
The next thing you want to do is to create content targeting the source-to-cite query, whether that is a statistic, template, or proposal.
You may want to check these websites to gather some public data information. Websites like data.gov, data.worldbank.org, reddit.com/r/datasets, and statista.com
After you build the content, you also want to promote it to gain backlinks. So that it can rank for the keyword you’re targeting.
So how do you apply a source-to-cite link building strategy?
Find keywords content creators are searching for when they are researching for additional references for their content. Then check using Mozbar to see if there are linking opportunities for that keyword. Then create content around that topic. It could be a template, statistic, or proposal.
How to Create Resource Content Guides For Linkable Audiences
Have you ever wondered why marketers are too confident with their content? The reason is that they know exactly that what they've created has the potential to earn links once they promote it.
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This is how you can guarantee links even before creating the content.
Linkable audience is a term coined by Garret French, founder of Citation Labs, who is also a good friend of mine.
He says, that linkable audiences are audiences who belong to communities with high-level academic, medical, and government interest.
And so these audiences are more receptive to giving you backlinks, given they want more resources, data, and references for their content.
Now, what you want to do is look for these linkable audiences first before creating content. Because you will create content to match and target a specific linkable audience. Given you know these audiences can link to you, you can guarantee links even before you create the content.
Here are some linkable audiences. We have teachers, caregivers, parents, senior citizens, veterans, health conditions sufferers, job seekers, unemployed, workers in the non-profit sector, immigrants, people with disabilities, local community, students, families of substance abusers…
So step one in using this link building strategy is to create a resource guide based on your chosen linkable audience.
So let's say your brand can target parents. So wanna make sure you don't get go too far from your target customers. Check your target customers and see if any linkable audiences ring a bell to you.
So if you're selling mattresses, and beds, you can create a guide to target parents. So you can have The Ultimate Parent's Guide to Sleep For Kids. Another example is to target people with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), and create a guide just for them. PTSD and Sleep Problems guide for example. So now each guide you create is targeted to a specific audience.
The next thing you want to do is to get a list of resource pages within your target audience. So if you're targeting people with PTSD, you wanna look for resource guides that have a list of references about curing PTSD or helping people with such disorder.
You can use a resource page prospecting spreadsheet which we include our Broken Link Building blueprint.
You can also check similar content for more link opportunities. These are content that your competitors might have or other websites published that talks about the same topic, in our given example, these are pages that talk about PTSD. To find all of the pages that link to these similar content, and add them as your backlink prospects in your link prospecting spreadsheet.
Make sure your spreadsheet is well-organized. So you can include columns for each detail about your backlink prospect.
Next, you wanna do is to find broken links using LinkMiner. The reason you want to look for broken links on a resource page that you just prospected is that the broken links are your value proposition in your outreach.
So when you send an outreach email, you say that you've found a broken link in their resource page. And you want to fix it by suggesting a replacement, which is your content.
So that is the link building strategy using resource guides for linkable audiences. You choose a linkable audience, create a content piece around it, find resource pages that talk about your audience, reach out to owners of these resource pages and let them know of any broken links they have, offer your content as replacements, and boom, you get the link!