Venchito Tampon Jr

4 Advanced Link Prospecting Techniques for Increased Efficiency

As I've come across several resource prospecting campaigns, I always notice little things that makes part of it more efficient. Efficient prospecting means producing a highly targeted output with the less amount of consumed resources (labor, time and cost of tools).

That itself requires experience through observation. So, here are four advanced prospecting techniques that hopefully can improve efficiency of your campaigns and help expand your list of link opportunities.

1. WEBSITE CATEGORIZATION

When starting a new outreach campaign for a client, the first initiative is to scour new link opportunities on the web from scratch. While this is good if it's a new industry you're taking on, isn't it wise to go back first to your previous list of industry-relevant opportunities and check which ones could be reuse for the new campaign?

Not only does it save time, it also saves a lot of labor consumption prospecting for links.

Website categorization does help with this. By using tags, you'll be able to categorize prospects from a topical perspective.

What you need here is a defined hierarchy of topics to begin with. For me, I recommend BOTW as starting point, given that they have four or five deeper-level topics such as Pro-Choice Abortion (Society) and Eating Disorders (Fitness) which is extremely important if you've got clients from a very-specific niche.

Make sure that your team agrees on certain topics to avoid any confusion when filtering your list. Having several but similar terms (i.e. I.T, Information Technology and Technology) as your tags is a trouble.

The next time you need automobile blogs, you can pull them off from a list within a few minutes.

2. CHECK DESCRIPTIONS IN LINKS TO EYE SEO'Y CONTENT 

Backlink research is the process of identifying current and potential competitors and getting pages/sites that linked to them for link opportunities.

SEOs normally identify these competitors through Google search by checking which pages are currently ranking for target keywords or creating a list of competitors' sites coming from clients themselves (as they already have ideas which brands to compete with).

While these two approaches are best practices to find your most relevant competitors, you may still miss out some SEO'y content (as what Ross Hudgens coined it) that you should reverse engineer on.

SEO'y content are pages or content pieces already linked out from a resource page you're trying to reach out to, that have earned tons of links from several linking root domains.

Looking for SEO'y content can expand your vertical prospecting, either from a horizontal or vertical perspective, as they aren't easily found through Google search or normal prospecting.

One way to identify these SEO'y content is to check discrepancies in description of links. What I mean with discrepancies is that there are resource pages with full descriptions for each link and there are some with links with unusual descriptions.

I got this idea when I received a response from a webmaster putting a link to our client's page from their resource page.

If you skimmed the email above, you'll notice that there's nothing uncommon with the email, only does it implies that the webmaster is in a hurry not to include a description for our link - the reason she requested if we can create one for them.

Discrepancies in link descriptions—either the description is not complete or not in format with other link descriptions (see image below)—are signs that the resource page had recently given a link to an SEO'y content. TigerMobiles.com and US Dish links have Titles as their descriptions while other links have longer texts that describe what those pages are about. 

It means that these SEO'y content are actively pursuing relevant link opportunities (primarily resource pages) in the same manner that you do. If you could scour their existing links (some may have been recently just acquired), it will help you gain link targets that are receptive to content suggestions. Thus, giving you higher link acquisition rate in your outreach campaign.

Clicking on SEO'y content links and assessing if they have relevant links you can potentially use as link opportunities is a great activity you can add to your link prospecting process. 

The best way I recommend to initially check if these SEO'y content has good number of linking root domains is to run them through LinkMiner.

The tool checks all external links on the resource page and highlights how many domains are linking to a certain external page.

3. USE LINKCLUMP TO UNOPEN DOCUMENT LINKS 

In link prospecting, the more you spend time checking for unnecessary links, the more you waste time that should've been otherwise spent pursuing for the right link opportunities.

What I've noticed with newbie link builders is that they often click on document links (pdfs, words/spreadsheets ready to download, etc..) that are consuming seconds (if not minutes of their time) which are all useless if your main targets are links or resource pages.

The recommended approach is to use a tool that'll automatically unclick these document links once you start qualifying your list of link targets.

For example, if you have a list of pages ready to be qualified for certain metrics (DA, relevance, obtainability), copy and paste them in an opened tab tool (e.g. URLOpener.com).

Then install Linkclump and use the filter option to add words that'll exclude links when it opens new tabs (pdf, doc, xls, etc..).

Once you right click and drag external links from URLOpener, the action itself won't open document links as new tabs given that you excluded certain words in the tool's setting.

4. UTILIZE NICHE PHRASES TO EXPAND LINK LIST 

If you are familiar with your industry, it's easy for you to know what phrases are commonly used as titles in resource pages. For example, in the transportation industry, you'll see a lot of "getting there" pages. These are phrases that are only specific and be applied to a certain vertical.

But one question that may arise here is, what if it's a new niche I'm taking on, how can I identify niche phrases I can use for expanding my prospecting approach?

The best way to do that is to collect the titles of your first set of resource pages (I'd recommend that you get 80 or 100 links pages from your list for optimal results).

Use Wordcloud to see common niche phrases.

Ensure that you click phrases only and display frequencies checkbox. Phrases only feature does what you need from tool - to give exact niche phrases while display frequency shows you the number of times a phrase appeared in the list.

If you are clever enough about using niche phrases, your list of link opportunities will expand.

Other Useful Resources:

• 4 Reasons Why You Don't Get Resource Links
• How to Identify and Pursue Linkerati
• How to FuturePoof Your Links By Determining Lifetime Link Value

If you liked this post, subscribe to our newsletter and follow me on @venchito14.

Need help with your link building campaigns? Check out our link building services here.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

4 Reasons Why You Don't Get Resource Links

Every pitch receives a yes or a no. In resource outreach (more often known as broken link building), a "no" isn't a direct response of "no". Instead, a "no" is a reason of so many reasons why a webmaster or the person managing the page couldn't give your desired resource link.

1. NOT CURRENTLY UPDATING THE PAGE 

No matter how good the content is, if the page you're pitching to isn't currently open to any link updates, you won't be able to get the link.

So instead of crafting a lengthy email to describe your guide, try sending a short pitch first to ask if they're open for new link suggestions. An email may look something like this:

Just saw your note on your online job hunting page about new suggestions, so thought I’d check and see if you’re still updating the page. If you are, I'm happy to pass along a few new resources for review. If not, can’t say I didn’t ask!

The reason this is important is because you're starting a small conversation first, not taking advantage immediately of the link opportunity  with a heavy pitch. You respect the person's time by asking if he or she considers resource suggestions, thus, you come off as less aggressive.

The sooner you get a "Yes" response from this approach, that's the time you can now describe how your content can best fit their links page and their audience.

2. REQUEST OVERLOAD AND SUFFICIENT RESOURCES

With so many SEOs building links to their sites/clients using the same link building strategy (broken link building), it's highly possible that a resource page is getting pitched almost every single day.

Take a look at these emails we've got:

(Request Overload)

(Sufficient Resources)

Obviously there are hundreds, if not thousands, of webmasters receiving similar messages like the one above. It's a reality that you're not the only person pursuing for the same link opportunity. A competition among SEOs/link builders gunning for the same link prize is considered to be a problem, but can also be an opportunity.

If you consider this dilemma problem upfront, you can give yourself an opportunity to ask yourself questions regarding your content before actually pitching them to your link prospects.

One question you can ask is, "Does the content I'm suggesting have competing/similar content pieces on the links page?". What I mean with competing is if you have a "resume templates" guide, does the links page have resume links too? If you cater to both niche audience with the same information, but don't necessarily mean you're competing for the same keywords, that particular content piece is your content competitor.

You may as well check what keywords in URLs those resume links are trying to rank for. If they target the same as your content piece, it may also be considered as your competing content.

Two reasons why you need to check for competing content assets:

A. Know if your content asset fits a subtopic/sub-section of the links page.

This is a good idea because you know that there's a reason for the webmaster to insert a link to your page, as it fits into a category. It's less likely that a webmaster will create another section of the page to just give you the link if in case your content piece doesn't fit to any section.

B. Check if you can fill an informational gap.

To fill an informational gap, you can either create a better version of the content than anyone else (10x content) or provide a unique value (either in format/angle of the topic).

Place yourself in the webmaster's shoes. Ask yourself, why do I need to add the suggested resource on my links page considering there are two or three resource links covering the topic already?.

This question sets the bar of your content's quality - increasing your chances to get

For overload requests, the difference-maker in getting the resource link is your content's comprehensiveness and utility that fills in the gap in the category/information of the resource page.

3. NO CURRENT PERSONNEL TO ADDRESS 

It's frustrating to know that the reason you don't get the resource link is not because your content sucks, but there's nobody currently taking care of the resource page.

While there are some high-authority websites with ready-correct department - a group of people who ensures every resource link is reviewed to pass certain standards before they actually go live, there are a lot of other links pages with no current personnel handling them.

We've found that one way to ensure you're not missing those link opportunities is to mark the resource page or create a new tab that includes all of the link opportunities with no current personal addressing them. Then you can set a schedule time to follow up these links after two months.

You've done a lot of work to prospect the opportunity and write an outreach email, so it's a failure to get the potential equity it'd have been developed if you didn't follow up the person.

4. SOON TO DEATH RESOURCE PAGE 

It's easy to jump off to another link opportunity when your target links page is going to be killed either because it's of no use to the webmaster or the department/personnel is not updating it anymore.

It happens, but there's a chance they might be creating a new links page with the same topic.

I recommend sending a follow up after a month, asking if they have a new resource page your content might be a good fit is a less work but can gain a return in outreach.

Other Useful Resources

• 21 Off-page SEO Techniques You Can Use Right Now
• The Definitive Guide to Blogger Outreach

So, those are the four reasons why you don't get resource links and tips on how to pre-solve those problems.

If you liked this post, subscribe to our newsletter and follow me on @venchito14.

Need help with your link building campaigns? Check out our link building services here.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

4 Scalable Link Building Tips

For the past few years, the debate about quality versus quantity in link building has been subsiding as more SEOs and business owners have gained a deeper understanding that it's the quality of links that matters over quantity.

Given that, some link builders still find it difficult to consistently acquire relevant links on a monthly basis.

But it's certainly possible with the right approach and improvements in processes to provide solid high-quantitative link reports.

Agencies like Citation Labs, based on their 2015 slide presentation, can accommodate a total of 300 resource backlinks every month to their clients.

Our team at SharpRocket is able to supply links ranging from 6 to 30 in volume to each client on a monthly basis.

It may not be a big number to most readers, but using sweat-and-blood approaches in link building, it's the highest quantity that you can achieve with a handful of resources you have.

Scalable link building requires speeding up phases in the area of link qualification, link prospecting and targeted outreach. Subtle changes that you can make to each phase can tremendously impact your campaign's efficiency.

For the past several months, we've noticed and tested a few approaches that if done well, can create success for your next link building campaign.

1. SOURCING MICRO AND MARCO CONTENT FROM INDUSTRY INFLUENCERS

Content creation for external distribution (or guest blogging) is easy to scale if you've got a team of in-house writers or outsourced freelance writers to accommodate your content writing needs.

However, if you're in scarcity of resources, one approach that you can use to facilitate guest blogging is by interviewing industry influencers and using their Q&A content as external assets for distribution.

Initially we start sending outreach emails to productivity publishers who might be interested to accept any of these two content formats:

• "How-to" [ topic ] interview content
• Guest post on [ topic ] (that includes a few insights from productivity experts)

The key to make this pitch standout is to highlight that you'll be including insights from industry experts in your guest article. Given that publishers would normally ask for high-quality guest posts (as we always request for outside contributors for our blogs), the approach of emphasizing the credibility and value of your content up-front can improve your chances of getting a response and eventually increase your closing rate.

Then you can throw-in topics of content that they can choose from.

To generate a content idea, you can do a Google search for site:domain.com with any of your targeted keywords or topics (e.g. "personal kanban") and check if these are topics they haven't covered yet.

Providing unique content ideas can increase the chances of letting them buy-in on what you can offer.

Further reading: How to Improve Your Link Outreach Success Rate

When they've chosen a topic to write about, it's time to create the content.

There are two ways on how you can approach content creation: create content with validated insights from influencers or use Q&A content with an influencer and format it as an external asset.

A. Validation To Your Insights

Instead of providing one generic round-up question to your target influencers and compiling them into one big post (just like what you normally read see in most round-up posts), you can ask influencers for insights to questions being discussed in your article draft.

Statements from influencers can serve as a validation to your article points that adds credibility to the overall content.

As an example of this approach, we've looked for productivity bloggers/experts to get their expert opinions on different subjects of productivity.

In my earlier example, the topic that the publisher wanted us to write is "personal kanban" - a personal productivity system.

We had to look for industry bloggers who have personally experienced using such productivity tool in their professional lives.

To speed up the entire blog prospecting process, we chose an authority website that has outside content contributors and that interviews niche influencers on its podcast show (these influencers/contributors were then our target prospects for interviews).

Using URL Profiler to scrape data from author and podcast pages, we've managed to create a list of 20 industry influencers (who are past and current contributors of LEADx.org's blog section and who became guests in their podcast show).

You can also do this process manually, if you're not a subscriber of URL Profiler.

In estimate, the manual approach will only take you 25 to 30 minutes.

Your next step is to gather contact details of your target interviewees to prepare for the outreach campaign.

As for the outreach, it's important to ensure that your authority bloggers will also benefit from the content partnership you're proposing. Reciprocation in a form of getting a link on a guest post written on a top-notch industry blog can increase the chances of getting positive responses from them.

Here's the exact email template we used for this kind of outreach:

Short interview with you [Name]

Hi [Name],

I'm [Your Name], a blogger and productivity enthusiast. I've found you on one of the podcast episodes of Kevin Kruse at LEADx.org and learned great insights from your conversation with Kevin.

I'm fascinated and wanted to conduct a short interview with you. I'll ask a few questions, compile your answers and use it as a guest content for a top-notch productivity site (not mine).

I greatly appreciate your response in advance.

Thanks,

- [Your Name]

From 20 authority bloggers we pitched for interviews, we managed to get 14 positive responses.

Here are some takeaways why the outreach campaign worked:

• Used prospects' name and their websites' name.
• Included the source where we've found them (I've found you one on of the podcast episodes …) - helps strikes a more personal approach on the email.
• Stated the value proposition to easily catch the interest of the outreach prospect (use it as a guest content for a top-notch productivity site). It helps secure confidence that their answers to questions can reach more audience.
• Straightforward subject line to get the message across.

You may want to check out this guide on blogger outreach to get more tips on how to effectively craft email copies specifically for blogger outreach campaigns.

Finally, you have to submit your finished content with great insights from niche influencers for content approval.

Then, acquire links:

A link to the influencer's website (for his contribution):

A link to our website:

B. How-to Interview Content

There is another way to maximize interview content besides using it as a validation to your article points - that is, utilizing the entire Q&A content as your guest post.

It is best to format it as a "how-to" article rather than just compiling expert's answers into a Q&A format and submit it directly to your target publisher.

You also have to structure the content in a way that is easy to scan and read, and that emphasizes the "specific topic" you're discussing about.

So the title can be something like, "How to [Topic] with [Influencer's Name]".

2. SCALE BLB PROSPECTING WITH CITATION LABS

For the past several months, I've been using Citation Labs heavily to scale prospecting for resources pages (or links pages) for our broken link building projects.

Disclaimer: I'm not an affiliate marketer of this tool.

Given that broken link building requires tedious work on prospecting especially if you're working on several BLB campaigns, using a tool to prospect thousands of relevant link opportunities is definitely a big help.

Using Citation Labs for a broken link building campaign, we've managed to create a list of 22,000+ job and career-specific link prospects with Domain Authority of 40 and above.

The list is further qualified to pass the relevance test, which resulted to 400 targeted prospects out of the first 10,000+ unqualified pages (4% qualification rate).

On average, we can qualify 1000 prospects based on relevance within 15 to 25 minutes. So the total time it took us to conduct relevance test for 10,000 pages was 2 1/2 hours to 5 hours.

Assuming you have a newbie link builder and he manually searches for link opportunities, it'd probably take him 3 to 4 hours to find 30 to 40 links pages qualified based on relevance and certain metrics like Domain Authority.

So for 400 qualified prospects, he would consume 40 hours equivalent to 1 week of work.

Notable advantages of utilizing Citation Labs for bulk link prospecting are:

• Improved efficiency in prospecting - as it requires less hours to manually prospect for link opportunities, so time can be spent on qualifying link targets based on relevance and obtainability.
• Expand link lists for untapped link opportunities - pages discovered by the tool aren't necessarily ranking for linker-based queries  (inurl:resources "topic").

Besides searching for links pages, Citation Labs can also help link builders to find other type of link opportunities such as review pages, forums and professional organization sites.

3. HIRE VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS FOR MENIAL TASKS

Apparently, outsourcing is a cost-effective strategy that can improve your link building campaign's efficiency. By giving menial tasks to freelancers, it helps you allocate more time on other important activities, which can help elevate individual and team's output and productivity.

Basically, the tasks that you'll be outsourcing are ones that'll only require basic knowledge and skills and can somehow be executed right away even without much deeper training.

Here are a few examples of link building tasks you can outsource to:

• Contact finding (name, email address, contact forms and social profiles - if email address is not available).
• Finding important page or site-level details (page tilte, article title)
• Initial pitching (sending your outreach emails using an email template with only a few tags to replace details with)

As an example, we recently started hiring virtual assistants locally (freelancers who are based here in the Philippines) and from other countries like Bulgaria to help us with bulk link building activities.

Instead of posting online jobs to facilitate hiring, we use Linkedin as a platform to manually search for freelancers who had previously worked for a similar company (either a full SEO service agency or a link building company).

The advantage of doing so is we were able to hire freelancers who can deliver more output than someone who just undergo a training process.

We also checked their work histories if they handled previous link building campaigns or any associated tasks like contact finding and daily checking of emails.

Before jumping straight to outsourcing, we created simple step-by-step documents that walks them through the entire process of executing the task to avoid recurring questions we'll then received from them, as they work on each campaign.

We use GDocs to easily share documents to our freelancers.

This outsourcing approach can certainly improve your campaign's efficiency with the right people and processes.

Further reading on outsourcing:

• Guide to Properly Outsourcing and Offshoring Work - Webris

4. PERSONALIZED EMAIL MERGE

As quoted by Jason Acidre on his SEO blog, "Outreach is probably the most tedious component of our marketing discipline because the activity primarily intends to build relationships."

I couldn't agree more with this statement, as we've done hundreds of outreach campaigns and to only succeed is to put the hardest work in creating the best offer (value prop in emails), in prospecting for highly targeted publishers and in sending email copies that'll mutually benefit both parties.

There's one subtle approach we've tested to improve the efficiency of our outreach campaigns - that is using a personalized email merge tool.

We initially start by installing Yet Another Email Merge to Google Spreadsheet as an add-on tool. It allows us to send 50 emails in every outreach account for free (there's a premium price if you're sending 400 emails a day).

Unlike the typical mail merge system that blast off email spams to publishers, this email merge tool allows us to personalize email copies while semi-automating sending off emails and scheduling them at the right time when prospects will likely to open.

Note: When using this approach, it's extremely important to set intervals in outreach, not to trigger Gmail from spamming your account. Instead of sending 400 emails one-time off, you can divide them into 5 or 7 days with intervals if possible, and just send 40 emails a day.

Here are a few advantages that this tool can bring to your outreach campaign:

• Enables scheduling features for different timezones.
• Tracks open and response rates as well as how many emails were sent and bounced back (or had errors in sending).
• Failed messages (bounced back emails or emails with technical errors) can be replaced immediately with secondary emails which streamlines your follow-up or second-pitch processes.
• One-click away from Google spreadsheet to schedule emails.

The said outreach tool requires a draft email which serves as your outreach copy to send or schedule emails. Using tags ($/Name/$) in your draft email is important to extract data from your spreadsheet and produce personalize emails.

This outreach approach can benefit you in so many ways, such as:

Initial-pitching using successful outreach copies

If you've tested a couple of outreach templates and one of them has successfully earned the highest open, response and closing rates (or even just the highest closing rate), you can use your most effective outreach template as your email copy in Yet Another Email Merge function for your next outreach campaign.

Follow-Ups

It would be more efficient to send short and straightforward follow-up emails using Yet Another Email Merge tool, which only takes 10 to 20 minutes to complete, than manually sending/scheduling all follow-up emails using your outreach accounts.

Considerations When Using Yet Another Email Merge

As you get your hands on to this tool, you may experience a few mishaps that can be avoided if you've taken a note of them.

Semantic Breaks

Ross Hudgens discussed semantic breaks in his outreach best practices post that should be noted carefully if you want to secure positive responses in your outreach campaigns.

A good example of this is when you send an email to a person with a tag, "I saw your post on venchitotampon.com blog" and you're addressing it to the blogger himself, "Venchito Tampon". A normal person would rather say, "on your personal blog" instead of naming the whole domain.

When you start using the tool, you might create a column for Website/Blog Titles that includes all branded names of your target link sources.

If not carefully checked, you might put the whole domain (venchitotampon.com) instead of inserting "personal blog" or "personal website".

Leaving off blanks

The tool requires you to create columns for Names, Email Address and other tags such as, Blog Name and Asset Title to further personalize your email copies.

All columns should be filled out with necessary input. Otherwise, you might see an email sent that sounds like a spammy build blast.

My trick here is to input the word "there" to blank cells in the "Names" column for email addresses with no available and visible names.

The final email copy will look like this:

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to FuturePoof Your Links By Determining Lifetime Link Value

As defined by Wikipedia, life-time value (LTV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.

This business concept enables entrepreneurs and marketers assess payback of advertising spent in promoting a product/service.

Replicating this same principle to link building campaigns can enable us to future proof links by considering their long-term effect on the pages they’ve linked to.

What is lifetime link value?

Lifetime link value is a self-evaluated prediction of the entire value of a backlink target to assess its potential impact to its destination pages. (coined by Ross Hudgens).

The great thing about using lifetime link value is that it can serve as a basis in determining the worthiness of getting a link from a page/site through its potential referred traffic, branding and assisted conversions, and by considering the resources you’ve put into place to acquire the same link (cost for content, time for prospecting/outreach, etc..).

There’s no absolute metric to measure individual lifetime link value of backlinks. However, knowing what makes one link more valuable than the other (because not all links are equal) can help you set standards in qualifying link targets and in prioritizing outreach based on which sets of link prospects can potentially bring long-term results for your campaign.

Link Value Factors

Search engines use a wide range of factors to determine how much weight each link on a page may pass along.

The Reasonable Surfer model, which was discussed by Bill Slawski in his 2010 post covered these three determinant sets of link value:

• • features associated with links
  • the pages these links had been placed
  • pages being linked to

In detail, examples of each link determinant set are stated below.

Examples of features associated with a link might include:

1. Font size of anchor text associated with the link;

2. The position of the link (measured, for example, in a HTML list, in running text, above or below the first screenful viewed on an 800 X 600 browser display, side (top, bottom, left, right) of document, in a footer, in a sidebar, etc.);

3. If the link is in a list, the position of the link in the list;

4. Font color and/or other attributes of the link (e.g., italics, gray, same color as background, etc.);

5. Number of words in anchor text of a link;

6. Actual words in the anchor text of a link;

7. How commercial the anchor text associated with a link might be;

8. Type of link (e.g., text link, image link);

9. If the link is an image link, what the aspect ratio of the image might be;

10. The context of a few words before and/or after the link;

11. A topical cluster with which the anchor text of the link is associated;

12. Whether the link leads somewhere on the same host or domain;

13. If the link leads to somewhere on the same domain,

• Whether the link URL is shorter than the referring URL; and/or

• Whether the link URL embeds another URL (e.g., for server-side redirection)

Examples of features associated with a source document (the page being linked to) might include:

1. The URL of the source document (or a portion of the URL of the source document);

2. A web site associated with the source document;

3. A number of links in the source document;

4. The presence of other words in the source document;

5. The presence of other words in a heading of the source document;

6. A topical cluster with which the source document is associated; and/or

7. A degree to which a topical cluster associated with the source document matches a topical cluster associated with anchor text of a link.

Examples of features associated with a target document might include:

1. The URL of the target document (or a portion of the URL of the target document);

2. A web site associated with the target document;

3. Whether the URL of the target document is on the same host as the URL of the source document;

4. Whether the URL of the target document is associated with the same domain as the URL of the source document;

5. Words in the URL of the target document; and/or

6. The length of the URL of the target document.

In the continuation patent (deeply discussed by Bill Slawski in his 2016 post), user behaviour on the page seems to be emphasized more as an important factor of link valuation. A link with high probability of being clicked on a page carries more weight than other links on the same page with no actions by users.

Further Reading:

• 20 Attributes that Influence a Link's Value
• 17 Ways Search Engine Judge the Value of a Link 
• Link Value Factors by Wiep

Visible Determinants of Lifetime Link Value

Evaluating links on a naked-eye standpoint is feasible given that there are visible clues that can be found on potential linking pages.

While some determinants provided below may require first-hand analysis on websites’ backlink profiles, it will only take less than 2 minutes of your time to generally evaluate a website/page for a link opportunity.

1. Topical Relevance

Relevance, no doubt, should be the primary factor when evaluating the value of a link target. In fact, the majority of top link builders/SEOs in this latest round-up post prefers a highly-relevant link but low authoritative link than a high-authority link with lower relevance, considering all other metrics being equal.

I’m fortunate enough to participate in the group discussion by sharing my insights on the topic:

“I strongly believe that relevant links have a bigger impact on the algorithm. More so, authority is pretty subjective, as metrics available on SEO tools out there can be flawed; how users/website visitors look at sites is mostly based on the relevance and utility of the information they’ve found on a given page.

“Also, in terms of scalability, you’re likely to get a bigger list of highly relevant link prospects, sitting in a very specific niche, than finding only high-authority sites with your choice of metric. Plus, if you’ve been reaching out to a webmaster, it makes more sense for them to give you a link if they think you’re highly relevant to their sites.”

Lifetime link value goes up when a certain page is highly relevant to your website. Meanwhile, if it’s a link off-topic to the destination page, its LLV certainly goes down.

One approach that you can use to determine the thematic relevance of a page is by using Majestic Backlink Analyzer.

The tool allows you to get an overview of the topical trust flow of a site.

Use this approach only for certain sites that you’re unsure of with relevance requirements.

Another tactical approach you can use for topical relevance is by checking the site’s list of categories. For generic blogs like travel, some of which have second-level deep categories like medications/insurance, you might find good link opportunities to acquire links from on a page-to-page relevance basis.

However, for niches with large linkable market audience, it isn’t a good idea to obtain a link from a domain with no category fit.

2. Evergreen Linking Source

The timeliness of a topic can either recede or raise a backlink’s lifetime link value.

An evergreen content idea like “how to tie your shoes” for example is less likely to become extinct than a marketing technique in SnapChat (who knows there’ll be another set of social media sites and new tactics to effectively use them?).

While trends can be taken advantage of for new linking opportunities, acquiring a link from an evergreen page can result to better ROI. It can help continuously drive traffic to your content as long as people can find the information on the linking page relevant and useful.

Given that the source page can improve its visibility by itself, getting in-content links directly to your content from publishers who are looking for references for their works (in addition to to the evergreen content they’ve seen) is also highly possible.

3. Link velocity

Domains that market themselves are great opportunities to build links from, as they continuously bring new visitors from organic channel (when they happened to rank for several industry keywords) which will then drive secondary traffic to your content.

Link velocity can be a visible determinant of the page’s marketability.

Link velocity describe the speed of link growth to a page or domain. Link velocity can be measured in new links per month or new linking root domains per month (LinkResearchTools).

Pages with steadier link velocity slopes tends to have a better LTV.

Similar to evergreen linking topics, they have the leverage of acquiring new visitors and potential customers from being able to rank for organic keywords. Given that they’ve been getting inbound links over time, they also have the tendency of improving its current search rankings - which can increase its lifetime link value.

For example, this page where I’ve acquired a backlink is getting consistent amount of links (see its link velocity graph).

This has allowed me to semi-automate leads coming from the page itself (even after 1 year of being published).

4. Temporal Links

Temporary links obtained through a “link renting” approach (similar to renting a house) have the lowest lifetime link value. Their value is predicated on the period of time the link remains sustained by the fees of the link buyer.

This type of links depreciates its link value, which can negatively affects the rankings of the content being linked to.

Imagine if a page is ranking within the top 3-5 spots for a target keyword and after a few months, 6 out of 10 of its temporal links have been removed by bloggers - this can certainly affects the page’s ranking.

While this hasn’t been proven by any study, the point in bringing this up is that temporal links can do more harm than good in the long run. Resources consumed for this type of links can be better off spent to links with high LTV.

4. Frequency of Updates

Determining the page’s frequency to updates or maintenance can help better assess its lifetime link value.

Static pages like resource pages with no updates since 2013 collects broken external links over time and is less likely being receptive to link request outreach pitches (some webmaster even planned to remove these pages).

Though these sites linking to 404s won’t be demoted by Google (as Gary Illyes answered Jennifer’s question), they are still perceived to provide a sub-optimal user experience. If you’re checking links on a resource page and find that most of them are broken, you wouldn’t take a chance to visit another link on the same page, even if it’s working in the first place.

No-longer-updated pages have low lifetime link value, as there are less likely to drive new visitors to their destination pages (their external links). Search engines won’t even try to rank these pages as they no longer updates information which are essential factor for search engines to decide which page deserve to rank for in search.

5. Link Neighbourhood

Checking the page’s link neighbourhood (other external links placed within the target page) is an imperative part of the link qualification process as it helps you better assess a backlink’s LTV.

A blog’s page with five commercial off-topic links is a low valued link neighborhood you certainly won’t get clicks from.

Check external links on the page and see if they’re mostly linking to commercial pages that aren’t thematically relevant to the content.

As a link building company, it has been part of our protocol not to acquire a link from a blog page with more than five external links and/or with a direct competitor link, unless the context of the page is a pure recommendation of services/products (i.e. top 25 productivity tools).

6. Indexability and Ranking Potentials

Indexability is fairly obvious, if a page isn’t indexed by search engines, it won’t certainly be found by target users. But there are potential link acquisition targets that are great opportunities on a naked eye view (well-designed and can potentially drive site traffic), but aren’t indexed by search engines in the first place.

To check if the site is actually indexed at the current time, you can use the command, site:domain.com and see if its pages are on search results (homepage should be at the #1 spot).

But more than that, target pages should at least rank in the first page for long-tail and/or low competitive keywords. The title tag of the homepage may not be worth assessing for in terms of rankings, as they may not be in the ranking positions yet. But going through its URL (target page), you should expect it to be visible in the first page of search results given that it’s targeting less competitive keyword than the homepage.

Ahrefs recently studied 3 million searches discovering the average number of keywords a page can rank for. They discovered that a page ranking for 10th, for example, can also rank for other 400~ related keywords.

Content that are both indexed and ranking for target keywords are high-LTV pages that are worth pursuing for links.

If you liked this post, you can follow me on Twitter @venchito14.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Build Authority Links to Your Website

What are authority links?

Authority links are links found on a webpage with an established trust and authority to drive targeted traffic to a website that can help the brand achieve its business objectives.

Getting these authority links is tough. It requires hard work, creativity and persistence to find, pursue and connect to publishers and industry linkers who are interested in citing or referencing your content as a trusted resource to follow.

Link building is not for the faint-hearted marketers.

After all, if a link can be easily acquired by everyone else, it shouldn’t be called an “authority”.

However, despite its difficulty, online marketers still pursue this type of links as it can positively impact a website in many ways, such as:

• Sending targeted traffic to your page
• Generating leads and sales from referred traffic
• Improving search visibility of your page by making it rank for industry keywords
• Providing more link opportunities to your content (organically from researchers who can potentially cite you as a credible source of information)
• Creating brand awareness (as you’ll be linked alongside with influencers and big content creators).

“Authority” is pretty much subjective depending on what factors you consider.

But whether it is relevance or benchmark metrics such as Ahrefs DomainRank, it is important to understand what types of links are deemed to be authoritative. Given that this will be the roots of your link building approaches - your “how” in getting links.

Types of Authority Links

Links from .edu and .gov sites

The legitimacy of an educational and governmental institution/organization being able to register a .edu/.gov domain is a way of the Internet preserving the authority and trust of this type of websites.

Although there remains a debate over the true value of .edu and .gov extensions, I strongly believe that what makes these sites authoritative is the information found on their pages. Incorrect, spammy or misleading details may lead to some drastic consequences on its end users (website visitors).

Authority .edu and .gov sites are hard-to-replicate links. Restrictions as to how relevant your page/site is to their own resource page make it more difficult for your competitors to get the same types of links  - unless they’ve created a better version of your content or is associated in the same organization your brand belongs to (e.g. for local professional organizations).

Links from ranking pages for thematic keywords

The most powerful links on the web are the ones that can directly send relevant traffic to your site.

Ranking pages for targeted industry terms are great sources of new traffic from searchers looking for relevant information.

Acquiring links from them can drive consistent visitors to your site (not just one-time off - as what happens to a one-time guest post publishing).

Here are a few tips to getting links from rankings page:

Target relatively new resource pages. They are more receptive to outreach pitches than old links pages that haven’t been updated for year. 

Given that they have just started curating topical resources/references, they are open for resource link requests.

Start your search with queries like, “inurl:resources “keyword” or “inurl:links.html “keyword”. Then set a time to past year/custom range (Tools - Time).

Contribute early to new industry publications. Investing early on topically relevant blogs (with high potentials for audience growth) by supplying them with regular content is a great technique to scale your link development efforts.

Because you’ll get higher approval rates as a columnist to contribute to low-authority (with high velocity for growth) publications compared to a high-tier news site in your industry.

Check the blog’s potential for growth using Ahrefs or SEMRush organic data.

Begin this approach with your typical guest blogging queries. Then do the same process above (set a time to past year/custom range) to filter recently published “write for us” pages.

(hat tip to Jason Acidre for this technique)

Further reading: Definitive Guide to Guest Blogging

Offer to update a static page. Informational content ranking for highly-searched terms should constantly be updated to satisfy its searchers’ intent, especially if the content requires the timeliness of the information (i.e. 2017 trends/updates).

This is where you can add value to the content creator by helping him update the page with new information and by adding other content formats (visuals, transcripts for video/audio, tables, etc..) - needed to make it 10x better than its competitors.

Links from top-tier news sites

Getting featured on A-spot blogs (media sites) can’t easily be replicated by your competitors because it requires relationships to make it happen.

If you have built connections with existing contributors from top-tier news sites, it’d open opportunities for your brand to be referenced as an authority expert in the industry.

Links coming from them (top-tier news sites) like Forbes is a great way to establish your brand’s authority.

You can also add social proofs to your signature or email pitches when reaching to mid-level or high-tier blogs for content partnerships to build your site’s

Links from topically relevant websites

Consider a prospect page’s relevance to your site above everything else. You’ll find pages hosted on domains with low Moz DA but should be considered as highly valued link prospects since they can pass human’s eye tests - great user experience, satisfying content and with promising search traffic growth (which can be measured using SEMrush/Ahrefs).

See this DA11 finance blog as an example.

I liked the three primary reasons Jon Cooper listed why SEOs and link builders should consider prospecting for relevant blogs/sites:

1. Looking at relevance gives you more room for larger pools of link prospects.
2. Relevant links have a bigger impact on the algorithm.
3. Webmasters are more likely to award you with a relevant link since it makes sense for their audience.

You need to start prioritizing relevance today as your primary metric in link prospecting.

Links that generate business conversions

Links that are sending qualified conversions to your website are link types and sources you should replicate over time - as they directly affect your online business’ revenue growth.

Aim to get recurring links from these websites to increase more assisted conversions generated in your brand.

On Getting Authority Links

Authority links are hard to get. But if you’ll able to acquire them for your site, it would tremendously impact your site’s search rankings - helping you dominate the market you are competing in.

Authority link development requires either branding and/or content.

Summing them up is a powerful combination for link authority.  

1. Perceived Branding

There are online businesses that don’t need 10x content to start getting brand awareness and establishing brand authority, as they have built it already using offline marketing platforms, such as advertising on billboards, television ads, and other offline marketing channels.

They have branded searches which enable them to generate leads and sales offline without having to depend purely on organic industry rankings.

If you are a consultant or an agency, getting clients who are widely known in a particular niche is a clear advantage on your end to develop authority links.

Because people are aware of the brand’s name, pitching publications and authority sites (.edu and .gov domains) for guest blogging, resource inclusion and broken link building are much easier to facilitate.

Ways to use perceived authority to get links:

A. Link reclamation

Find publishers who have mentioned your brand or product but haven’t linked to you. You can use BrandMentions to track them.  

Then politely pitch them and ask for link attributions.

This technique has been covered many times, so here’s a guide you can check out that walks you through the entire process.

B. Interview opportunities

Use your branding to cover more interview opportunities wherein you can also obtain authority links to your site.

Make your existing press mentions and features of your brand as social proofs when pitching to industry publishers who’re looking for guests on their show (podcasts). The more credible you are as a brand, the higher the probability they’ll get you (or your client) as a guest for their show.

C. Incentivize social sharing in exchange of linking

If you’ve had a huge fan base in your social accounts, you can start using it as a value proposition when reaching out to bloggers in your space. Ask if they’d be willing to be featured on your social profiles (as long as their content feature provides useful information). In exchange, get an authority link from one of their pages.

D. Speaking gigs for natural linking opportunities

If your client is into public speaking, it’s best to check if you’re getting natural authority links from speaking pages/profiles of event organizers’ websites. There’ll be times where they’ll be linking to broken URLs/domains.

You can also monitor publishers who link to your client’s slide presentations and Slideshare profile and ask if they can cite your client’s website as a source.

Chris Dyson wrote a guide on how to reclaim links from content creators that used your visual assets.

More reading: Using Brand Building Strategies to Improve Link Building

2. Content-based Link Acquisition

If perceived authority is missing in the formula, you can still get authority links by producing 10x content assets.

Smaller brands can win over big brands with an effective strategy to produce more content assets that can attract organic links.

As coined by Rand Fishkin, 10x content simply refers to content that is 10 times better than the best result that can currently be found in the search results for a given keyword phrase or topic.

Jason Acidre wrote a great piece on his own 10x content creation process (I advised you to check it out).

Here are a few effective techniques to acquire authority links using content:

A. Broken dead domain link building  

Broken link building is a concept of pointing out broken links to webmasters, with the hopes that they’ll be open for requests to add your link, whether as a direct replacement for a previously broken link or as a new addition unrelated to the broken ones.

Here are some useful resources to get started with broken link building:

• All-in-one broken link building workflow
• The broken link building bible by Russ Jones
• Inverted broken link building strategy by Ahrefs

Maximize this link building approach further by observing what other similar resource pages have been getting organic links (quietly) in your space. They’ve gotten links you haven’t acquired yet that I’ve found, in most cases, can’t easily be found through Google search.

Track dead content (broken links) on resource pages using LinkMiner.

Set the options to display the number of referring domains for each external link.

Check if the link is broken and if it does, do research further if it’s just a specific URL or prefix that isn’t working or the whole domain itself.

For instance, this video addiction content that I’ve found on a links page is part of the whole domain that isn’t working.

Gather resources/links pages pointing to the whole domain, not just to the specific broken content. Because there are other content in the site that gained high-authority links from other linkers as well - which provides you more link opportunities at one hand.

You can filter the results by link type (educational) to quickly extract .edu resource pages. Also, do quick searches for “link” or “resource” on Ahrefs referring domain search bar to easily get the same type of link opportunity (links pages).

Reach out to webmasters letting them know of the broken content they’ve linked to from their pages. Then suggest your relevant content as a replacement to their defunct link.

To increase the efficiency of your outreach management work, it’s best to stalk your A-list sole operator webmaster and see if they have social accounts you can pitch to - straight to get their personal email addresses.

I’ve found this effective for personal blogs (with only one webmaster/operator) and for sites with no visible email addresses.

Instead of sending follow-ups to receive a response, you can directly ask them for a contact email they regularly use. Because other webmaster has more than one email address - you may be pitching to one that isn’t working anymore.

Plus, this allows you to see their interest to get help from you in providing errors found (broken links) found on their webpage.  

Then acquire links:

B. Reverse engineer new content assets with highest link growth

Reverse engineering other people’s content assets has been a standard practice in the link building space.

Since publishers/content creators have linked/shared a competitor’s content (or a website with a similar content of yours), you’ll have better chances of acquiring a link to your content - especially when your content is 10x better than what your competitors have.

Start by finding competitors’ content that are similar to the assets you already have.

But don’t stop from there. Find other non-competing but relevant websites with high-performing industry guides (those that received a substantial amount of high-quality backlinks).

Analyze their backlink growth further by checking the page’s link velocity. This approach allows you to get insights on how long have they’ve been building links or have been picking up links organically.

Because if they’ve acquired authority links just recently, their existing linkers are still at the stage of updating their pages/sites. When you reach out to them, you’ll have a higher probability of receiving positive responses.

You might also find other linkable audiences where they’ve been able to secure links that you might as well consider for link prospecting.

C. Linkable market analysis

Linkable audience is a group of resource curators who would benefit from specifically tailored information on a topic.

Starting a link development campaign by identifying linkable markets in the space can give you a better idea if a particular content topic is worthy to pursue for content creation. It is a guarantee on your end that there are audiences willing to link to your content asset, once it’s been created.

There are two ways to assess linkable markets in your industry:

Check the number of unique referring domains to ranking pages for industry terms

You can use Mozbar to see if there are pointing links to pages ranking in search results.

You may have to analyze further these links to see if they’re coming from legitimate websites/pages.

Intersect existing linkable audiences to your brand’s theme

Garett French created a list of 601+ linkable audiences whom you can serve with your content. If you can intersect your brand’s mission with different linkable markets, you’ll be able to generate more link opportunities for your website.

For example, this drugs rehab site published several pieces of content targeting different linkable audiences.

1. A Substance Guide for Parents

Linkable audience: Parents of teens who are struggling with substance/drugs.

2. Bullying and Substance Abuse: Who It Affects and Why

Linkable audience: People concerned about bullying in schools.

3. Degrees for Mental Health and Addiction Professionals

Linkable audience: Job seekers in the mental health and addiction niche

4. LGBTQ+ and Addiction

Linkable audiences:

• Parents of LGBT teens
• Parents of LGBT adults

You may notice that these audiences served by resource curators (not necessarily bloggers/journalists, etc..) fall into one of these categories:

• a person in need, or a person who cares for a person in need
• a person seeking out information

If your clients have content pieces that are targeted to specific linkable audiences, you’ll have higher chances of acquiring consistent amount of authority links every month.

Further Reading:

• Link Magnetism - How to Create an Authority Site That Attracts Authority Links
• Earn 50+ Authority Links Per Month

by Venchito Tampon Jr

Are Private Blog Networks (PBNs) Worth It In 2017?

I always get asked by SEOs, particularly those who have their own agencies why I’m not using PBN as my go-to-strategy in link building.

I’m not an anti nor pro private blog networks. If it works for you and you told your client the risks of doing it, that’s fine. Otherwise, you’re blindsiding your client.

This post reveals data of the return on investment of a private blog network.

I received 75 responses to the survey I did this month on everything about private blog network.

Let’s see what we’ve gathered here.

Note: This survey was done to gather simple data on the cost and time investment they take them to some immediate rankings for their websites. This is not the end all and be all of ROI on PBNs.

How many websites do you have in your PBN network?

Respondents are heavily engaged in a Private Blog Network, with 37.3%, (28 of them) have 50 to 100 websites in their private blog network. A few reached out to me that admitted they even have a larger size, 100 or more websites in their database.

How much does it cost you to start each website? Including Domain, Private Whois and Hosting plus a few articles to start.

Similar to any website creation and development, private blog network owners take the time to setup a domain, Private Whois and hosting plus creating a few content pieces or pages to get started with it.

A whopping 59.5% of respondents invest $50 to $100 for each of their websites.

Among the 59.5% who invested $50 to $100, 15 of them have 50 to 100 websites, only 11 have 1 to 3 websites.

If you do the math, the highest prices might go between $2500 and $10,000 total setup cost! It’s a big amount for those who are just starting out and want to get immediate results.

How many hours every week do you spend for web development, content, plugins, etc.. for each website? – maintenance

Let’s get to know the number of hours private blog networks owners spend for each of their PBN sites.

Over 37.3% of them spend less than an hour every week to maintain each of their websites. It may include adding SEO plugins, developing each webpage, publishing new content and other maintenance activities.

Out of 37.3 equivalent to 28 respondents, 10 of them have 50 to 100 websites while 6 only have 1 to 3 websites.

When you do the math, the longest time a PBN owner spends each week for all his websites ranges between 50 to 100 hours! It amounts to a full-time day job.

Do you outsource content for your PBN sites?

More than half of the respondents outsource their content creation tasks to freelance writers. If they have tons of websites (50 to 100 or even more), it’s wiser for them to outsource content as it is obviously time-consuming.

If yes, how much do you invest for outsourcing content for each site? (61 responses)

Among the sixty-one respondents, 49.2% or 30 of them invest $25 for the content of each of their sites, only 8.2% or 5 PBN owners spend $100 and up for outsourced content creation.

Out of 30 private blog networks who spend $25 content investment for each site, 9 of them have 50 to 100 PBN sites, only 3 have one to three websites.

If you do the math, the total cost for outsourcing content for PBN purposes is between $75 and $2500.

Do you use any SEO tools? How much do they cost?

To scale some SEO processes like link audit, PBN owners definitely need SEO tools to help them with their work.

Sixty-percent (60%) of respondents invest less than $100 per month for SEO tool subscription. Others (twenty-nine percent) have $100 to $500 investment on search marketing products which will add to the total cost of their investment for private blog networks.

How many months do you see results in rankings to your money website(s) using PBN?

The real deal here is how many months they see search ranking results from their efforts. Fifty-two percent of respondents confidently say that they see immediate results within 1 to 3 months of doing SEO activities.

Let’s do the math both for those who own 3 websites and for those who have 50 websites.

Total cost of 3-site PBN network for three month period (though three sites alone couldn’t be considered as private blog network by some SEOs in grey/black-hat industry) is $525 (sum of $300 on website setup cost (3 month period) and $225 on outsourced content creation - 3 month period).

I doubt if they’re getting results from three websites alone.

The total cost of 50-site PBN network is $12,500, the sum of $5000 on website setup cost and $7500 on outsourced content creation (3 month period).

Do you monetize your PBN network? How much do you earn every month?

Aside from getting returns on investment from using private blog networks for their money websites, most, if not all, PBNs get returns from monetizing their own PBN networks. A large portion (66.7%) earns $100 to $300 per month. Others get $500 to $1000 and $1000 to $3000 every month from their PBN network monetization. I assume the latter two have more PBN sites than the former.

Different Ways to Invest $4000 a month ($12,500 for 3 months) Into SEO

1. Content creation

Content-based SEO strategies, especially if it is heavily invested in evergreen content can stand the test of time, and you’ll see initial and long-term results from this kind of work – increase in conversions, lead generation, so on and so forth. You can learn how to be more practical with content creation with this content writing post.

2. High quality backlinks

If you seriously want to focus on acquiring real backlinks that have growing traffic and can be placed editorially on highly relevant sites through guest blogging, targeted outreach and other link building strategies, you can invest that same amount $4000 a month on hiring one or two link building companies or hire a team of link prospects and outreach specialists to do the work for you ($4000 can hire 10 Filipino virtual assistants already). Automate it with proper link building sessions/trainings and management.

Further Reading:

• 101 Actionable Link Building Tips
• 23 Actionable Tactics to Get Backlinks in 2016

Now it’s Your Turn…

If you are getting a return on investment using PBN network, then good for you. Take risk and let your clients know about it.

I know this is a controversial topic.

Do you have any questions about private blog networks? I’m not an expert on it (I don’t have one), but will ask other SEOs to come by and answer the questions for you.

Or maybe you have any insights or thoughts to add?

Either way, leave a quick comment below.

I'll be more than happy to reply to comments and answer questions.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Get Editorial Links to Your Website

Editorial links are the most powerful type of links given that it signals Google that the brand being linked to is a trusted resource/reference (either it is targeting the homepage of the site or its inner pages/contents).

There are three primary elements that can intensify your chances of getting in-content links for your website:

• Strong direct relationships with bloggers and content publishers in the industry.
• Content seen has a uniquely useful information and unexpected hook, which edges the content piece over pages hosted on competitors’ sites.
• The brand has a large influence over its community through its published high quality content and coverage/mentions from popular news/media outlets – which makes it easy for the brand to be remembered by top media/content publishers when writing posts for their blogs/sites.

Acquiring contextual links editorially from content creators requires extensive amount of effort and time especially for websites who’re still starting out to build their influence and authority from scratch.

Tactics that aim to consistently attract editorial links to your content/site would usually take 4 to 6 weeks or even months for brand new websites. Though they’re all time-consuming, these tactics that I’ll be sharing to you are not impossible to do.

1. Trust marketing

Without trust, it is almost impossible to earn and editorial links, simply because content creators are keen to choosing credible sources/pages that they’d like to mention in their future works.

Trust marketing brings edges to new brands without enough to content to compete in the industry. With proper engagement and content development, new websites can now attract in-content backlinks from industry-related publishers with trust as its main component of link attraction.

Personalize your brand by choosing one team member (prefer it to be your site’s content creator) to spend most of his/her time producing high quality content pieces that’ll be published inside and outside of your company website.

Get him/her engage in niche-specific community platforms like forums and Q&A sites by providing direct and useful answers to topical questions in your industry. Spend at least hour every week for community engagement, because you’ll learn great insights from this activity – i.e. understanding the deepest needs of your target users, which you can use to create a user-generated content that targets a specific group of users (mostly potential linkers).

Wil Reynolds shared a very interesting presentation on conversion-oriented forum link building. He specifically discussed one ecommerce client who generated $11,000 revenue from a simple one-hour a week forum engagement.

Trust marketing can also yield contextual links from brands (with pre-existed relationships) through interviewing one of your brand publishers in their own blogs.

2. Invest in scholarships programs

For brands with big marketing budgets, setting up a scholarship program and publishing a page on it is one of the effective ways to earn reputable backlinks nowadays. Educational institution sites and government pages tend to link to scholarship programs that provides intrinsic value to their target visitors and users.

Though most of the time there’s only link that can be built from a single domain using this link acquisition technique (scholarship link building), still the relevant traffic and assisted conversion it can bring to the website are very much promising for the business.

This client of mine in the education niche acquired 62 .edu links through its scholarship program – which adds hundreds of referral traffic to his website and helps the site rank for relevant industry keywords.

You can request for a profile section from your target linker to explain more details about your program. This will entice users from other sites to visit your scholarship page and contact you for future partnership programs (this might get you additional editorial links from potential linkers).

3. Do secondary-competitor reverse engineering

Competitor backlink building is not just creating a huge list of backlinks earned/built by competitors but also understanding the relationships of linking pages and the page/site being linked to.

Reverse engineering (other term for competitor backlink building) can provide you an easy way to earn your first set of links (without need to prospect for targets from scratch).

The most common reverse engineering method is finding websites that currently rank in search results for your target keywords (either these keywords are commercial, transactional or blog-related).

Though this approach is pretty much powerful for local-based businesses, adding a few more ways to improve your reverse engineering process is definitely worth to try out in order to lessen footprints caused by building links also gained by your competitors.

Target links seen in resource pages as your secondary competitors when doing reverse engineering activity.

You can build a larger list of link prospects using this approach given that most of the time, links in those resource pages are not visible in search results.

Use Ahrefs, OSE or other third-party link analysis tools to track existing links of those secondary competitors. You can apply any of the following link tactics to acquire those editorial links:

• Pitch webmasters who have resource pages with broken links in them and ask if they’ll be interested to replace their defunct links with hyperlinks pointing to your website and to your other suggested resources (choose non-competitor links as your other suggested links, so as not to help your competitors gain the same amount of links your brand is getting).
• Contribute on industry blogs that have high search share and engagement level to build recurring links to your content(s) every week/month. Ask their content managers if you can apply to become their regular content contributors.
• Understand how your primary competitors (prospected from search results) and secondary competitors (other links in your target resource pages) acquired their current editorial links. They may have used any of these tactics: moving man method, press pitching or social link building.

Once you’ve created a giant list of link prospects through reverse engineering, you can now create a link strategy/plan to build those in-content links.

4. Profile editorial links from content contributor/speaking opportunities

A brand ambassador with a superb expertise in an industry often receives speaking and content contribution opportunities because he is recognized as one of the top influencers through his valuable contribution on top industry blogs and his non-profit social and community engagement.

Target corporate speaking and authority blogs for speaking and content contribution opportunities since most of the time, they allow individual profile pages for each of their contributors/speakers which’ll make it easy for target participants and readers to know more about their authors/speakers.

Other opportunities to earn editorial links from profile pages include:

• Sponsorship and exhibit programs for local and international events, which allows sponsors to expose their brand to a wide variety of potential customers/clients both offline and online.
• Local or international volunteerism on popular events with an opportunity to be mentioned in a volunteers’ list (specific brands) in a separate page of their website (there are cases that they also publish profile pages for brands who volunteered to the event).

Invest in networking with other brands in your industry (should be non-competitors) to earn unexpected in-content links from voluntary events in industry-related events and seminars.

5. Quoted insights

In today’s digital marketing, content creation is now a requirement for every brand who wants to build and earn non-manipulative links from reputable websites/blogs.

When producing high quality content, it is imperative to add unique insights/quotes coming from your brand ambassadors and content creators in order to make your content comprehensive to read or to consume.

This approach allows you to earn voluntary-given backlinks from bloggers and researchers who want to use your content creator’s quotes/insights contained in your content.

Make a consistent effort to produce high quality content on your website that have information that is found nowhere else (this element is commonly called unexpected hook).

6. Optimize your pages for natural language optimization type

Natural language patent was released last November as a method for Google to extract data from an authority page listed in search results in order to provide a direct answer to a specific search query.

This allows many authority pages to be seen by new search users as a recommended answer for a specific questions/query.

Add information to your page that is straightforward and that suits a specific search query or keyword phrase (e.g. symptoms of diabetes).

You can link to your page from other related internal pages in order for your new visitors to see your main target page. This will also help the page to increase its page authority and rank for that specific query.

This approach may help your page be seen by researchers or bloggers in that specific area, which will eventually help your content to earn editorial links from their blogs/sites.

Here are other resources that you can check out for more information on this topic:

• Direct Answers: Extracting Text From Pages Citations
• Direct Answers: How Answers Are Extracted From Web Pages
• Direct Answers – Using Query Intent Templates To Identify Answers
• Direct Answers – Taken From Authority Websites
• Direct Answers – Natural Language Search Results For Intent Queries

More Resource: How To Promote Your Latest Blog Post Like A Boss

by Venchito Tampon Jr