How to Increase Responses from Link Requests (Classic Examples, Recommendations and a lot more)

A link request is an email sent to a prospect with the goal of earning a link back to the sender’s website.

That phrase is now popularly termed as, “outreach email” or “outreach template”, seeing that the value that this approach provides is far better than just earning a link. A single outreach email could also be translated to new relationships, partnerships, engagements and business sales and conversions.

So when we discuss about link request, you won’t just get a link, you build connections.

That is why link request (outreach) when combined with content, is one of the most utilize link building tactics and many internet marketers still believe that it is the most effective link building method that you can still apply to build authority to your pages and to improve your site’s search performance.

Now, the question is how you can write a link request email that will get you results for your website.

To answer this question, I took a few examples of emails that I received for the past three months to show you mistakes that most link specialists/PR managers and the like online marketers are doing and how to make these link request emails effective in getting responses from targets.

Let’s get started.

Example 1: Shopping cart abandonment email

This PR email pitch is almost perfect for an outreach campaign but the sender forgot the first thing people would want to open an email and actually read it – interest.

Yes, I wrote a post about link building for ecommerce and blogs but it doesn’t mean that I’m really looking forward for another post or even a visual content about the said topic. My site covers only link building and content marketing (which you may know already, if you’ve been a long time reader here).

How to improve this email copy?

Include a few personal details of the webmaster/blogger (e.g. name, blog/site name, etc..) to spark a little connection while the recipient is reading the first paragraph of the pitch.
Target tech, SEO and internet marketing blogs that primarily discuss ecommerce topics in their content. This is the first set of linkers that you might want to engage with in your content promotion.
Identify the value that your content is offering. If you go back to reading the pitch, you can think that CRO blogs would be a good fit to target with their approach.

Example 2: Hospitality trends email

How to improve this email copy?

Subjects should be made catchy and is something that the recipient would be able to connect to. Since I’m only interested with SEO, internet marketing and business topics, I will not bother myself replying to this type of email.
Include personal details of the target (again). Take a quick look at the about me page and homepage, you’ll definitely identify the author of this blog. J
Encourage to check out the content first before asking for a link. If I find it useful, I will spend one minute to login to my website, edit my post and link to you.

Example 3: For guest email

How to improve this email copy?

Support your information about your writing experience with proofs of work. If you’re an experienced writer, then why don’t you give me samples of your best articles?
Never ask for a link in your first pitch, it would only give the impression that you’re sending an email to encourage me to link to you (where is the value of your pitch?).
Make sure you have a clear point in your pitch. If you’re only asking the person to check out your content, then that should be clear from beginning to the ending paragraph of your message.

Example 4: Product review email

How to improve this email copy?

State your position in your company (even though people won’t care about your career status, including your company position adds credibility to your pitch).
Provide details about your product (i.e. features and why should I care about it)
Don’t ask for a review if you don’t tell the person the value of your offering.

Examples of good link request emails

Example 1: More link links email from Wordstream

Why this email works?

First name first. Elisa stated my first name and that catches my attention (pretty basic but very important).
The pitch was straightforward and clear (by reading the first few words, I already know what to do).
The branded signature makes me want to check out the brand and personally connect with Elisa.

Example 2: Resource link building

Why this email works?

The pitch is actually what I actually looking for (I stated in my recent post I that I want to receive actionable tips to add to my resource page).
It answers all my questions (what, how, why of the pitch).

Psychology 101 for linker outreach

Let’s get straight. Psychology of persuasion and influence is what we, link builders need to further improve the way we approach link building and outreach today. Because with psychology in mind, we’ll be able to tap into other people’s interests, and get them take any action that we desire for our brand.

Given that we reach out to real people, we should also make our principles and methods real as well.

The Six Principles of Influence were created by Robert Cialdini, Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. He identified the six principles of influence that we can apply to any content and link development campaigns that we’re doing today.Here’s how.

Reciprocation

Link building should benefit both parties (you as the person who wants a link and the person you want to get a link from).

With reciprocation, the first initiative should come from you. The same goes with link building, if you start linking to other relevant sites, people will eventually link to you as well.

Here are some ways to show reciprocation in link building:

Create a resource page for non-competitors’ domains. If you own a service company website, why not publish a page that lists down all the best tools in your industry.

Link to other relevant content sources (e.g. influencers’ recent posts) from your own blog’s content. If your piece is relevant and almost has the value/information similar to your content source, you would have a chance to acquire a fresh link from your influencer’s site.
Share other brands’ content on social media platforms with a mention to the author’s social profile. This would help your brand to tap into other brands/influencers/authors’ radars and solidify the relationships you have with them. This will in turn, entice them to share or even link to your page once you start reaching out to them through blogger outreach and content promotion approaches.
Make other domains’ visible on other blogs by linking to them from your third party content (e.g. guest posts). Reach out to them and tell them that you mentioned their posts in your guest articles. This approach will eventually provide you links in your second layer link building.

Initiating link building activities to relevant blogs/websites in your niche gives you more link opportunities than just simply reaching out to people and asking to view, share or link to your content.

Liking

Finding your common grounds with your outreach targets is one of best ways to get their attention instantly.

Here is how you can find your commonalities with your prospects:

Identify sources/links that they consistently share on social places and see what specific blogs they love to read and share to their followers.
Discover their interests by stalking to their websites, looking at how they respond to their community followers and finding what topic they usually publish on their sites.
See where they publish their content works. Use Reverse Image search and Google search to find pages/blogs where they had their posts published.
Spend 3 minutes finding their best links and analyze how do they get those links, (do they participate in industry-related communities?)

Include details in your pitch that will relate and/or connect you to your outreach prospect.

Commitment and consistency

Commitment is hard to express when you still don’t have any consistent activities on your website. Reaching out to a prospect with the intent of committing yourself for collaboration/partnership activities would need first to show consistency on your content and link development efforts.

Here’s how you can do it:

When pitching a content manager/blogger for regular content contribution, make sure that you include links to your other site’s author profiles where your guest articles are visible. This approach would prove that you have previous commitments on other brands.
When performing broken link building method, you can include a personal commitment to your pitch, telling to the webmaster that you’re willing to make aware of him of any error issues (dead links) that you might encounter on his website. This will show a little interest from your part to provide value to his website and to his site’s targeted audience.

Social proof

One of the effective ways to capture the interests of your outreach prospect is to show social proofs in your email message. There are many implications of showing social proof in your link request pitch:

It exemplifies your authority as a brand/author/publisher.
It makes your recipient feel that you’re capable of providing value for their website and for their readers (if in case, you want to use guest blogging approach).
It humanizes your pitch (impressing others that you’re an engaging person in your industry).
Adds credibility to your content particularly when you show examples of influencers who’d shared your posts in the past.

Social proofs are commonly added to pitches to ask a webmaster to become part of his community (regular contributor), exclusive partner and/or requesting to become an affiliate marketer of his product/service.

Authority

Authority is what most brands would want to achieve in their respective industries, given that it provides them opportunities to easily inculcate their messages/intentions/stories to their communities who already trusted them through the efforts that these brands made in the past (content, partnership, engagement, etc..).

It also makes outreach campaigns more effective in earning responses and mentions from people, seeing that they already know what the brand is all about and what the brand is capable of contributing to the community.

Authority is achieved through many content and link development efforts such as:

Consistently publishing linkable assets that people won’t find from anyone else and are filling content gaps in the industry.
Participating in online communities where expertise and experience could be expressed (interviews/crowdsourcing, taking advantage of journalists asking for free tips/advices, answering questions on forums, Q&As and blogs, etc..)
Building a solid social community on social platforms such as Google+ and Twitter by actively answering questions on social communities where you know you can add value to and consistently adding/following social people who’re actively sharing relevant posts and participating on communities (you can use ManageFlitter for Twitter management and Circloscope for Google+)
Become the go-to brand in your industry by publishing guides, whitepapers, ebooks and podcasts/webinars that discuss questions/topics that are raised by people in your community.

Other resources:

How to become an Influencer through Content and Relationship Marketing

How Being an Authority can Boost Your Online Sales

Scarcity and exclusivity

Taking advantage of the idea of scarcity and exclusivity when offering premium content to your users/subscribers/customers is one of the best ways to promote your offerings (products/services) as well as earn links from your outreach and content promotion campaigns.

Here are some methods where you can apply scarcity and exclusivity to your content creation and link development campaigns:

Provide an exclusive content only to your existing subscribers (e.g. free ebook). This will allow your brand community to give importance to your emails that have information/data that you haven’t been published on your blog.

Send exclusive offers to active bloggers in your industry (i.e. sending them free access to your brand’s new premium products). Allowing this to happen in the first few weeks before your launching campaign could give a boost to the traffic and link opportunities to your product’s page once it goes live (bloggers would be excited to write reviews or add insights to their existing reviews given that they want to become the first few persons to cover your new tool/product).

Actionable tips to improve your link request/outreach emails

Follow any link-request instructions indicated in the page where you want to get links from to have a higher chance of getting response from your target. Contact email, required subject line and name of the person to contact to are a few examples of details that may be added by your outreach target to his resource page.
Spend time writing your pitch to your link prospect. Making your email personalized and straightforward makes it easy for the recipient to understand your main intention/purpose of outreach. You can check out these resources from BuiltVisible and SEERInteractive about linker outreach.

Other resources:

http://moz.com/blog/how-to-write-email-to-get-a-better-response-rate

http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/content-based-outreach-for-link-building/

http://kaiserthesage.com/persona-link-building/

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Real Life Examples of Blogger Outreach and 7 Lessons I Learned From It

Creating a blogger outreach strategy has been one of my top priorities in link building since I started to focus on this challenging side of SEO. It is also become one of every online marketer’s arsenals for marketing their content, page or website to let everyone know that their online asset exists and it has something of value to offer.

There are several reasons why blogger outreach has become a normal part of content promotion these days. The most common among them are:

Earn links (since link building today has become more difficult, most of the brands consider outreach as one of the viable techniques to acquire high quality and relevant links).
Build relationships with like-minded people.
Increase visits to a website (direct traffic and referred visits from referring link domains).
Tap into influencers’ radars and make the website known to them.

With so many benefits of blogger outreach, we often neglect the lessons we can learn from it and further improvements we can do to advance our approaches in this aspect of online promotion.

Here are a few real life examples on how I used blogger outreach in some of my content marketing campaigns and provide you tips on how you can effectively use it for your brand. I will also cite lessons I learned from my almost one year experience in doing blogger outreach.

Crowdsourced Content

With three group interviews I already covered on my blog, I realized that the most significant purpose of creating a crowdsourced content (group interview) is not to add more links to a link profile but to actually help spark connections with influencers/top personalities in the industry.

Relationship building will take you into many places and given that this part of marketing is what most brands are not accustomed to, it could bring you an advantage over your competitors. The more effort you exerted on influencer outreach, the likelihood of earning the biggest share in the search market is higher.

Increase in influence could result to increase in brand signals which will associate additional links and shares to your website.

Publishing group interviews will not always be suitable to every industry, based on the following reasons:

Different industries have different levels of competition.
Some industries have high numbers of non-participative brands (there are industries where brands are not willing to participate in any community discussions for some valid reasons – e.g. their own branded information are too confidential).

For industries that have active communities, crowdsourced content would be a good topic idea for a content marketing campaign. To start with creating this type of content, here is a step by step guide that you can follow:

Step 1: Prospect influencers in your niche

There are so many ways and tools that you can use to find influencers in your niche, but the most effective tools that worked for me are Google search and Buzzsumo.

Google search

You can use simple search queries to discover pages/posts that already list down popular websites in your niche.

See if those websites have an active webmaster/blogger that you can engage with for interview opportunities. If there is real person behind that blog/site, you can list down the name and his/her email address in a spreadsheet.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is definitely one of the best places to find popular content as well as influencers and journalists that you can contact for your link development campaigns.

You can use any terms/phrase that are related to your industry to discover the most popular/shared content.

Click “View Sharers” and filter only the results by influencers.

Collect all the names and the URLs of the websites of those influencers in the result and list them all down in a spreadsheet.

Other prospecting tools to find more industry influencers

AllTop
Niche directories
Other sites’ resource pages that list down industry’s popular websites or influencers (do a Google search using this advanced search query - inurl:links OR inurl:resources)
Followerwonk

Step 2: Gather your influencers’ email addresses

There are useful tools that you can use to help you identify your influencer’s email address. A few of my favorite tools are:

Email Permutator + Rapportive
Google search (“*domain.com” full name)

Step 3: Pitch to your influencers

When pitching influencers, the most important thing you must consider is the basis/purpose of your pitch. This should be clear in your entire email message to bait a response from your outreach recipients.

For my first three group interviews, I used two simple email templates to pitch influencers whom I know would be interested to share their personal tips/insights about my content’s theme.

Below are the examples of two email copies that I used for my third group interview (the most actionable link building tip):

For initial outreach:

For follow up:

This approach resulted to:

For the first group interview (creative content marketing):

Target interviewees: 159

# of responses: 50

Earned contributions: 38

For the second group interview (most actionable link building tip):

Target interviewees: 99

# of responses: 52

Earned contributions: 37

For the third group interview (natural link building):

Target interviewees: 108

# of responses: 49

Earned contributions: 28

Just imagine if you have a regular group interview published on your blog every quarter (if one piece can earn an average of 80+ links, then in a year, you’ll have 320 additional links).

Well, if you ask me, the first group interview took only 5 hours to complete (2 hours for prospecting and 3 hours for the outreach).

Since the list of participants from the first group interview could still be used for the subsequent outreach campaigns, the total number of hours consumed would have been lower than 5 hours.

Step 4: Consolidate your influencer’s contribution into one big post and publish it

Once you start receiving responses from interview participants, it is very important to note in your spreadsheet which of them had submitted their contribution, those that would need a follow up outreach and those who’re not really willing to participate. This will help your next outreach campaigns to prioritize interview targets who love to participate in such kind of community discussions – group interview.

Once done, you can now consolidate all of your influencers’ contributions into one big post. You can add a cool design if you want but make sure that texts are readable and easy to digest.

Step 5: Insanely promote the group interview

There are several ways to promote a content asset, and this topic has already been covered on many SEO and content marketing blogs so I won’t need to discuss this in this article.

However, below are a few techniques that you can try to get the word out of your content asset:

Make social sharing buttons visible on your page (this may sound pretty basic, but there are several blogs that haven’t done this yet).
Participate on relevant community discussions (forums, Q&A sites, blogs, etc..) by answering industry-related questions and link to your post
Use linker outreach to promote the page to people who’ve shared similar content and have existing blogs/sites that are relevant to your industry (remember not to ask for a link, if they’re linkers, they already know what to do).
Link your group interview from your third party content pieces (e.g. guest post) to attract more readers to it and increase the chances of earning more links and shares from people who’ve been attracted to your page.

More resources to promote your content

Optional Step: Upgrade your successful group interview

If you have a group interview that had been successful in earning brand signals in the past (shares, links, mentions, news citations, etc.), you can upgrade it to a more comprehensive resource content by adding more useful tips/information from other influencers who haven’t contributed to your interview post. They could be from your past list of link targets/influencers that haven’t replied to you due to personal or work issues or had changed their contact email address, which made it difficult for you to reach out to them.

To get started, you can assess your previous list of influencers by identifying their new websites, and/or personal email addresses, to change those important details in your spreadsheet and increase the odds of getting responses from them in your next outreach.

Case study

I’m doing a simple experiment today and it’s quite getting successful.

As part of improving my brand’s content assets, I am currently working on upgrading my previous group interview – the Most Actionable Link Building Tip.

I prospect for more influencers that I haven’t reached out in the past and those that weren’t managed to respond to my previous pitch.

Before doing the outreach, I think of ways on how I can get more responses from my interviewees.

So I spent at least two minutes to identify the influencer’s current status on the web and include it to my email pitch.

Below are a few basic information I considered to add to my email copies:

The influencer’s latest blog post and my personal take on the article (based on the value that it provides to its readers).
The influencer’s latest status updates on Twitter (I used AllmyTweets or Twitter’s list feature to make this scalable).

These two basic things are enough to evaluate my influencer’s status, which I included to my blogger outreach pitch.

Email to Adam Connell

Email to Aleyda Solis

Spend at least 15 minutes to identify your influencers’ status updates on Twitter in a regular basis. This could help you make your pitch more personalized and catchy to your targets.

Guest Blogging

I already covered this link building technique last month, but just a recap of the process, here is a short step by step guide that you can follow:

Prospect both for horizontal, vertical or local-centric guest blog targets (use advanced search operators when doing Google search to ease the process of finding them).
Qualify your list of domains based on authority and brand metrics (domain authority, ave. # of social shares, ave. # of comments per post, etc..)
Collect important details from the domain (site/blog name, categories it belong, three topic suggestions for the blog, name of the contact person, his/her position and his/her Twitter profile).
Use email templates (one for outreach specialists and one for agency marketers), send three topic suggestions and let them choose the topic that they want you to write for them.
When you get a response, you can now create the guest article based on the level and type of audience, and the type of content that is prominent on the blog.

To make this more scalable and more effective in getting higher response and link acquisition rates, I added a few tips/insights that you can consider.

Ask to whom you should send your topics

The most crucial part of a guest blogging process is outreach, seeing that if you won’t get a response or even catch the interest of the blogger to let you write an article for them, you would need to find another way to engage with him (which will take another minute of your time to reach out to that person).

Perhaps, one of the most common issues when sending emails to outreach targets is not having connections with the right contact person.

When gathering email addresses of bloggers using tools, there’ll be times that the only available contact emails are support/info email addresses (e.g. support@domain.com or info@domain.com)

These email addresses don’t have any specific names attached, therefore, you don’t have any idea of the contact person that you’re trying to reach out. If this is the case, asking to where you should send your email pitch is the best way to do.

Take note that you still need to clarify your intention of your sending your email to get them send your email pitch to the right person (e.g. blog/content manager)

When done right, you should receive a positive response like this example.

Use branded email signature to your email to add credibility to your pitch

Email service providers have their own features of allowing users to change their email signatures. These email signatures are the last few texts that your recipient will read yet it will add credibility to your pitch and to you as the sender.

Here are a few things you can add to your branded email signature:

Complete name
Position and your company
Website URL
Personal picture
Social profile links (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc..)

Providing these basic personal details to your pitch would allow your recipient to know more about you and your brand (which will make it easy for them to know whether or not your pitch deserved to be replied).

Getting interview coverage from relevant blogs

Mentions that describe and discuss more about your brand are probably one of the important links that every brand must be able to acquire for their websites.

Initiating interviews to bloggers who had successfully published individual and group interviews in the past is one effective way to add more branded links to your site’s link portfolio.

A few months ago, I connected to a few bloggers in the internet marketing industry and ask if they would like to conduct an interview with me, ask me questions and publish the interview on their blogs.

The process is simple. I searched for blogs/domains that are regularly publishing interviews with influencers/experts in the internet marketing niche (a simple Google search will do).

You can also reverse engineer your influencer’s website and identify those domains that provide him links through interviews. CognitiveSEO and Reverse Image Search are good link prospecting tools for this activity.

After building your list of prospect blogs, you can now start creating an email copy. Here are a few tips for creating a personalized and targeted email copy for your outreach:

Make your message clear and straightforward.
Ask if he/she is still looking for interviewees coming from your industry.
Provide proofs that you’re capable of answering in-depth questions that are related to your niche (in my case, I used my guest articles).

Below is the exact email that I used for testing this approach:

After sending 10 personalized emails, I got three responses (30% conversion rate) with one that is interested to ask me questions for the interview.

This approach resulted to an interview link from Eric Gati.

Testimonials

Testimonials add credibility to the unique selling point of a product/service, which encourages other potential customers to buy/use it.

Providing testimonials about the products or services of other brands is a good opportunity to build relationships with the owners and net a few links from this approach.

Since I’ve been blogging for the past one year now, I already have a list of influencers, mostly comprised of agency marketers who sell SEO tools in the market. These influencers have their own domains which I already targeted before for content placement and interview opportunities.

So what I did is to assess their domains and look for more link opportunities (either mentions or simple citations on a single page). Then I’ve found out that most of them have press or testimonials pages that have a few product/service testimonials from SEOs and internet marketers.

This mention happened just after I reached out to Razvan (founder of Cognitive SEO), asking if he is still looking for additional testimonials for his product.

You can do the same by creating a list of all the industry tools that you used before.

Populate your list by prospecting for testimonial or press pages on Google search.

Filter the results by those domains that are connected to your business and you know you’re capable of providing testimonials.

Reach out to them and ask if they’re still looking for additional testimonials for their products/tools. There are high tendencies of getting responses using this approach because they themselves will definitely benefit from it.

10 Lessons I Learned from Doing Blogger Outreach

Lesson #1: Spend time in identifying your main audience before performing your outreach

This is the most basic part of blogger outreach but the most overlooked aspect when prospecting for outreach targets.

Highly targeted prospects are people that are capable and are more likely be interested to your pitch. These are the audience that your brand should start engaging with given that there might be some of them who’ll start to follow your brand and become your brand loyalists.

As an example, I had a client where his main business is to offer personal injury services to local businesses in US.

The niche where he belongs is very competitive, meaning that most of the possible linkers in the space are all his competitors (which we know, most of the time, competitors are hesitant or are less likely to link to their competitor’s domain - your domain).

So what I did is to identify the site’s target audience level and type and find the industries where they are actively participating.

Instead of focusing on law-related blogs, I target sports blogs and car driving websites that are definitely part of my client’s target audience (since my client is primarily offering personal injury and auto accident/injury services).

Some actionable tips

Always spend time in identifying your main audience (those that would really convert to customers/clients as soon as they landed on your website’s page).

Widen your reach and tap into industries that might potentially bring you significant traffic if you’ve been participated in their communities.

Lesson #2: Use the blogger outreach tool that are most convenient to you and to your team

Outreach tools could be your life’s saver if you know how to use them to speed up your processes and get more good results for your online marketing campaigns.

So it is very important to take consideration the usefulness of the tool and how it can make your campaigns more efficient.

I personally use Right Inbox as my outreach tool, basically because it has an option to be paid through Paypal (well, I don’t have credit cards. :D). Other outreach management tools like Buzzstream and Yesware don’t yet offer Paypal as payment options.

The main point here is to always consider your budget, your payment system and the utility of the tool before you start purchasing it for your outreach campaign.

Lesson #3: Follow up people to track the progress of your outreach campaign

Performing a follow up outreach to your targets gives you a second chance to receive more responses and achieve the goal that you set beforehand for your blogger outreach campaign.

The main benefit of doing a follow up is that it allows you to identify issues that caused your recipients not replying to your pitch (e.g. problem/error issues in the email service provider).

Another benefit of follow up is that it helps you to filter out prospects in your list that don’t really manage to respond to your first outreach, which will help you prioritize participative recipients in your next outreach campaigns.

Lesson #4: Test other techniques to bait your link targets

We all know that search marketing as well as online marketing in general, is a fast-paced industry, wherein online marketers should be able to adapt quickly to the changes that search engines are constantly doing to improve the search experience for users, and to become more reliant to what users would want to see and consume from various websites and from the web.

Given this, you’ll have to make sure that you always come up with new techniques to capture the interest of your users and your link prospects (if it is for link building). This would not only make your outreach campaign evolve in nature, but actually allows your team to see better results in terms of response and conversion/link acquisition rates.

I’m testing a new link building technique in the law niche, but haven’t been successful in terms of getting responses and links. Though it may seems to be failure at times, it only proves that I really have to think another problem that webmasters or bloggers are facing today and try to come up with solutions to offer to them, which will open doors of link opportunities.

In link building, your aim is to come up with solutions that will help solve other people’s problems. With that mindset, you’ll always come up with new strategies and techniques that will produce links, shares and mentions to your website or to your clients’ domains.

This old post by Jason Acidre is a good list of alternative approaches that you can try for your link development campaign.

Lesson #5: Make your process scalable and easy to understand by your team members

SEO processes, particularly link building processes would always need proper planning and implementation to make everything flow smoothly and to adapt to certain changes Google had implemented and will still launch in the coming days.

Though this topic would need another blog post to cover, here are a few insights that I’d like to share about creating your own link building process:

Start with an end in mind. What are you trying to achieve? Always start your document with objectives that will give proper direction to users who will read it.
Make your tutorial a guide by listing down the step by step process on how to do it. Include screenshots and ensure that it is easy to understand and apply.
Test the process by yourself or look for someone who’re new in the industry and let him follow the process. If he applied it correctly, then it could now be part of your link development documentation processes.

For a more through post about creating business processes, here is an awesome post from Grant Merriel.

Lesson #6: Never forget your past linkers when looking for outreach targets

When starting a new link building campaign, the most common approach is creating a new list of link targets that are relevant and could provide significant value to a certain website (in terms of bringing that website referred traffic, assisted conversions and etc..)

Though there’s no wrong with that approach but it would be much better if you first take a look at your website’s existing referring linking domains and assess whether they would still be open again for link opportunities for your brand.

The main why you need to start first with your existing links is that there is a high potential that you’ll acquire links from your site’s current linking domains given that there is a history of linking and because there is already established connections with them.

Lesson #7: Understand the reason why you’re doing outreach and insanely be good at it.

In every business activity, it is very important to understand first the purpose of performing it than just doing it straight. In blogger outreach, it is very much the same. If you don’t understand the reason why you’re reaching out to a target, you will always come up with sub-par/low quality results.

I’ve been doing guest blogging for a few internet marketing blogs for almost six months now. And my main purpose of doing it ever since is to increase my site’s visibility on the internet marketing niche, SEO in particular, and to establish relationships with authorities and industry influencers.

This led me earned several link opportunities that I only wished way back when I started blogging.

Links from SEMRush resource page:

A link from DejanSEO page

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building Quotes and Ideas from the Experts

Discovering new link building ideas requires creativity. Given that the more problems you encounter in the space, the more you should think outside of the box to constantly provide solutions to those problems.

To solve a problem is to build links.

Broken link building (helping someone’s fix a dead link on his page) and guest blogging (helping someone to provide regular content on his site) are a few examples that directly explains how link building solves other people’s problems.

In this post, I’d like to cover a few quotes and techniques from some of the best link building experts in town and some link building ideas from anonymous people.

Note: If you’d like to add your actionable link building ideas or tips, then you can submit them here.

Jason Acidre – Kaiserthesage

To educate is not just the best way to sell. It’s also the best way to build links.

If you have successful evergreen blog posts (that have natural links), make them a page (pages have higher staying power in SERPs).

How to find pages on your site that have natural links:

Use OSE or your favorite tool to discover your sites’ top linkable assets.

Go to Top Pages tab to see your most linkable assets (use linking root domains as your metric).

You can filter the internal links by http status (e.g. 200) to only find live pages.
Another trick is to filter the results by 400 status to find dead pages on your site. Recreate those content assets and reach out to the past linkers of those dead pages, asking to link to your newly created pages.

Don’t build links to rank for a keyword. Build links to improve domain authority and so as to rank for all your targeted keywords.

How to improve your site’s domain authority through link building:

Pursue regular contribution on two or three authoritative blogs in your industry, instead of doing one time post to almost every mediocre websites. Recurring links from a few websites could help increase your DA, particularly when those sites have high DA, traffic cost (SEMRush metric) and continuous flow of backlinks.
Build links from pages that are already ranking on search results either for informative or ready to buy keywords. Given that the more visibility you earn from already ranking pages, the likelihood of getting new visitors from search and attracting additional links to your site is higher.
Initiate conversations with influencers and top personalities in your industry. Get into their radars through social engagement and influencer email outreach.
Discover dead links on other sites’ webpages and reach out to the site owners and ask if they could replace those defunct links with your relevant and similar site’s content.

Ross Hudgens – Siege Media

When evaluating twitter authority, view recent tweets and if no engagement prob not a true authority

1.Find common website type in your space.

2.Crawl in Screaming Frog.

3.Sort by External Outlinks.

4.Build content for those pages.

Wil Reynolds – SEER Interactive

Link from your main site to your profile pages on yelp, yp, others. Help those other profiles to rank.

Can’t get your clients to write good local content also differentiated by location? Use yelp filtered reviews & repurpose for your site.

Offer your space to host local events, get citations from those organizations, improve local rank.

Places to find local events:

Rand Fishkin – MOZ

Begging to guest blog sucks. Being begged to guest blog rules.

Don’t figure out how to get your post accepted. Figure out how to get asked.

Tips to attract invitations from authoritative blogs to write for them:

Publish expertly-made content on your website that has unexpected hook (information that people aren’t expecting from your site).
Create a press page that includes all the mentions/pages you’ve participated in the past (e.g. interviews) or you can simply include them to your about me/us page. This would prove the authority and trust from your community.
Build relationships with influencers and company sites in your industry via email or social platforms to get into their radars, and probably remember you as an author/expert in your niche.

Larry Kim – Wordstream

Keywords that don’t have much to do with purchasing intent (asking questions) will be a great for match for organic search.

Comprehensive resources about keyword research:

Mike Essex – Koozai

Lists are easiest way to interact with influencers on Twitter. Engagement far more important than followers.

What to do with your lists of influencers:

Check your Twitter list regularly, answer questions your influencer may have and/or engage further by promoting their tweets/posts. This quick answer to Jason Acidre’s question gave me a link from his blog.

Include your influencers’ status updates to your outreach to capture their interests and build stronger connections with them.

Dan Shure – Evolving SEO

Simple content ideation:

1. Search title of main customer in Followerwonk

2. Examine what they share & talk about.

3. Find ways to help.

Ways to help your customer with your content:

Create content that answers to your customers’ deepest questions. It could be in a form of FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) or a simple blog post using their question as your headline.
Identify topics and headlines that captured the interest of your customers. Publish content pieces that directly discuss those topics and make it easy to read or consume.
Add call to actions to your content, encouraging visitors to share or add some comments below your post. When they leave a comment, spend time to thank them and/or answer to their questions.
Make your social sharing buttons above and below the fold of the page to easily get your readers share your content.

Simple prospecting idea:

1. Search similar site in @BuzzSumo

2. Sort content by shares

3. ‘View Sharers’

4. Export/import to Buzzstream.

Jon Cooper – PointblankSEO

1. Find highly competitive industries

2. See how they’re building quality links

3. Apply to other less competitive industries.

4. Profit.

Use Followerwonk to identify influencers & All My Tweets to find out what sites they sharing.

Create a separate “blank” template for link bait without commercial call-to-actions

Anonymous

Segment your email list into those who have a Gmail and those who don’t b/c you can simply send Gmail users a direct link 4 reviews.

Draft compelling content for your site by answering FAQs, repurposing from Facebook, using filtered Yelp reviews.

Find content sites w/ high share of voice for your organic KW targets. Run display, form partnerships, sponsorships, etc.

How to get press quotes 1) get on east coast schedule 2) catch breaking news 3) send reporter a value-add quote 4) get coverage

Have 10 of your employees type your domain name as fast as they can and register all of the misspells.

You can use misspellings to earn branded links to your website. Learn about this link building strategy from this post by John Henry Scherck.

Use Allmytweets to find phrases used by journalists when they’re writing new stories, get alerts through IFTTT for when they use them.

Resources about press release link building:

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

How I Increase My Client’s Website Search Traffic by 5,913% and Earn $440 in 14 Days

Increasing search engine traffic for any website is one of the main goals of search marketers given that it can help speed up generating more leads/revenue/conversions to a certain brand from any space.

Similar to any marketing process, achieving search marketing goal would need specific strategy and actions to plan ahead of time and to set base metrics that will determine if the campaign reaches the goal or not.

The strategy and actions that I applied to my client’s website (which will be my case study for today) are all pretty basic what hat SEO optimization techniques. However, it gave me the following success rates after two weeks:

5,913% increase in search traffic

$440 Adsense earnings

The main concept of my approach in search marketing as a whole (including off site – link building) is providing the best experience for my users. This is what search engines are looking for every website and would basically the core deciding factor of ranking a certain domain on search results.

User experience primarily points out to two things – user’s need and the specific action to satisfy it. Learning to quickly identify needs of your users could help you understand your market environment and think of ways on how to attend to those needs.

How to Increase Search Engine Traffic through Basic On Site Optimization

Analyze your industry’s search environment

My client’s website belongs to health niche, particularly in the home remedies industry which is a very competitive space.

To get started with my white hat SEO strategy, I did a competitor analysis on a few authoritative websites to see how they provide the best experience to their users through proper site architecture, content placement and user-based web design.

This gave me an idea that the type of content that people in the home remedies niche would want to read are mostly short list type of blog posts.

The main reason is obvious. People who’re looking for solutions for their health-related problems won’t spend time reading a long article on quick and effective ways to get rid of pimples. They want immediate solutions for their problems.

This led me to another idea that those who’re searching for quick home remedies would normally use long tail phrases for their searches instead of using main terms as search queries (they want to quick solutions).

The demand for these long tail keywords is extremely high and some of them tend to be low in competition which are good topic ideas to target for content generation.

This simple competitor analysis helped me get a better feel of my client’s website status in its industry’s competition.

Find the searchers’ intent to match with your categories

Categories are foundational pages of a domain that allow visitors to walk through each webpage of the site and help them complete their desired actions (as to the main reason why they visit the website).

Optimizing categories based on how the searchers should flow through each page of your website could give your audience satisfaction.

For my client’s website, I created a spreadsheet to list down categories that best suit the searchers’ behavior.

I only asked myself a question, “how can I help my users find his/her want(s) on my site particularly when he landed on my homepage?”

This led me to a good list of categories that makes each blog post organized in a way that matches to the searchers’ behavior.

Gender – Men/Women -
Age – Children/Youth/Adult/Seniors
Many more…

If you landed on the homepage of the site and you don’t have any specific home remedies in mind, you could easily check and find categories that fit to your persona (e.g. age, gender, etc..).

This kind of categorization helped my users find the exact blog post that he/she wants to read. This could also give him a reason to come back to the website again given that he was satisfied on his first search visit.

You can also do the same on your website by looking at classifications from a taxonomy that is related to your industry. Taxonomy is the practice and science (study) of classification of things or concepts, including the principles that underlie such classification.

You can use the following Dewey Decimal Classification Systems to identify industry-related categories.

Optimize your content for long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are composed of three or more words that tend to align to specific intents of the user. These phrases are easier to target for rankings particularly on blogs given that they are less competitive than head terms.

Discovering long tail phrases for keyword targeting would basically need some handy tools. You can use any of the following for keyword research:

Google Webmaster Tools

Go to GWT – Search Traffic – Search Queries to find keywords that your visitors are using to find your site’s internal pages.

Take a look at this screenshot below.

Optimizing the page with the exact search query: wasp sting home remedy (or other variations, i.e. – home remedies for wasp sting), helped the page rank for its desired long tail keyword as well as for other industry related phrases.

Google Analytics

Though Google has decided to hide the big portion of its keyword data (non-provided keywords), you can still use Google Analytics to find some long tail keywords.

By checking you’re the Real Time section of your GA account in a regular basis, you can find gold keywords that you can target for your future post/content.

KeywordTool.io

Another tool that you can utilize for keyword research is KeywordTool.io. I already covered this tool in my post about organic link building but just a recap on how to use it, here is a short list.

Grab your head terms and find additional keywords using the tool.

Add when, what, why or how to your head term to find more topic ideas.

SEMRush

There are tons of ways to generate topic ideas using SEMRush and you can check out this comprehensive guide by Rishi Lakhani for a complete list of methods on how to use the tool.

If you already have a good list of keywords, you can optimize your pages by including the targeted keywords on the title page, meta keywords, header tags and first 50 words of the body copy.

Other optimization techniques:

Link to the most important pages from your site’s other relevant pages. Go to GWT – Search Traffic – Internal Links and see if your most important pages (besides homepage) get a lot of internal links from other pages.
Improve your site’s loading speed for positive user experience. Use tools like GTMetrix and Pingdom.
Optimize your images by targeting keywords in their alt texts.
Track and fix code errors through W3C Markup Validation

More Resources:

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Earn Authority Links to Your Domain

Link building space is a fast-paced search environment. Different link building approaches and techniques had evolved to adapt to the users’ needs and behavior and are now focusing on building strong brand presence on the web, earning trust from the target audience and building connections with the right persona groups.

Authority link building is essential not only for those small brands who don’t have any established influence within their niches but also for bigger ones to get them stay ahead of the competition. Brands will benefit from getting authority links in so many ways such as:

Increases the exposure of the brand as it would be introduced to a wider audience targeted by the link sources.
Continuously assists conversions.
Passes authority to the domain being linked to.
Sends referred targeted visitors.
Helps the brand absorb social followers/readers/brand loyalists.

These benefits could be obtained by the referred domain considering that the authority links are niche relevant and qualified based on domain metrics (DA, PA, search share, Alexa) and brand metrics (social shares, readership, community strength).

Types of authority links

There are two types of authority links: absolute and relative authority links.

Absolute authority links are backlinks from domains that generally discuss multiple subjects/niches. Those domains can easily get the trust of their audience from different market segments, seeing that they had establish themselves as authorities before on earned media outlets (newspapers, television, radio, etc..).

Relative authority links are backlinks from domains that are considered as authorities in a specific niche. These domains have high search share in their particular market segments.

Earning both types of authority links could help boost the authority and influence of your domain. However, if you’re targeting a specific market, you would want to prioritize building relative authority links as they are much more favorable of passing highly converted visitors to your website.

How to Get Authority Links to Your Domain

Produce link-bait content pieces

Link baiting has become a norm in content marketing given that it has the ability to automate link acquisition (link building machine) without the need to follow the normal blogging frequency.

Producing one link bait content in a monthly basis is a good starting point to acquire a few authority links and to slowly build the brand within the community.

You can start link bating on your own blog. Target to produce at least one content that is tailored to a specific market segment. Then just go with other market segments when you’re done establishing yourself as an authority in one particular niche.

Look at Brian Dean of Backlinko. At the start of his campaign, he published actionable link bait pieces about search engine optimization particularly in the off page sub-niche – link building. As a result, he was able to rank for popular keywords like link building, on page seo, and keyword research.

When he noticed that he was already an authority in the SEO field, he tap into other market segments like CRO and email marketing – which are parts of the big market segment he was targeting from the start, online marketing.

This linkbaiting process can also be applied to other industries by applying the following steps:

1. Look at the client’s market and see where there’s a content gap.

2. See if there’s content on their site that could be improved upon or turned into a linkable asset. That’s usually faster and easier than starting from scratch.

3. If they don’t have that, I help them create a linkable asset. I prefer infographics and ultimate guides because they’re cheap and easy to share.

4. I try to get as many eyeballs on the content as possible. That means posting it on industry forums and trying to get it featured on popular newsletters (a massively underrated content promotion strategy).

5. Once the buzz has died down, I pound the pavement with an email outreach campaign.

I believe the main reason why you need to produce a link bait piece is to create a hook that people will get something new from your brand (news/insight/information) and which will give your brand an opportunity to prove its authority.

More resources:

SEO Guide to Creating Viral Linkbait and Infographics

Linkbaiting Tips with Chris Dyson

Invite authoritative guest authors

Authority in a certain niche becomes achievable when useful content assets are consistently produced on the table. These are content pieces that are driven by data/analyses and information that no one in the industry has published yet and would require experience and expertise to provide actionable, comprehensive and unexpected niche-specific advices.

Regular publishing of content that have all the elements described in the image below has been a common problem for several brands (especially for those small brands that don’t have enough resources for content generation).

Source: From Zero to Hero by @kaiserthesage

To solve the inconsistency of publishing regular posts for my blog, I invited a few authors to produce new and actionable link building tips and absorb new followers/subscribers/readers from my guest authors’ blogs.

This process help me earn links from UpCity and Kaiserthesage pointing to the enterprise link building post by Glen Dimaandal and link earning strategies article by Roel Manarang (both of which are guest posts for my blog).

How to invite new but expert guest authors

1. Prospecting

Start with people whom you’ve built relationships with (those you met in local meetups/seminars/workshops and those who reached out to you in the past through email outreach).

You can also track new bloggers in your niche by diving to Twitter and Google searches (use the search query: “new blog” OR “new website” [industry])

You can also visit the comment sections of your favorite niche blogs and watch out for those people who actively engage on those blogs. See if they have links pointing to their own blog/site. These are the people that you can easily partner with because they’re spending time building new relationships/connections with the industry community through blog commenting.

2. Evaluation

Once you listed your prospect guest authors in a spreadsheet, you can now spend time visiting their websites. Evaluate their existing content assets based on the quality, design and information.

Different industries have different tone, style and delivery of information so you will really be the one to decide if those authors have enough expertise and experience to write comprehensive articles for your blog.

3. Pitching

When pitching for target guest authors, the core angle of your email copy should be the value that you will provide for them.

If you’re an established authority, you can use your brand’s current status as the value-added factor to your pitch. It could be one of the following elements:

Readership size
Social following
Average monthly acquired links
Site’s monthly traffic (optional)
Online awards
Monetary incentives

If you’re a small brand and you don’t have any incentives to offer, you can start by getting into the radars of the guest authors. Spark conversations with them on their blogs through blog commenting or performing an initial outreach campaign. You can use the email copy below:

Hello [First Name],

First I should introduce myself. My name is [Name] and I'm in charge of content management on the [Site Name] (URL)

Just wanted to say to you again that I loved your post [title] You may already know that from Twitter :)

[Complement about the post he wrote]

We aim to increase both the volume and the quality of our blog content and we're looking for awesome writers (just like yourself) to team up with us on this job.

Do you think I could tempt you into becoming a guest author for the [Site Name]? :)

What do you think? Would you be interested?

I hope I managed to spark your interest on this and I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

Best wishes,

[Your Name]

Ethical link reciprocation

Excessive link exchanges designed to cross link pages is considered as a red flag for Google.

This link building technique starts with creating a page (link to me, link to you page) that lists down all the sites that the webmaster has partnered with. A little section at the top or below the page provides instructions on how other websites could get a link from the page which is obviously through linking back to the site.

Though it has been practiced in a black hat approach, link reciprocation can be executed in an ethical manner.

Here’s how.

How to get reciprocal links ethically

Build alliances with key influencers and active participants in your industry (target those that spend time answering questions on forums, Q&A and other community discussion boards).

Include content pieces from other authors to your blog and distributed content (e.g. guest post). Let them know about the mentioned link. Chances are they will also link to you from their content assets.

Create a crowdsourced content (group interview) on your blog.

Start by listing down influencers/bloggers/evangelists that are expert, well-experienced and approachable in some ways. Think of a solid and actionable topic - this will be the main angle of your content. Then pitch those whom you want to contribute tips/insights about your chosen topic. Publish the group interview and let all the contributors know about it. Expect authority and social links from them using this content-based link building technique.

Engage content authorities on social and/or email platforms to solidify the relationships you have with them. There is a high tendency that they will reciprocate your actions through promotion partnerships and social sharing.

Team members at SEMRush are part of my core list of influencers/evangelists. By constantly helping them promote their product/content in some way, I was able to earn their trust and thus, led me to more link opportunities for my blog.

Their Twitter account is constantly promoting my content assets (whether it is a blog or a guest post). This only proves that link reciprocation works effectively when it is done in the right way.

6 White Hat Link Building Tips for 2014 and Beyond by @venchito14 - http://t.co/Nr4R4kp6O5

— SEMrush (@semrush) June 30, 2014

Buy links ethically

For brands with bigger budget/resources, link buying can be considered as part of their authority link building strategies.

However, there are handful considerations you need to consider when using monetary incentives to build links from other websites:

Choosing and controlling anchor texts for pages/domains that link back to your site can be detrimental to your site’s link portfolio.
Diversify your link profile by getting links from different types of pages (e.g. not only donation pages).
Consider relevancy as your top priority in link buying. Links from irrelevant sources may not be beneficial for your site in the long run.

How to buy links ethically

Sponsor meetups/seminars/workshops that will cater to the audience you’re targeting and will include bloggers/freelance writers as one of the participants.
Incentivize bloggers in your niche to write reviews about your products/sites. Incentives could be in the form of commissions/affiliates, free access to premium products and direct payments.
Organize niche-related and/or blogging contests that will result to baiting contextual links from participants and winners given that linking out may be part of the contest’s criteria).
Donate to charities/organizations. Prioritize those commercial sites that can easily give you authority links (ones that already have donation pages designed to attract donations from different brands).

Another effective way to earn in-content links through link buying is investing on influential bloggers that actively contribute guest articles on different authority news sites/blogs.

The strategy will result to contextual links from guest posts written by an influential blogger. Those high quality authority links are pointing to either your homepage or any of your deep links (e.g. category pages).

To get started, here’s a step by step process to execute this strategy:

1. Prospecting

Look for influential bloggers that consistently write high quality guest articles on authority blogs. Use Followerwonk and Google search to find them.

Check out their Google+ profiles to see and evaluate their existing guest contributions. Normally, if they implement authorship markup (rel author) on their guest blogs, it would be listed in their Google Plus’ contributors’ section.

Create a spreadsheet for those prospect bloggers. Include columns for their personal websites, contact emails/forms, Google plus profiles and samples of their works (e.g. at least two guest posts).

2. Evaluation

Filter your list of prospect bloggers based on different quality metrics such as:

Authority of domains where his guest articles have been published.
Quality of content produced by the guest blogger (i.e. flow of information, hooks, style, format, etc..)
Relevancy of the content he creates (targeting general or specific market segment – e.g. SEO is general; link building is specific).
Strong social following (Twitter and Google Plus following).

These metrics could help you filter out influential bloggers that don’t fit to your A-list prospect bloggers such as those that publish re-hashed articles on their guest blogs, don’t have any strong community/connections (less than 500 social followers) and those that contribute for low quality domains (DA 20 and less).

3. Pitching

Craft your email copy using the same angle you used for the second link building strategy – inviting authoritative guest bloggers.

However there is one main difference between the two approaches – that is, paying guest posts from influential bloggers will focus more on monetary incentives.

Normally, a guest post from an influential blogger will cost from $100 - $250 depending on the goals and metrics used to quality a certain guest post or the domain where the guest post will be published.

This monetary incentive can become part of your email and could help your outreach campaign to get quick responses from your end-receivers.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Building Organic Backlinks the Right Way

Organic links are often termed as, “natural links” and are considered as votes for the site. These links are products of highly-targeted content or link bait pieces that aim to provide specific value/information to users (i.e. how-to guides).

Link baiting has long been discussed on many SEO blogs and probably because of its popularity and an easier process than creating viral content pieces. Popular link bait pieces is more than just a one-time strategy and if you’re not lucky enough, you would need a year or two see the best results using this link building strategy.

However, unlike any viral content pieces, paid advertising and big budget won’t be necessary in the first time frame of building your link bait assets. You would only need a proper execution of the process to get things done correctly and get you earn high quality organic links.

A lot of the tips that I’ll be sharing below require content assets to execute organic link building effectively.

Link seeding

If you’re doing link building for startups and newly-established blogs, this technique could land you various link opportunities that your competitors may haven’t know about.

The process starts with identifying “long tail queries” that your target audience might be using to find your products, your brand and informational content in your industry.

I personally use KeywordTool.io for this technique for the following reasons (which are also present in the tool page):

It generates up to 750 suggestions for every keyword (which are mostly long tail queries).
Best alternative to common keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner.
It's absolutely free.

To start with, you can create a list of keywords that your audience is using to find your unique selling point (service, product, blog, etc..). Then discover more topic ideas by grabbing those keywords in KeywordTool.io.

You can simply use your main keyword, e.g. “personal injury” or add words like, “when”, “how” “what” “where” to your main keyword to yield more informational-based long tail queries.

Don’t forget to select your country search when performing this in a local basis.

To populate the list, you can grab discovered phrases and do the same keyword research technique to discover more topics and search queries.

List down all the brand and industry-related keywords and search queries in a spreadsheet and choose only the informational-based keywords to look for link opportunities.

Do a Google search for each of the keyword but be careful when you do continuous search (follow tips in this post to scrape search engines without pissing them off).

Here is a list of link opportunities that can be generated using this keyword-based link strategy:

Ranking outdated resource pages that need additional information/data/diagrams.
Forum boards/threads that rank for long tail queries because of the continuous answers/question of members participating on those threads.
How-to guides that need visual content to better serve the users effectively.

These link targets could give you chances of generating new links for your page/content/site. The more organic links you earn from them, the more referral traffic they can bring to your website.

Conversion link building

Links that help achieve the brand’s conversion goals are more valuable than ordinary referral links. Aside from the fact that they can generate leads/sales, most of this link type is evergreen. Evergreen links are links than tend to last and provide more value to the linking to page/site because those links are placed naturally and strategically and built with conversions intent.

For instance, you can link out to your informational pages from your content distribution pages (i.e. guest post) instead of directly using anchor texts to link to any page of your website. A good example of this is this guest post by Adam Connell at BoostBlogTraffic.

The author byline provides a link pointing to his free guide (ebook).

Linking out to information pages and conversion-captured pages (e.g. where users can stay and subscribe to your email list) could benefit your branding strategy given that you can target two birds with one stone (links and subscribers, links and followers or links and leads).

Make sure that the content you contribute on other authority blogs/sites are topics that are related to your business so that people who can see your informational link can convert into customers/followers/email subscribers.

Another organic link building technique that you can start trying is link building from pages that are highly visible on search results (targeting ready-to-buy queries or conversion-based keywords).

You can use the same keyword research tool earlier and find conversion-based keywords. Add phrase like, “where to buy” or simply add “where” to your main keyword. Identify if the resulted long tail queries can drive conversions to your brand and use them to search for more link opportunities.

Given that the searchers are ready to purchase in this phase of search, earning links from these ranking pages can continuously drive conversions to your website.

Improve your site’s linkability

Improving your site’s linkability would need proper foundation on your website given that if you’re able to fix your site’s technical issues, your tendencies of ranking for industry-related keyword is higher, which can result to more linking opportunities (when bloggers start to reference your content from their sites).

Here are a few technical and content tips to enhance your website’s linkability:

If you removed your old pages that are still sending traffic and links to your website, you can create new pages that contain the same information as your old pages have. Then redirect old URLs to your newly-created content. Share your new pages on social networks so you’ll have tendency of earning fresh new links and shares.
Make your most important pages visible on your homepage by including a link to your linkable assets and/or most converting pages or adding image links pointing to those pages.
Create new resource pages that curate internal and external links (e.g. introducing a beginners’ guide to…). Then build contextual links to these pages through community discussions, guest blogs and/or link outreach to resource pages that are related to your content. You can check out this post on link building using content organization.
Add appropriate social sharing buttons that your audience is actively using (e.g. Pinterest for photo blogs). You can also add buttons that your target audience might be using to share your content (e.g. Inbound.org share button for online marketing blogs).

Content upgrade

Every content piece from every industry requires continuous improvement or update given that there are always new information/data/analyses that need to be added to provide more value to a particular group of users.

The best way to find pages that need upgrade/update is using link building tools like Outdated Content Finder, Screaming Frog and Open Site Explorer.

OSE has its new feature where you can filter the top pages by http status. This could give you provide you more information on which links are broken but are still sending relevant traffic to the site.

Do a reverse engineer to your competitors’ websites and non-competing websites that have the same brand attributes. Grab one URL to OSE, filter the Top Pages by 4xx. Do the same to all of your competitors. Then create a list of all the broken links your competitors’ sites have.

To see if those dead pages are good opportunities to upgrade, you can use Archive.org or any tools that can bring you back to the history of those pages. Identify if the lost information of those pages is relevant to your brand and can easily be your team’s expertise.

Create a content that is comprehensive and engaging to the users, surpassing the old information found on the broken pages. Make it more interesting by investing design formats (images, slide decks, videos) to it.

Reach out to the people who linked to your competitors’ dead pages and asked if they can mention your new content in replace for the broken link. Generate more organic backlinks by including your new content on community discussions/forums, Q&A sections and social media groups.

More Resources:

Sky Sraper Technique

Creating and Developing Content Assets Like A Pro

Strategic content distribution

Distributing your content on other related blogs (i.e. guest posts) could provide you more than one link. Here are a few tips to maximize the value of your content distributed pieces:

Aim to provide unexpected hooks to your guest contributions given that the more people are consuming your content, the higher are the tendencies that your piece can attract more shares which will later on turn into organic links.
Exceed the expectations of your guest blog target by providing useful information that no one in your industry has published on. This could give you an opportunity to be featured in the top contributors page which is good not only to build more internal links to your distributed content but to brand you as an author within that specific niche. You can check out this post on how to guest post strategically on other relevant blogs.
Target content-focused websites that are authoritative in a very specific industry you’re targeting. The more closely related the site is, the better, since you can easily drive conversions from those content distributing sites.

Use SEMRush to find guest blog targets that are content authority in your industry. When they increase their rankings/search traffic after the recent Panda update, it means that they have proven their content authority in a particular niche. If you target them for content distribution, you’ll benefit more value from those sites in terms of link building, conversions, and social sharing.

Target long tail keywords in your content distribution pieces like in your slide presentations. If these pieces happen to rank for those keywords, it can generate new users to see, consume and even include your pieces from their blogs.

You can also track those followers who’ve shared your slide decks on their websites. Ask if they can also link to your website as the source of the information. You can even get higher conversion when you create a page designed for all the slide presentations, webinars and videos you’ve recorded/uploaded both on and offline.

Interaction Link Building

Building relationships with your customers/followers/brand loyalists could bring a long way to the branding of your website. It is also the easiest way to understand your audience’ needs and let them contribute insights to your content creation.

Add a quick survey on the blog section of your website, asking which topics they would want to see on your site. You can also ask questions regarding the content format, length of content and other content elements to generate more feedbacks from them.

The more targeted and useful to a specific persona group, the higher is the likelihood of earning the trust of your target audience which eventually will bring organic backlinks to your website.

Email your customers using a personalized email copy to inform them about your new product features. A simple email template with no ads, images, videos and attached are more likely to convert to new feedbacks and sales.

Email from Positionly

Create alerts from Q&A sites like Quora to get updated with timely questions that you can immediately answer in a daily/regular basis (use IFTTT).

Those questions can also be the main topics of your content, which can help you rank for several long tail keywords given that the topics might be the exact keywords users are searching for in Google.

Final Thoughts:

Organic link building considers great content to passively and actively acquire relevant and high quality links. By using the above actionable tips, you can generate fresh new content and links to your brand/site.

If you want to conduct an organic link building campaign, you can contact us for link building services quotes.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Build Links Using Directories

Directory link building is one of the initial link building techniques that you can execute to add a little boost to your site’s link portfolio, to increase your relevancy signals and to get people find your brand/site on the web.

Generally, there are a lot of discussions about directories whether or not they could still add value to a website’s ranking potential and if there are any high quality directories still exist today. Let’s dig deeper into each discussion and hopefully, I could provide insights to all of these questions/boards.

Let’s get started.

Directories are still good to consider in link building for the following reasons:

Customers still use them to find services/products within a specific city/area and if you are listed in a directory, you have chances of getting found by your target clients/customers.
Getting links from them are easy wins in link building. If you’re working with clients, a list of 15 or 20 directory links could add some details to your weekly SEO reports (earning some trust from your client).
Earning citations from local directories sends more signals to Google that your website is tagged or categorized to a specific niche/industry.

Now, you decide whether or not you want to continue building links using directories but the mere fact, it doesn't hurt your website at all (when done in a non-aggressive way) is a good thing to consider for your site’s backlink profile.

Quality Factors to Consider in Directory Link Building

With tons of directories out there, you have to separate the wheat from the chaffs to choose only the best directories that you want to submit your website.

Here are a few factors that I consider when qualifying a specific directory:

Domain age – with the use of webarchive, you’ll see the year and date the directory has been bought. Though in most cases old directories had been spammed, there are still a few of them that remain high quality.
Editorial review/discretion – you can look at the policy standard/submission pages of the directory site and see how much time they would need to review each website. If they don’t have strict editorial guidelines, they’re more likely to be automated directories.
Lists down top brands/companies – you can grab one popular company website and search for it in the directory. See if it pops up and the category, tags and descriptions fits right to the company.
Relevancy – Look for closely related directories that don’t have any submission from adult and gambling sites or any bad neighborhoods.
Number of listed websites – the faster they list websites, the higher chances that they don’t have strict review guidelines (unless they existed for a long time and are ranking for many directory terms).
Anchor texts used to link to submitted websites. If the directory links out to websites using exact match commercial keywords (e.g. personal injury firm in UK, personal injury firm in Florida), then it’s more likely deemed as a low quality one.

Types of Directories

There are three types of directories that you can find on the web. They are:

Niche-specific. These are directories that only accept submissions from websites in the same industry/category (e.g. legal services)
Blog. These directories would only accept blogs as part of their listings.
Local. These directories accept submissions from sites located within the same city/country (usually with the same top-level domain – TLD).

Actionable Tips to Build Links with Directories

Reverse Engineer to Find High Quality Directories

A great way to find closely-related and quality directories is reverse engineering. For each type of directory, you can apply reverse engineering by simply grabbing the URL of a target website and discovering its inbound links using Ahrefs.

Search for one website that is ranking for a targeted keyword. You can use queries like:

“your industry” blog (e.g. “personal injury” blog)
“your industry” city (e.g. “personal injury” Texas)
“your company” (e.g. “personal injury firm”)

List down all the websites in a spreadsheet and filter out low quality ones based on the metrics I mentioned above. Discover links pointing to them using Ahrefs. You can find and replace terms to quickly look for directories (i.e. using terms like directory, personal injury)

Tip: You can search for more directories by grabbing one website listed in a directory and doing a reverse engineering on that site.

Pay for Editorial Value

Maybe, you’re asking if this is considered as a paid link?

Matt Cutts answered this question. If you’re paying for editorial value in which the editor reviews the quality and relevance of a submitted website, then it’s okay to pay for the directory. However, if you’re paying for low quality and automated directories or you are given the option to choose the anchor text used to link to your site, then you should worry about submitting your website to those automated directories.

Spend a little amount of your SEO budget to these directories. Focus more on the usability, site architecture and design of your website. Invest in your content and make it useful to your audience. This investment is more beneficial than just spending money for easy directory links.

Earn citations from local directories

Citation building is known these days because of the value that it provides to a specific brand/website. Aside from getting listed in the directory and helping your customers to find you, you’re giving Google and other search engines relevancy signals that will make your website rank for local terms/keywords.

In submitting your business to local citations and directories, you have to remember that when you submit details of your brand, they should be all be the same on all directories. Be consistent with your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) details so that Google will understand better about your website and help you rank on local search results.

You can check out this post by Richard Marriott to find more link opportunities in the local scene.

To help you save time in finding local citations and directories, I created a spreadsheet that lists down submission sites where you can add/submit your business, only for UK, US and Australia brands.

[sociallocker id="2245"] [/sociallocker]

Perform a Manual Citation Auditing

If there are changes with your NAP and other business details, you have to consider editing your past details existed in your directories. This is the most common problem most local search professionals encounter. And thanks to Andrew Shotland. He just created N.A.P. Hunter Life, a local SEO tool that will help us track our existing local citations and directories (it will be available on Google Chrome Store soon).

This tool will speed up the process of auditing your existing local citations. Manual citation auditing happens when the brand needs to add or edit N.A.P and other important details about the business.

N.A.P. Hunter Lite will automatically export NAP suspects in a spreadsheet file which will save time in gathering all the links.

Note: The tool will not keep your logins so you really have to document the username and passwords that you use for local citations/directories for you to be able to do some changes when you need so.

Reminder:

Diversify your link portfolio. Never put all your eggs in one basket. Directory link building should only be part of your initial link building strategy as you take time to plan creating linkable assets, fixing technical issues and performing link audit on your website.

If you liked this post, you can subscribe to this blog or follow me on Twitter and Google+.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

11 Link Earning Strategies to Spice Your Content Marketing

This is a guest entry by Roel Manarang, the founder and CEO of North Social Media, a Philippine-based social media marketing company. He is also the author of Shoot Forth, an Internet marketing strategy blog. You may follow him on Twitter.

Link earning has been a core factor to a successful content marketing and is an effective way to increase search engine rankings on a long term basis. Many content marketers will totally agree that creating exceptional and useful content can help you earn links. Surely, best content marketing practices do earn links.

Producing top-notch content can help other publishers recognize it and generate links, which increases your site's ranking signals. However, it requires that the content should be easy to understand and consume by the users so that it can be distributed appropriately to other interested audience.

This article will help you create specific, exceptional, and useful content assets that can easily help you earn links to your site, as if they’re the power enhancer steroids.

1. Infographics

Because most people love images nowadays, one of the best content pieces that publishers can create is infographics. According to AnsonAlex, publishers who use infographics grow in traffic 12% faster than those who don’t.

Let’s take a look at Anna Viral Infographics. It has been published on Entrepreneur.com and received not just a link back to her site but also generate more than 21,000 social shares.

Making your infographics useful and easy to share using embed codes can help you earn backlinks back to your website.

To get started with creating infographics, you can use Picktochart or Visual.ly.

2. Contest

Creating contest allows you to provoke your audience to share and enter yourwebsite.

People love joining contests especially if they are loyal fans or readers. This strategy is very effective on producing organic links. All you need to do is create a contest (of course with prizes and giveaways) on your website and/or on social media platform and promote it. The more people see and share your promotion, the more links it produces.

Here’s one example of a contest that Spielgaben, which is one of my clients, has done.

We used Rafflecopter to create and launch their giveaway promotions. This increased their referring trafic and links and improved their branding campaign and conversions.

3. Social Sharing

Since social signals impact search engine rankings, it is just important to have links from social networking sites. Integrating social sharing buttons on your website allows your audience to easily share your content which later, can produce links.

Here are some of the social media plug-ins for WordPress that I personally use:

For Post and Pages

o AddThis (free/upgradable)

o Digg Digg (free/upgradable)

o Social Deux (paid)

For Images

o WP Easy Social Hover (paid)

In case you are not convinced on using social sharing buttons for gathering links, you may want to consider some social media marketing statistics that provide you more than just one benefit (links).

4. Researches, White Papers, and Analyses

A result-driven marketing blog like I have that produces evidence-based content pieces links out to a lot of statistics, academic researches, case studies, and analyses. This makes my articles deserved to be linked to from other blogs.

When you linked to data-driven pieces (pdfs, reports, statistics), it provides you great benefits such as an additional credibility to your posts. It also supports your personal insights about the topic.

5. Free Resources and Guides

Almost everyone loves free resources as long as they are answers to one’s needs. Depending on what type of resources you want to produce, the difficulty on creating this type of content ranges from easy to difficult level.

A few great examples to look at are Quicksprout and Heidi Cohen’s resource pages, which have different approaches on how they create their layout depending on their goals and styles. Huge thumbs-up to their sharing buttons that makes sharing easy.

6. Tools

Smart marketers love to recommend a tool that they use especially if they think that it will be helpful to their audience and get them to take action.

Take a look at Google Analytics and Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress. Since these tools are very helpful to their target industry and many of their audience leverage from them, most of their users link back to their product pages and/or recommend them to their networks. You can check out this list of SEO tools by Linkio.

7. Quizzes

Creating quizzes helps you drive social traffic and earn links easily. Using tools such as Qzzr provides you even better feature such as capturing leads and more.

BuzzFeed, Kissmetrics, and Moz, just to name a few, use quizzes not only to earn links from either social media or websites but also to engage and increase branding awareness.

8. Memes

Memes are easy to create images that have a lot of viral potential. Creating memes has become one of the fastest growing trends years ago, which many companies still use today.

They are great for inbound marketing to create easy wins, to generate content that their users will love, and to build their brand and engagement. Fact is website like 9Gag that has become popular in earning links, social shares, and engagements simply by just producing memes.

There are free online tools like Canva, Meme Generator and Quickmeme that allow you to create meme in just a few seconds even without designing knowledge. But when you have a knowledge of using advanced tools like Adobe Photoshop, it can help you create more customized memes for your content marketing.

9. Quotes

Thought leaders who offer quotes and insights about a certain topic enchances their personal branding and enable them to earn links for their websites from those who featured their quotes. The best way to easily share quotes is by embedding them or by putting an easy share button.

An example is Noah Kagan’s best quote page, which features an embed code with a link back to his site.

10. Controversial Post

Remember those controversial articles that you shared, linked to, and provided some insights because you just can’t resist it? This type of post promotes critical thinking, education, and information.

Controversial post can fall into different categories such as education, politics, religion, health, money, and more.

If you want to publish controversial posts, you should be careful though and try not to annoy or offend your loyal readers.

11. E-books

An e-book is a great tool not just to promote your website but also to build authority or influence in your community. It is a powerful tool that naturally attracts discussion and reviews about your website/brand.

Ranking your e-book and getting a lot of exposure is a sure way to earn links and increase your sales. Another good thing is that bloggers can contact you for interviews which can result to new relationships and links.

Conclusion

Link earning surely is easier to be said than to be done. It is way harder than building links for your audience.

You need to consider that earning links are not limited to just creating exceptional and useful content. Relationship building and partnerships are just few of the other things that you can do.

Do you have strategies that are not on this list, that you use for your content marketing efforts and help you earn links? Feel free to comment below or let me know on Twitter.

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If you liked this post, you can subscribe to this blog and follow Roel on Shoot Forth.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

Persona-Based Guest Blogging: How to Guest Blog Like a Pro

Aside from being the most common link building tactic (as stated in the last year’s link building survey on Moz), guest blogging serves as a traffic generator that continually brings targeted visitors to a certain website which can help the brand grow a small but engaging community.

The main key to generate targeted traffic, leads and sales through guest blogging is the use of personas. With persona in mind, third-party content (guest posts) are more appealing to its audience given that the value/information provided by the content appeals to the deepest needs and/or pains of a specific group of people.

In this post, I’ll be discussing how to create and use personas in guest blogging to maximize every effort and time devoted to writing and distributing the content.

How to Create a Persona

In user-centered design and marketing, personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way. This is essential in capturing attention from a specific group of people given that the interest, need and/or pain is identified, solved or attended by the content piece.

The first initiative in creating a persona is to identify the audience that the business wants to engage with. This may be the direct customers and/or those people that would help promote the business online.

To identify the direct customers/clients, you could simply get an idea from the unique selling point or features of your product/service. So for instance, if you’re selling an online point of sale (POS) system, your direct customers could be product retailers and ecommerce site owners.

Features

Customers

To identify your brand evangelists, you can look at those people who’ve shared your content in the past or if you’re new in the business, you can reverse engineer on your competitors’ social profiles. See the descriptions of those social followers and determine their niches.

Once you have identified your target audience (whether it is your direct customers or brand evangelists), you can now create a persona by adding important details such as:

Name
Age
Location
Job Title
Interest
Needs

You can create a cartoon to get a visual look of your persona.

How to Guest Blog like A Pro

Prospecting

Like any other link building techniques, guest blogging starts with the right link prospecting.

When prospecting for blog targets, you only want to find relevant blogs (where your audience is engaging) and have high potentials of bringing to your site a consistent traffic once you landed guest posts on them.

In terms of relevancy, there are three prospecting categories that I usually follow in guest blogging: horizontal, vertical and local-centric. These categories are based on relevancy and geographic locations.

Here are three diagrams to explain each category:

(Let’s take sports insurance as our niche example).

Horizontal Category

Vertical Category

Local Centric

When you determined the category of your choice, you can now proceed to finding relevant and high quality blogs. Here are some tips in looking for high quality niche-specific blogs:

Use author footprints to discover guest contributions written by an industry blogger. If the blogger is highly influential, chances are those guest blogs where he had contributed his posts have strong readerships and solid blog communities. You can try using Buzzsumo to find guest articles of an influential blogger.
Maximize the power of directories by using it to search for high quality blogs from horizontal and vertical categories of your industry. Blogs listed in directories like Dmoz are said to be of high quality given that those kinds of directorieshave strict guidelines in listing websites.
Utilize contributor queries in prospecting for guest blogs instead of using generic search queries such as inurl:submit a post [industry] or “write for us” [industry]. Here are a few queries that you can add to your prospecting query list:

“become a contributor” [industry]
inurl:contributors [industry]

To discover more guest blogging opportunities using free tools, you can check out this post on Raventools.

Qualification

Qualifying your list of blog targets could help you save time for outreach, remove irrelevant and low quality blogs and prioritize targets based on available quality indicators.

There are several metrics in link qualification but a few of them is enough to determine the site’s authority, readership size and search potential. Remember that relevancy isn’t a quality indicator here given that it has already been applied to the prospecting phase.

Guest blog quality indicators:

Domain authority – use Mozbar to identify the site’s DA.
Engagement – see the comment section (an average of 5 comments is a green signal).
Social shares – 100+ authentic social shares could further promote your guest post to a wider audience.
Readership size (optional) – There is no definite way to track the number of average readers for each blog post. However, some blogs show the number of their email subscribers on their opt-in forms which could give you an idea of the site’s readership size.

When you have separated the wheat from the chaff, it is time to list all the industry-relevant, high quality and engaging guest blogs in a spreadsheet. Fill in some important details of each blog target by adding other columns for the following:

Blog Name – self explanatory
Categories – add categories that best describe the niche of your target audience
Sample Blog Post (1) – relevant guest contributions of other bloggers
Sample Blog Post (2)
Topic Suggestion (1) - provide three topic ideas and let the content manager choose one.
Topic Suggestion (2)
Topic Suggestion (3)
Name – find the name of the content manager/blog manager/editor
Position - his/her position
Email address – read these several posts about finding email addresses.
Twitter profile (optional) – either of the brand or of the person who handles the content.
Regular Contribution (Yes/No) – if the content manager allows you to become a regular contributor of their blog, then write “yes” in the column. Otherwise, you write “no” which means that you can only write one-time post on their blog.
Relationship Stage – This column allows you to track the stages of your guest blogging pitches. Stages are Initial Contact, Draft, Submitted, Published.

Complete all the important details listed above and start performing your initial outreach.

Initial Outreach

The primary goal of this phase is to spark a conversation with the content manager. Once you secure a positive response from him, it would be easy for you to place a guest piece on his blog.

Write an email copy that is straightforward and that includes topic suggestions to let the content manager choose one and become the topic of your guest article for the blog.

For outreach specialists:

Hey [Name],

I know you're the [Position] at [Blog Name] and I wanted to get in touch.

I am looking to write about one of the following topics:

[Topic Suggestion 1]
[Topic Suggestion 2]
[Topic Suggestion 3]

What do you think about this? If you’re interested, I am happy to get something written up and sent over to you – or if you have another topic you’d like to see covered, I am more than happy to write on that.

Here are some of my posts I've written on other blogs:

[Sample Blog Post 1]

[Sample Blog Post 2]

Thanks,

[Your Name]

For agency marketers:

Tips to create a better email copy for guest blogging:

Start your email copy with an introduction to yourself and to the brand you’re representing.
Propose topic suggestions instead of sending the content manager a ready-made article unless the guest blogging guidelines say so. Letting him/her choose a topic idea could signify your concern to the usefulness of the guest article to their readers.
Provide previous guest articles that are related to the blog target you’re pitching to prove the value your writings could provide for their users.

If in case the content manager didn’t respond to your email, an alternative way to pitch is through Twitter outreach. Conversations will not be continued on Twitter but rather it is only a way to let him send to you the right email address.

Hi @prontomarketing I'd like to pitch a new guest post for your blog. Which email should I send it to?

— Venchito Tampon Jr. (@venchito14) April 11, 2014

You can check out my post on building solid relationships through link building outreach.

Content Creation

Content creation seems to be complicated for some link builders given that it will require continuous experiments to be able to see better results for the whole content marketing campaign. This is quite true, but in reality, the crucial is the right targeting of your audience and writing guest articles that best suit the needs and pains of the persona.

The combination of constant practice and right execution is the key to a successful content creation.

When crafting guest posts, the following elements are highly considered:

Preferred topic idea of the content manager
Level of audience (beginners, intermediate, advanced)
Type of audience (e.g. retailers, suppliers)
Type of content (tutorial, list type, trends)

If regular contribution request is accepted, you could focus your guest articles on one specific niche to emphasize your niche expertise and to slowly build a brand around that sub-niche.

Other tips when writing guest articles:

Surround the links pointing to your site with call-to-actions and relevant terms/keywords.
Link to your site’s categories and related blog posts to increase the chances of getting them found by new readers.
Combine low, medium and highly competitive keywords to come up with a powerful long tail keyword that you can target for your guest posts.

If you do that, you’ll have chances of ranking your guest posts for desired keywords.

Other Resources:

Data Driven Content Strategy and Outreach from Richard Baxter

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If you’re looking for a high quality link building service, then you can contact our team to help you create a link strategy that fits your brand and industry.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

how-to-create-backlinks-using-existing-content

How to Increase Contextual Backlinks with Ahrefs

Ahrefs has been my first and my most favorite link building tool since I started my career in SEO particularly in link building. This largest index of live links provides opportunities for link builders like me to analyze a link portfolio, get a good understanding of the site’s current link status and making sure that it follows the guidelines set by Google.

In a nutshell, here is a list of activities where I use Ahrefs as one of my link building tools:

Link discovery
Link analysis
Competitor analysis
Content ideation

Now let me explain how I use Ahrefs to perform the above activities.

Link discovery

If you’re working on a new link building campaign, then link discovery (or reverse engineering) could get you dive into both easy and hard to replicate links as well as give you better insights on which link acquisition methods work effective in your target niche.

Ahrefs has an easy-to-understand platform that lists down the referring page URLs, number of Internal and External links, link URL, and anchor texts of all the links acquired for the site.

The filter options in the platform allow you to sort the links by All Backlinks, 01 Backlink/Domain or 05 Backlinks/Domain. This means that if you want to see only the referring domains and not all the links acquired from every single domain, you can choose the 01 Backlink/Domain or 05 Backlinks/Domain.

By skimming the whole list of URLs, you’ll see which pages of the website garner the highest number of links and what keywords/phrases people are using to link to those pages.

Link analysis

Link analysis should be performed whether or not you’ve been hit by link-based penalties. Regular audit of your site using tools like Ahrefs allows you to track your current incoming links, see which one should be immediately removed and gets rid of over optimization of anchor texts by maintaining a balance between the use of commercial and brand-related keywords in link building.

I don’t need to dig deeper into this topic. Jon Ball has already written a beginners guide to conduct a backlink analysis.

Competitor Analysis

Instead of analyzing every single website of your competitors using the Ahrefs dashboard, why not try the Domain Comparison tool?

A quick glance of link profiles of your main competitors can reveal several insights about their current link statuses including the number of linking .edu/.gov domains, the total number of shares of their main pages and link velocities of each site. This gives you a general overview of the strengths and weaknesses of your website as well as of your competitors.

Content ideation

When getting natural links, a content piece is always at work. Whether you execute link prospecting before you proceed to content creation or do it verse visa, you’ll realize that content marketing is always tied with link building.

When finding topic ideas for your future content assets, you can use Ahrefs as a content marketing tool. Consider the top pages of your competitors’ websites or any related sites that have managed to earn high quality backlinks, shares and trust from the community.

How to Increase Editorial Backlinks Using Ahrefs – A Short Case Study

Now let me share a short case study on how I increased the editorial backlinks of my client’s website.

It is a video production blog that has several assets that can certainly generate traffic and sales including:

Conversion rate-optimized landing pages with embedded high quality videos that clearly explain the unique selling points of the brand.
Testimonials from clients they’ve worked with. This adds trust to the customers and can entice them to get the company’s services.
Visible video-focused social media profiles placed in the most important areas of the website.
A portfolio page that lists down proofs of work, clients they’ve worked with and glimpse of their projects (behind the scenes).

You may be wondering why I need to share this with you. There is only one main point here. A well-designed website with branded and optimized content for sales and traffic can help increase the number of editorial backlinks because of two reasons:

Your brand is well-trusted within your community (this is proven by testimonials, portfolio pages, and optimized social media profiles preferably the ones your industry is using).
Lead generation can happen either on third party content (when the piece matches the selling point of the brand) or on your website (when landing pages are optimized for conversions).

So what we did is to utilize the available content assets to acquire editorial links for the site.

Service Listing Pages

First off, we prospect for available industry-related resource pages that don’t require linkable assets (e.g. infographic) to include the company in their lists.

Using the common search queries like inurl:links OR inurl:resources “video production” “services” in Google search and/or executing reverse engineering method using Ahrefs, we’re able to find service listing pages.

After link prospecting, we proceed to link building outreach to get contextual links for the site.

High quality guest blogging

Matching the context to the brand’s unique selling points improves the quality of the third-party content. It helps the company attract leads/potential customers from their content placements especially when the content piece is able to show the expertise of the brand in offering its service/product.

We shoot high quality guest blogs with the aim of building relationships with the webmasters and allowing us to contribute regularly on those blogs.

You can check out this post about risk management for guest blogging strategy.

.Edu link placement

For company sites that have blogs, one way to get links from .edu sites is to create a linkable asset that people in the community not just .edu webmasters would love to share and/or link to it.

Though there’s nothing new with this technique, what I want to point out is to always reverse engineer on other websites whether or not they’re directly related to your business before diving into your keyword research process. The main reason is that you want to get first an understanding of what topic and content type resonated with your target audience based on the existing content assets of influencers and competitors in your niche. Then just go over to your favorite keyword research to discover and identify which keywords/phrases have high search volume potentials.

Related industry resource pages

To acquire more contextual backlinks, we move away from targeting video production resource pages. We tap into other broader industries like marketing blogs and related industries like graphic design websites.

The key is to stick into relevancy. As long as the resource page is relevant to your asset and you have a chance to acquire a link (i.e. there is a similar content that you have that is listed on the page), you can obtain a link from that page.

Summary

I was not paid to review this product. I simply love this tool and I know that newbies in the search industry would love to include it in their link building toolset.

For more link building tool reviews, you can subscribe to this blog (use the subscription box below) and follow me on Twitter and Google+.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

Venchito Tampon Jr

Example 1: Shopping cart abandonment email

Example 2: Hospitality trends email

Example 3: For guest email

Example 4: Product review email

Examples of good link request emails

Example 1: More link links email from Wordstream

Example 2: Resource link building

Psychology 101 for linker outreach

Reciprocation

Liking

Commitment and consistency

Social proof

Authority

Scarcity and exclusivity

Actionable tips to improve your link request/outreach emails

Crowdsourced Content

Guest Blogging

Getting interview coverage from relevant blogs

Testimonials

10 Lessons I Learned from Doing Blogger Outreach

Jason Acidre – Kaiserthesage

How to find pages on your site that have natural links:

How to improve your site’s domain authority through link building:

Ross Hudgens – Siege Media

Wil Reynolds – SEER Interactive

Places to find local events:

Rand Fishkin – MOZ

Tips to attract invitations from authoritative blogs to write for them:

Larry Kim – Wordstream

Mike Essex – Koozai

What to do with your lists of influencers:

Dan Shure – Evolving SEO

Simple content ideation:

Ways to help your customer with your content:

Simple prospecting idea:

Jon Cooper – PointblankSEO

More resources about link baiting:

Anonymous

How to Increase Search Engine Traffic through Basic On Site Optimization

Analyze your industry’s search environment

Find the searchers’ intent to match with your categories

Optimize your content for long tail keywords

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics

KeywordTool.io

Other optimization techniques:

Types of authority links

How to Get Authority Links to Your Domain

Produce link-bait content pieces

Invite authoritative guest authors

How to invite new but expert guest authors

1. Prospecting

2. Evaluation

3. Pitching

Ethical link reciprocation

How to get reciprocal links ethically

Buy links ethically

How to buy links ethically

1. Prospecting

2. Evaluation

3. Pitching

Link seeding

Conversion link building

Improve your site’s linkability

Content upgrade

More Resources:

Strategic content distribution

Interaction Link Building

Quality Factors to Consider in Directory Link Building

Types of Directories

Actionable Tips to Build Links with Directories

Reverse Engineer to Find High Quality Directories

Pay for Editorial Value

Earn citations from local directories

Perform a Manual Citation Auditing

1. Infographics

2. Contest

3. Social Sharing

4. Researches, White Papers, and Analyses