How to Scale Your Link Building Campaigns for 2014 and Beyond
Scalable link building is a combination of a volume-oriented and efficient link building methodologies and strategies. The more links are being acquired through content and community-based link building tactics, the higher should be the efficiency developed in the overall campaign including the process, tools and the people working on it.
The primary idea in this approach is to focus both on the inner development and bulkiness of the activity since having more time performing a specific link building task, the higher is your chance of mastering it through constant improvement that adapts to what search engines are going after for this year and beyond.
The future of search will always emphasize the value of the business which comprises the nature of the operations, profitability and future economic benefits that should flow from different web places where customers are visible. With business’ value in mind, scaling link building efforts would result into more ROI-based results that drive authority, brand and social signals to the inner pages of the site where external sources are linking to.
Scalability in an ROI-focused link building campaign is essential for the following reasons:
- Increase in the present resources of the company (i.e. team members) can accommodate numerous demands of customers that would result into brand-related benefits (besides sales) such as positive feedbacks, brand awareness, effortless content promotion through word of mouth marketing, voluntary-given links and other secondary benefits (benefits that are not basically targeted by the campaign).
- Increase in workforce provides more time for the upper management to strategically plan the future development of the campaign (which will be more effective if priorities for different tasks are set beforehand).
- It fuels the growth of the business given that each of the team members are able to cope up with the changes/development that occur during the execution of the campaign which allows them to participate more in the strategic planning and hands-on activities.
- It standardizes the brand’s methodologies and processes for new team members. The higher the need for scalability, the more efforts should be exerted for the basic necessities of the link building team (i.e. basic manual for newbies). This will reduce the time and budget that will be needed for personal training for each team member given that manual or one general resource could help newbies to learn about every detail of the link building process (i.e. link building outreach) and go back to the section they haven’t learned and which needs repetitive learning.
For any reason, growth in link building requires scalability. The more resources (workforce, tools, etc..) are scaled for the campaign, the likelihood of continuous improvement is higher (through constructive criticisms and regular feedbacks from team members/leaders).
Without setting your team to focus on scaling certain elements in link building, growth is unlikely possible for the campaign.
The question is, in what areas should scalability be focused on?
Three Main Focus of Scalable Link Building
1. People
For obvious reasons, link building will always need people to run a campaign. With a mindset of allowing your team members to reach their maximum potentials, it would be easy for you to scale each of them (since proper training leads to scalability). Scalability in people sense is flexibility. If your people are able to work on multiple tasks, then you are effective in scaling your team.
Essentially, focusing on how you could improve the skills of your team members would greatly impact the whole campaign’s results. The more skillful your team is, the better your results will be.
Here a few tips to scale your team members:
- Think of a good list of questions that you want to ask for your applicants in the recruitment process of your team. You may either add examinations to get a feel of how knowledgeable they are in link building or offer a two-week paid test trial to see the output they can finished within that short period of time.
- Create a database that is filled with the basic resources/information that your team members must learn about as part of the team. I would suggest that you provide two tutorials:
- Video training tutorials for hands-on activities (for applications) with transcript or outline below each video.
- Text-based content (for theories)
Make it easy for your people to read each section by adding quick links at the top of the page/post.
- Let your team members send a weekly report about the results of their work, challenges they faced during the week and improvements that they can do for the team. You can add a section to your task management platform for questions and feedbacks.
Further Reading:
2. Tools
Without tools, it would be quite difficult for your team members to scale each task that you assigned to them. Tools will always play a big role in reducing the time spent for a particular activity, and ensuring that the results for every work are high quality and accustomed to the expectations set by the team.
A few tips to scale your link building tools are stated below:
- Use spreadsheet and Excel functions to speed up the process of one subset activity (i.e. finding duplicates in the list).
- Create your own tool for your in-house works to setup only one platform for all the multiple tasks you’re handling for each campaign.
- Select only a few tools that your service requires you to scale. Compare two or three tools and see which one could make your work faster and easier. Do this every 6 months or 1 year (add new tools that are publicly offered by other SEO agencies for comparison). Remember not to spend almost half of your budget for paid tools since you can also scale activities with selected free SEO tools.
- Ensure the privacy of access to each of your tools (restrict ex-members from any methods to login in any of your regular tools).
- If you’ve built a strong readership and personal branding, try contributing to product websites that offer regular content contribution on their blog sections. I’ve seen many of them offer paid subscriptions to their products in exchange for regular write-ups (monthly/weekly). By doing this, the cost assigned for tools would reduce dramatically given that you’re almost free of charge to some paid products.
3. Process
Scalable link building will not be completely performed without a process. Systems or processes will only work well if they are continuously being tested by adding some changes to them to see some improvements in the results.
Process is hard to scale since it requires testing/updates before seeing big results. Conducting multiple testings would need much higher budget and more time for the team to quickly adjust to any immediate changes that will happen during the testing period.
However, there are a few ways to make it much easier for the team members to grasp each detail of the process without making them overwhelmed with the big picture of it.
- Conduct an initial meeting with your team members for you to explain to them each activity that your team needs to perform to satisfy your clients’ needs.
- Illustrate your link building process by adding visuals/diagrams that describe how the system works.
- List down the time needed for each task to be completed. Make sure that you consider the completion time for each task when you assigned all the tasks to your team members (i.e. 15 hours to find 180-200 qualified link prospects). This will help you identify who are performing at the above par or below par output and which of them are qualified for regularization.
- Take note of frequently asked questions from your team members. Analyze which part of the link building process is difficult to understand and create a detailed video explaining that particular task.
- Perform a monthly evaluation of the team’s output by simply listing down tasks that are quickly completed by the team and activities that need more members to work on.
- Involve your team members for monthly feedbacks and consider their suggestions/feedbacks for future updates to your link building process.
- Compute your client acquisition/retention output such as:
- Retention rate (how many clients are still getting your service?)
- Client acquisition rate (how many client inquiries do you receive in a monthly basis?)
- Top assisted conversions (which websites bring you the most number of potential clients?)
There are a lot more tips that I will share on my future posts about client acquisition, task management and other process-based activities. But for now, the above tips are the most vital applications of the overall link building process.
People, tools and process are the fundamental things you have to focus on scaling your link building campaigns since these three core elements would greatly impact your business’ growth and branding.
What to Scale in Link building for 2014 and Beyond?
Content Assets
Understanding how to extract the most value out of the existing and future content assets is a must to consider for next year’s content marketing. Creating high quality content assets is not enough. You have to determine the future economic benefits of your content and how you can amplify the reach of each of your content piece.
Here are a few tips to scale your content:
- Focus on content optimization. Ensure that your asset has the essential characteristics of a high quality content:
- Comprehensiveness. The ability of the content to be mostly cited by media outlets and industry-related publications because it provides data/information that is credible and useful to different groups of audience.
- Shareable. Social sharing buttons are visible both on the above and below the fold of the page (or is static in one area). In addition, the content should be capable of multiplying its shares by having influencers mentioned in the post (either their insights are included or their content are being referenced for additional resources).
- Design. First impression lasts in content marketing. In most cases, people shared the content once they are attracted with how text/images/videos are formatted within and on the page.
- Use your content to leverage business relationships. Connect with influencers who’ve shared/linked to your content. Mentioned their content on your posts (especially posts that linked to your content) to put yourself to their radars and circles.
- Instead of doing one-time guest post, pitch authoritative blogs/news sites for regular content distribution. This would help you increase your branding, authority and your content’s ability to reach a wider group of audience (especially if you linked your best posts from your content distribution posts – i.e. guest posts).
- Invest in content development. Update existing content assets to adapt to its target industry’s environment.
- Repurpose your content to different content formats (i.e. slide presentation, ebook, etc..) to increase its likelihood of being seen by top industry curators who might linked to your other content formats.
- List down all existing linkable content assets in a spreadsheet (content inventory). Identify which of them had received a significant amount of links (by looking at the page’s number of referring domains) and shares (use Topsy). Schedule one week for linker outreach to promote existing content assets that have potential for active and passive link acquisition.
Link Acquisition
Link acquisition is a tedious activity that demands proper execution and analysis to dramatically increase the number of links acquired, penetrate influencers’ radars and build relationships with the target audience and comprehend the behavior of customers in the industry.
Scaling link acquisition would basically dig into one activity: careful qualification of link prospects. Here are two types of link qualifiers that would extract only high quality link prospects from the list.
- Automated link qualifiers such as:
- Ad placements
- Pagerank of URL
- Pagerank of domain
- Domain Authority of the site
- Page Authority
- Keywords placed on the most important areas of the page
Manual link prospecting using the above link qualifiers could possibly create a list of 50+ link prospects in an hour with the help of tools like bulk PR checker, Mozbar, Scrape Similar and a little common sense to identify the site’s ads marketing (whether or not the website is designed to provide value to the community or just earn passive income).
- Manual link qualifiers such as:
- Relevancy of the target page/site to the produced content or the client’s website itself.
- Obtainability or link acquisition level based on the relationship status of the link prospector/client to the link target.
- Competitor identification. Determining whether or not the link target is a competitor.
- Content/page has a good context in terms of grammar and spelling.
- Is the link placed on the link target’s page automated or human-generated?
- Quality of blog comments
- Accessibility of the webmaster (is the site owner’s email or contact form visible on the page?)
With these two types of link qualifiers, you can now scale the link prospecting efforts of your team by allowing them to focus on the important factors that make links good quality.
Other scalable link prospecting tips:
- Provide regular feedbacks to link prospectors (explain why link prospects are approved and others are not).
- Use tools for massive link prospecting like Ontolo and Scrape Similar and store the results in a link prospecting sheet.
- Categorize unapproved link prospects based on their link opportunities. Execute other link building efforts using those unapproved list of prospects (i.e. posting articles to industry-related forums). Approval of link prospects is based on the type of link building that the team is working on: “Approved” for resource/links page; “Not Approved” for forum links.
Outreach
Outreach efforts are scaled through evaluating these activities and results:
- Email templates that work best in getting higher response and link acquisition rates.
- Feedbacks received from link targets and their behavior towards your outreach.
- Setting an expected response rate and/or link acquisition rate for every outreach efforts (based on the industry’s environment and response to link building outreach). This would help you determine if your effort is at sub-par or above the average standard.
Here are a few initiatives that can improve the scalability of your outreach:
- Use interns for small outreach tasks like uploading CSV files (spreadsheet of contact names and emails) to outreach management tools like Buzzstream.
- If you’re only using Gmail and other free email marketing solutions, you would want to let your interns work on editing the email message (replacing the [Name of Site Owner] and [URL] with the actual contact names and websites of the link targets). This way, you would just have to check all the drafts and make it more personalized by adding introductory paragraphs to the template.
- Contact webmasters who had linked to your competitor’s content. Try a second blow of emails that is more personalized than the outreach template you’ve used on your initial contact.
Branding
The future of link building will always be on the branding and other marketing objectives of online businesses. Targeting conversions, increasing brand awareness and establishing influence and authority are a few marketing-centric goals that can send brand and social signals to the pursued website/content.
The following initiatives are best to scale your site’s branding activity:
- Take advantage of the top curators in your industry by starting to build a rapport with them and get updates for their planned interviews/round-ups. Provide your best insight/tip/strategy/tactic to the curator to get high quality backlinks over time given that the post is more likely to attract more link love from top media outlets in the industry (especially if the crowdsourced content was able to rank for a target keyword).
- Consistently create persona-based content to win top awards in your industry. This could amplify the reach of your awarded content and increase the likelihood of getting direct traffic visits.
- Participate in industry-related communities like blogs and forums by providing high-valued answers to the most commonly-asked questions.
- Start engaging with people who mentioned your brand/product/service on various web places. Regular brand mention monitoring could give you links when you asked those potential linkers politely via email or social tools.
Scalable link building is both improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your link building campaigns and understanding how to improve the value of your link building results.
To end this post, I want to thank James Norquay for giving me an awesome gift (15 GB USB with a bottle opener on its other side).
If you liked this post, kindly share it to your circles/networks and follow me on twitter @venchito14.
Merry Christmas to all of you guys!
Creating and Developing Content Assets Like A Pro
Content assets had been one of the greatest investments of almost all size of brands today. It became such a phenomenon in the industry that everyone wants to have a piece of asset for their site's content development.
However, content marketing is not just about creating content pieces. It’s more on delivering the best value to your target audience. Without including your audience as a contributing factor in your marketing campaign, you would be more likely to lose track with your goals/objectives. Remember that your customers are the reasons why your brand exists in the industry. Therefore, they should be given the top priority in your content marketing campaign.
I’ve seen a lot of improvements in content marketing and how those improvements affect the thinking of many content marketers in delivering a useful and targeted content. This made every phase in the content process looks more challenging than before.
Five Stages of a High Quality Content Development
To surely make the most value out of your content efforts, it’s very important to take every stage in the content creation process as a chance to win over your competitors. This may require strategic planning in those stages to truly provide a reliable and useful content piece for your audience.
In this post, I will share to you actionable tips to help you outrank your competitors with every content piece that you will be creating.
Ideation
There are several ways to get ideas for your content that are not only catchy to the eyes of your audience but are also seasonal and/or traffic-based keywords (which means that they can give a boost to the traffic of your site if those keywords/ideas are optimized on your content and your content pieces ranked high on search results for those certain keywords).
Let’s get started..
1. Comments on other site’s content
Blog commenting is not only used for link building purposes but also for finding keywords for your content. If you have a list of authority sites in your mind, you may want to visit once in a while to get some ideas.
I’ll get Moz as my example.
Every post on Moz (the main blog) managed to get an average of a hundred comments just the time they were published on the site.
This Whiteboard Friday edition by Michael King received 119 comments which is a good amount of blog comments for one post.
Those comments would give a significant value when looking for content ideas given that every word commented by a blogger could be words/phrases that they may/might be searching for in the search engines.
What I’m gonna do is to find keywords in the comment section that are related to link building, content and branding (because this is my field!).
By using the Find and Replace in Chrome Web Browser, I was able to find phrases that are related to my keywords.
Oh! An expression!
Finding these keywords is not enough. You have to see whether or not they are the most commonly searched terms in your industry. To do this, we can use Google Keyword Planner (for search volume) or Google Trends (for seasonality).
Let’s see the trend of each keyword.
As you can see, the word “great content” seems like a good keyword and the interest for that keyword progresses over time. Gold!
“Amazing content” (though it may not be a seasonal term for now), looking at its seasonality would give us an idea that it might be an interest-rich keyword for content in the future.
And if you’re targeting an audience located in India and USA, those aforementioned content-related terms is a must to consider for your campaign.
Another Tip: Click the box saying, “email me when new comments are posted” right below the post of your target site, this would help you track if there is a new comment on the blog post (you’ll receive a Wordpress email).
2. Authority Sites through RSS Feeds
Competitive research will never be excluded in every marketing campaign of SEO practitioners given that it would help them identify their strengths and weaknesses as brands which are necessary to bring those campaigns into success.
Determining what authority sites are doing with their blogs based on the content they’re publishing would give you a feel of what you can also do for your content strategy (outranking them with better content than they have).
If you still don’t have any authority site in your list (perhaps, you’re new to the industry), you can use this tool to look for websites that have a large number of subscribers. The reason you want to consider the number of subscribers when finding authority sites is that most of the time, those websites with a large amount of subscribers managed to build a community for their brands. This community could get them share their content on social and provide useful insights (which is commonly about their offerings) in the comment section of their blogs.
Type in your keyword in the search bar of the tool and it will give you a list of websites that are ranked according to the number of subscribers. Use Feedly to get those sites on track. Once in a while, visit those authority sites, read their content pieces and analyze how they create content (based on content format, concept, posting frequency, etc…).
You can check out this huge list of free link building tools to find more link prospects.
3. Repurpose other people’s content
Most of the time, posts that get a lot of attention are those content that are just repurposed from another content (made by them or other brands). This would save you time and money especially if you’re tight with your budget.
Repurposing blog posts to UGC content pieces is a good strategy especially if the original content garnered several shares/links. Outreaching to the linkers/sharers of the original version would yield much better results in terms of outreach response rates.
Original content
Repurposed content
4. Keyword-rich URLs
Authority sites don’t rank easily without optimizing their pages for search (unless they’ve been in the webspace for over 2 years or so). For those sites that are new in the industry (6 months to 2 years) but tend to get to the top spots of search results for targeted keywords, there must be some on-page optimization that they are doing for their pages.
Let’s take Kaiserthesage as my example (do you still wonder why I always link to him?).
By simply looking at each url of every page, you have an idea of what keyword the webmaster is trying to rank for that page.
Or you can use Ahrefs to find their top pages (where you can see their keyword-rich URLs). Click on the top pages.
5. Anchor texts of referring domains of your competitors’ content
If you’re tired of searching for an idea that doesn’t have a potential to gain continuous traffic to your site (through search), you should make some analysis of your competitor’s backlink profile. You won’t be getting the list of referring domains that linked to your competitor’s site/page (to reach out and get the same types of links). Instead, you will only look at the anchor texts that your competitor’s referring domains used to link to your competitor’s page.
Get those anchor texts and put them in a spreadsheet. Use your keyword tool to identify which of them could be considered gold for search volume.
6. Ultimate Industry Guides
Not all industry guides are perfect guides. Every portion in the guide would support the main subject/theme of the content. However, those portions are just descriptions, which means that they are not so detailed (which is a good content idea that you can use for your own content piece).
Let’s give an example.
There are portions in this industry guide that are not so detailed but when you see it in the overall view, it is a comprehensive and useful content. Use those portions to create another content piece (not necessarily be an industry guide, could be visuals) but ensure that the content piece is specifically optimize for the keyword you’re looking at.
7. FAQs
You’re familiar with this. I’m sure a lot of brands have their Frequently Ask Questions page to better serve their customers by answering their most common questions. This would help the brand to know any problems that their customers might be experiencing when they use their products (questions that are not answered or solved by their FAQs page).
FAQ pages could also be used for content ideation. What you will do is to get all the listed questions, place them all in a spreadsheet and take each one of them into Google search (don’t put all the phrases; pick up those related terms in the question).
If there is any page that is already targeting those questions, you could put another phrase in Google search until you find one that has not yet been targeted by someone.
8. Dissect Google+ Hangout videos
You will not strip the video into shorter ones but you want to know what ideas/insights have been discussed in the hangout that can be covered in a blog post (or any other content format).
Listen to the hangout video (it would be great if you could listen to a group interview). There are tons of ideas that are accidentally shared by industry experts (they could just say anything that is sometimes not specifically pointing to the topic they’re discussing about).
List those points in the spreadsheet and get back to the list once you’re done with the content ideation.
9. Two seemingly-irrelevant but relevant topics
Connections are what would make your content looks more natural and appealing to your readers. You could connect two seemingly-unrelated topics and turn that combined idea into a blog post.
You might need a thorough research to make this thing works! It would take time and effort to create awesome piece like this.
Imagine if you can create several pieces like this (related to your industry terms), you might be surprised by how many people would link to your content or at least share it to their peers.
10. Niche-related communities
There is at least one community related to your field that could be a useful resource for your content development assets. Use Google search to find at least one (inurl:forum + “your industry”) and identify if that is really awesome (users participate well and not spammy).
Use the intext:query to find niche-specific phrase/ideas.
Try this one: intext:your keyword + site:yourforum.com
You should only use one word (your main keyword) to find relevant ideas in the forum.
Example:
As you can see, there are tons of ideas that you could use to develop your own content. Use again your preferred keyword tool to get the highest search volume and use your personal judgment on which keyword you’ll be using for your own content.
11. Anchor texts of linking domains to your site.
You can’t control the anchor texts that other webmasters are using to link to you (unless you’re the one who approach them about those link opportunities). They might be using phrases/keywords which are uncommon to you but related to your industry terms.
This is great if you have that list of anchor texts that your linkers link to you. However, you can use those texts to create a solid content that matches to each of the phrase. Simply, find a phrase you have not optimized yet for your site. Create a page targeting that phrase/keyword and build links to it (just like what you did for your site’s other pages).
12. Branded link mentions.
You may be tracking every site/page that linked to your website. If you’re already doing this for link building purposes, make sure you do it also for your content strategy. Those webmasters (those who linked to you) have reasons why they did that linking. If you will know their reasons of linking to you, you can have good partnership/relationships with them. Who knows? They might collaborate with you to create an awesome content piece.
You could also interview the person who linked to you (especially if that is a customer). Ask him what pushes him to give credit or mention your brand on his blog/page. Incentivize him to encourage him to talk more about you. Interviewing that person would improve your site’s performance given that people would like to know the feedback(s) from the users of your product.
Remember that you don’t want to make the content be a self-promotional one. Add some twists in it (like asking the person, “Give me some experiences in using the product that almost pushes you to stop using it?”
People love brands that are transparent with their situations/offerings as this would prove how they truly value their customers.
13. Interview speakers of upcoming webinars/events.
If you’re looking for an easy content piece, this one is good for you. The only thing that you need is to do is to make a list of events (webinar/conference/seminar) that people in your community (local) is so excited to participate in. Gather all the details about each event like the names of the speakers, location and other important details that could help your content (if you’re using this as an angle) to be detailed and useful for your followers.
I wrote a piece of content a few weeks ago about a conference that will be held here in the Philippines. Review that post on how I use event details to make the post more valuable to my local followers.
14. Product Reviews
You have a product and you got product reviews in the past. You can use that to make an awesome content piece for your brand.
Here is what you can do.
Look at the sites (your own website if you allow ratings/reviews for each of your product or product review sites where your product had been mentioned). Some websites allow you to sort reviews based on ratings so you can get the most value out of those comments/reviews. Check industy-related terms that people had used in their comments. Those terms is what you’ll be using for your content piece given that those are informational keywords (people are using those phrases in their searches).
15. Intext Query
You’re probably familiar with this query. You can use this to find keywords that are placed on any sites (that you should be analyzing as to the content format).
To get the best content ideas from sites that you’re not almost familiar with, don’t add any specific website to this query. Just use the plain query, like this: intext:”financial calculator”.
The reason for doing this is that you want to see all the pages where that keyword/phrase has been mentioned. You will probably see the top pages ranking for that keyword (most of the time, those are authority sites in your industry). In my opinion, you can’t get much value from those pages (as they already had built an authority in the space). You want pages that are still new but are authoritative already in terms of followers/readers and analyze what they did to create a page targeting that keyword.
Click on the lower pages (page 7 or higher) to see how are those sites use that keyword in their content assets.
16. Ask someone about your brand through email or social.
Know what captivates your readers’ interest by asking questions to them. You may have not known they’re waiting for you to reach out and ask their content suggestions. This is one of the most effective ways to get content ideas as those customers/readers/followers is part of the group (target audience) that you’re trying to please with your content. If one of them replies and suggest one idea for your content, don’t ignore him. He might also suggest a content format (infographic, blog post, etc..) that you had never done before for your brand which can make a significant difference to what your site is already doing for them.
17. Use tools to organize your content.
I have Mindmeister in my mobile phone which I use to organize my content ideas and add more to it as I think another idea. The best content ideas that I had for my recent posts came from nowhere. When I’m not facing at my computer, those ideas pumped up!
You can try this technique. It might work for you also.
Another tool that you can also use is wordcloud. This will help you see the common keyword/phrase and some combined thoughts that you can use for your content.
Research
Sixty-five percent of the respondents in the survey conducted by the team of Colleen Jones say that web is an unreliable source.
But there’s still some (45%) who’re looking for sources from web for their own research/content. The reason is that people go to web to get true help or advice. So if you want to get the most value out of your content, you have to consider the credibility of your sources/references which you will use to point out facts/info/data that are relevant to the topic/subject of your content piece.
Aside from what I mentioned in this post about attributes/characteristics that I consider valuable factors when looking for resources for content, credibility should also be taken into consideration.
Why do you have to look for credible sources?
Most often than not, people get confused with the content they searched on the web given that the cited sources are not really credible. The sources were outdated and they don’t really support the main point that the content wants to convey.
This is something that you should be looking at when looking for credible sources.
Now let’s know what factors that would make the source(s) credible (added info to what I mentioned in that post about content resources)
- It has a distinct voice. When the content publisher of that source says something, everyone listens to him given that he has proven his authority and influence to his audience. So if you’re looking for credible sources, determine if they have distinct voices (or personality). Does their audience agree with their saying/thoughts? Does the brand owner get several complaints rather than compliments/praises?
- It makes a clear point. The source should only give emphasis on one subject. I haven’t seen any content piece that already tackles all the terms in the industry. There are pieces that managed to do that (ultimate guides) but most of the time, there’s one topic that the content asset is specifically talking about. Sources are credible when they managed to show off their expertise through those sources (pointing only to one topic).
- It is useful. As you always get the most useful sources, you enable your content to become more credible in the eyes of your audience (users will learn much from your content and to its sources). This would give them a reason to come back to your site once in a while (to read/consume your content).
- It guides you to the next step. A source always guides to your next step of learning. If your source does not do it for you, it will not also guide your users. Make sure that you are satisfied first with the value that you’re getting from your sources before enticing others to be satisfied with your content. Otherwise, your users will not read those sources for additional knowledge.
Note: Not because it ranks in one of the top five spots in the search results for the target keyword doesn’t mean it is a credible source.
Here are a few ways to get sources for your content:
- Use this tool to find industry-related sources/references. Use this as your own advantage to identify which of them could pass credibility and value to your content. Data-driven content is a good source if the content publisher provides source documents of their content.
- Expert’s insights/advices. Get help from people who know their stuff really well. This post by Rohit Palit is a good example of this. Below that page, there is a section that allows experts to share their own insights about the topic.
Indeed, research takes time. To maximize your research efforts, ensure that you only get credible and relevant sources for your content.
Other Resource:
6 Ways to Find Data to Support Your Content
Conceptual Framework
All the data/sources should be gathered at one place. This phase, “Conceptual Framework” would ensure that your content has a logical flow of information.
One of the mistakes of every blogger or content publisher is gathering all the data at one place without even arranging every single thought that they collected. This would look like a scratch paper (scattered ideas).
Note: There’s no rule in the method of outlining your ideas. Use your own if you already have one.
But here are some tools (they’re the common, ha!) that you can try to make your ideas flow smoothly within your content:
- Excel Spreadsheet. One way to organize your ideas is using an excel spreadsheet. Make sure that you add a column for “what is lacking” to take down notes on what is lacking in your resources so you can add insights/hooks to it to improve the context of your content.
- Problem-to-Recommedation Table. This an effective tool to use when you’re creating a guide (how-to) that is focused on helping your target audience solve their own problems. Use this spreadsheet to list down all those problems and take down notes for recommendations.
- Visualization. It’s easy to create a content when you can see the whole picture of it. Visualization allows you to do this by picking up the main principles/ideas and visualize them in a good format.
- Basic Outline. Use your document tool for this one (e.g. Microsoft Word).Here’s an example of a basic outline.
Optimization
I already covered this phase in my post about content promotion. But for additional tips, here are some that you can apply for your content piece.
- Based on the list of anchor texts you’ve gathered earlier, pick up the best ones and use it to optimize your content. Additionally, you can use this query: (site:abc.com inanchor:content) to find pages where your competitor used anchor texts related to your industry terms.
Make sure that you strategically use those anchor texts to ensure that you’re also passing value to your site’s other content assets. You can also use those anchor texts for your content distribution efforts like guest posts.
- Optimize the page with the basic on-page SEO. Putting your keyword at the page’s title tag, H1 and at the first sentence of your page would help your page to rank high on SERPs.
It’s also best to use the exact keyword at the first place of your title (there’s an added factor for rankings when you use this).
- Link to your site’s other content assets (especially to your money pages or your top converting pages). Use Google Analytics to find your top converting pages.
You can link to those pages strategically when you optimize your future content assets.
The most common mistake of webmasters is the use of generic words (e.g. click here) as anchor texts for their content. Though you don’t want to use your exact match anchor texts (so as not to have anchor text over optimization), the use of generic words could be replaced by using your alternatives (partial match, long-stringed, etc..) which is more powerful to use than generic words.
- Don’t worry about keyword density. Focus more on getting links for your content. As long as your keywords are positioned in the right spots (title, h1, first sentence) of your content, you don’t have to make an effort counting how many times you use that keyword alongside your page.
Here is a cool video by Brian Dean about the upside down guest post (where you can get tips on how to optimize your page for search engines and users).
Content Placement
Reminder: There’s no rule in determining where to place your content (on your site or other’s site(s) – guest posts).
But here are a few tips by Moosa Hermani on how to determine if the site (where you will place your guest post on) matches to your brand.
“I always keep few things in mind when reaching out to any place (for guest post or my content)” – M.Hemani
- Is my audience there?
- Do they agree my core principles (for instance I do not like Google's idea of hiding keyword data in GA. If there is a great website who have an opinion that is negative to this then I probably will drop the idea of placing my content there as this differs my ideology)
- Do they have a positive name in the market?
- DA (obviously)
- Will I be able to grab some traffic and make them my continuous reader?
Using this list of guidelines when identifying the right site/blog to place your content would help you get the most value of your content distribution efforts.
Other Resources:
Conclusion:
Strategic planning is necessary to every marketing campaign (the same goes with your content marketing). If you perform really well for each phase (ideation to content placement), you’ll be surprised that you almost win half of the battle. The other half is obviously promoting your content.
If you're looking for high quality links to support your content and grow your business, get in touch with us for effective link building services.
Infantry Square to Promote Your Content
Promoting your content is like bringing your military troops in front of your enemies. It’s either you lose or win the battle. Whatever the result will be, you have to prepare yourself before entering into the war of content marketing.
Part of the preparations is creating your own solid following base. This comprises your own troops and your allies. Designing your content strategy in this approach would help you build a competitive advantage over your enemies because some of them focus only on building low quality links (blog networks, low-quality guest posting, buying links, etc..) which would only bring down their chances of winning the battle (especially now that Google is targeting sites that are engaging in aggressive webspam tactics).
Content that is designed to satisfy user’s intent is what matters most in today’s online marketing. However, creating a content piece does not guarantee your victory. You have to get in front of your target audience with the content that you have and entice them to take necessary actions for your brand (signing up for your newsletter, follow you on social networks, buy your product/service or whatever conversion goals you’ve setup beforehand). This makes content promotion evenmore complicated given that there are lots of effective promotional tactics that your competitors might be using for their own content strategy.
How to Promote Your Content Using the Four Core Principles
In this post, I cover the four principles of a robust content promotion that will differentiate you from others and will certainly enhance your brand experience towards your target audience (customers and influencers).
1. Content Optimization
Content that is not optimized both for search engines and end users would leave you behind the battle. The reason is that people would not be able to find your content unless certain web elements are present on it. Some of them are:
Page title
Using your target keywords in your page title would help your content improve its performance on search rankings. However, you should not optimize it for the sake of keyword density. Rather, ensure that your content matches to the keyword you’re targeting for by satisfying your user’s intent on clicking that page.
Applying actionable page title is also one of the best implementations you can do for your content because this can entice searchers to click through your content as they see it on search results (people are now looking for “how to” content pieces rather than the “what and why” of a topic).
How to Find Resources for Your Content
Google+ Authorship
Google is now favoring pages with authorship markups on them as they are more likely to indicate credibility and authority on the web. Making sure you implement authorship on all of your content pieces would give you a cutting edge over your competitors. This can also increase your social following on Google+ since people can directly click your Google+ page right on the search results.
Internal Linking
Linking to your site’s other pages would retain users on your site given that you’re giving them reason to read more of your other content pieces. Using a well-planned anchor text strategy for your internal linking would also help improve your site’s performance. Longer anchor texts are more receptive to clicks from users than the usual strategy – exact match anchor text. The reason is that it looks more natural for the users to see longer phrases/terms that link to your site’s other pages.
Substance of Content
The more useful, significant and comprehensive your content is, the more likely your users would want to share or link to it. Bloggers want to link to comprehensive content pieces on their articles as these can give more value to their readers.
Another strategy you should now start implementing for your site/brand is the use of freshness for your content. Rand Fishkin discussed this topic in his recent Whiteboard Friday. He noted that freshness is one of the ranking factors that Google is now using to give favor to content pieces that are up-to-date and high quality. Using this for your own advantage would help your content get easy wins in the battle.
You can do this by simply entering your target keyword in Google search. By looking at the dates of each content listed on the search results, you now have an idea if freshness greatly impacts ranking results in your niche.
For more useful tips, you can check out this post on Kaiserthesage on how to optimize content for search engines.
2. Alliance Building
If you are a small brand, you cannot win the game without the help of content allies. Building an allied force would not only indicate a strong brand community but would also help you amplify the reach of your content. Each social share by your ally would significantly affect your content’s performance on the web (especially if your ally targets a strong group of people whom you can become your followers in the future).
Here are some tips to build your own allied force:
- Create a list of mid-level bloggers whom you think are targeting the same type of audience as yours. Understanding how they write their content (length/form) or how they interact with their readers would give you a feel of what approach you’ll be using to penetrate to their community. A list of bloggers on a spreadsheet that also contains their contact details and/or some information about their blogs is a good starting point to alliance building.
Click here to see a sample list of bloggers…
- Outreach to them with the intent of giving them value four times of what you’ll be getting from them (link/share).
- Consistently engage with bloggers and provide valuable content on social platforms. Promote others’ content pieces on social. Show appreciation to someone who shares your content (whether or not he’s included in the spreadsheet).
- Include other bloggers’ content asset (article, slide presentation, video, etc..) on your own content piece. Always give attribution to the content creator by linking to the external source. Pitch the blogger and let him know that you mentioned him in one of your posts.
I mentioned both of you here @gfiorelli1 @PeterAttia --> http://t.co/0QuV3SKXKH thanks!
— Venchito Tampon Jr. (@venchito14) October 1, 2013
- Promote other bloggers’ content by creating a newsletter. Nick Eubanks is doing a great job in listing content pieces in his weekly newsletter (Nick’s Links). He is able to promote others’ content assets and build a solid following base (allies) as well.
So where’s the content promotion by building your allies? If you started to build relationship with the blogger, it would be easy for you to promote your content. Asking for a link/share to someone you’ve started to build relationship with would not be as difficult as to asking for a favor to a stranger. This would increase your email response rates every time you do your outreach.
3. Influencer Outreach
It’s difficult to reach out to influencers because they have their own agenda and they get tons of emails in their inbox daily. They do have their own spam filters to determine whether or not your email has the right get a reply. This makes it difficult to be on their radars (and get them following you on your circles).
Before you write personalized emails to your influencers, you need first to identify them (to lessen the difficulty of finding influencers who are not related to your niche). Who are they and why are they worth following to?
How to Find Industry Influencers?
Followerwonk
This is one of the effective methods to find influencers who are working in the same niche as yours and have a huge social following on Twitter based on social authority.
Type in the niche that you are targeting on the Followerwonk’s search bar and sort the results based on social authority. The reason you want to sort it by social authority is that you want to get a list of influencers that have a decent amount of Twitter followers and who get a lot of retweets in their recent tweets (this is how social authority is calculated).
Getting in touch with highly social influencers would help your content to get in front of a larger audience and obtain tweets and/or retweets over time.
GPlus Data
Type in your industry in the search bar of GPlusData and you will see the top 10 Google+ influencers (based on the number of followers and the engagement they’re doing with their circles.
Group Interviews
I’m sure that there’s at least one solid group interview in your industry. Find those group interviews by doing Google search and typing any of these search queries:
- “your industry” + share their most
- “your industry” + share their best
- “your industry” + group interview
- “your industry” + expert interview
Twitter Lists
You can also use this to find influencers in your niche. Just type this search query (inurl:/list site:Twitter.com + "your industry”) and you’ll be able to see great list of influencers.
Pages that rank higher on search results
Type a keyword on Google search. You will see tons of results (from page 1 up to the last page). Use the search settings and filter the results per page by 50 or 100 so you when search for a keyword, you’ll get plenty of results right on the first page.
Get all the needed information to reach out to the owners of those websites listed on the first page. Collect their contact information, country where they are living in (so you know the best time you can send them emails) and form/type of content they usually publish. (You can use the same spreadsheet I shared above, just rename the document title with “influencer outreach”).
When you do your outreach to influencers, you can apply any of the above tips on alliance building. The most important tip in the list is to give value to bloggers you want to get connection with.
Let’s look at what you can offer to people.
What value can you give to mid-level bloggers and/or influencers?
Create an audio version of a group interview
There are tons of group interviews you can see out there. Some of them are long form text-based content which is boring to read (especially if there are no quick links on it and you have to scroll down the page to read each answer). You can use this as your angle to pitch to bloggers who do group interviews. Tell them the reason why it’s important to have an audio version of the group interview (it would be easy for readers to just listen to every answer in the interview rather than read each of them).
In exchange for your service, you can ask for a link pointing to your latest content piece (which should be relevant to the topic of the group interview) or a description about your website or any of your offerings (product/service).
I’ve found this value on Pointblankseo’s list of creative link building. There’s an audio version of the group interview which you can download and listen to it in your most convenient time.
You can do the same for your outreach campaign. Create the audio version by yourself or hire a talented transcriber on Fiverr or Odesk.
Transcribe a video or audio
Offer this kind of help to bloggers who created content in a video or audio format. This angle would increase your response rates when you pitch them given that most of the bloggers don’t have much time to create a text version of their content asset.
You can also check out this guide on how to promote your brand using video content.
Create an infographic version of an existing content piece
Turning a content piece into different versions is a cost and time efficient strategy given that you don’t need to do a lot of research to find resources/data for the content (which would give you more time to do your outreach).
It’s important that you find an existing content asset that is already ranking for related industry terms/keywords that you targeting. The reason is that earning links/shares for your infographic would be easy given that you can pitch the linkers of the existing content piece and ask them if they can link/share to its infographic version.
One example is the infographic version of the 200 ranking factors of Google by Brian Dean.
You can find a high-performing content asset in your industry by getting on the radar of authority sites. Adding their blogs on your RSS feed (Feedly) would help you track pieces that are gaining natural links and are receiving positive feedbacks/comments from the community.
Offer to promote their service through your mailing list
If you have a weekly/newsletter or you are using a mail service provider, you can make this as an angle of your pitch. Ask your prospect site owner if he wants to promote his product/service through your newsletter/mailing list. Mention in your email template that you have a large number of email subscribers and promoting their offering(s) would give a boost to its promotion.
It’s important that you don’t ask immediately for a link/share to your content piece. This would only give them a reason to ignore your pitch. Wait for a few weeks to ask them for a favor.
Help Authorship Markup
If you’re working as an SEO professional or you know someone who is an expert in the field, you can offer to help bloggers implement authorship markups on their sites. This tip came from Jason Acidre’s post about alternative approaches to improve blogger outreach. You can also check that out after reading this post.
To obtain higher response rates for your outreach, you have to include in your pitch the importance of installing authorship markup on a site (increase in click through rates (CTRs), improve their site’s search rankings as Google is now giving favor to brand/site with installed authorship markups). By mentioning this in your pitch, it will surely catch their attention, seeing that there’s a value in it – enhancing their site’s performance.
To find blogs that haven’t installed authorship markups, simply do a Google search (type in “your industry” blogs or inurl:/blogs + “your industry”) and build a list on a spreadsheet.
Asking bloggers to become your affiliate marketers
David Sottimano wrote an awesome post explaining the perception of bloggers today towards pitches from SEOs. In his article, he surveyed less than 100 food bloggers and asks them the first question, “Do you make money for your blog”. Eighty-five percent of the respondents said yes to that question, which only means that there are several blogs that earn money through selling affiliate products, or advertisements (e. g. Google Adsense).
By asking a blogger to become your affiliate marketer, you give a chance for your product to get a review about it or be included in the resource page of the site. Jon Cooper wrote a product review for Buzzstream in one of his posts. It does not only describe the features of Buzzstream as an outreach tool for link builders but also make it as a useful resource for those who are looking for guides for blogger outreach.
You should include in your pitch the value that they’ll be getting from promoting your product. You can mention the commission rate that they can earn once a person buys the product using the referrals on the site (product review or inclusion in the “resource” or “useful links” page). To encourage your blogger to accept your offer, you can increase the usual commission rate an affiliate marketer earns from your product (e.g 3 % to 6 %).
The advantage of using this approach is that it is not a one-time promotion you commonly use as an angle for your blogger pitches (e.g. product review), which means that the blogger can continuously include your product in one of his content distribution efforts (e.g. guest post). This would bring your product into its longer promotion on targeted sites given that product reviews are sticky when they are included in a “tutorial” page/category or the product itself is embedded on an advertisement above or below the fold of the page.
Using the above list of approaches for your outreach can significantly affect the results of your content promotion campaign given that bloggers would not ignore benefits/values that you will offer to them.
4. Content Distribution
Consistently promote your content piece into your different content distribution channels would help your brand/site to become known to your target audience. Here are some content distribution channels where you can mention/promote your content piece:
Interviews
If you have built authority in your niche, you probably receive interview requests from bloggers, where you can take advantage of. Reference your content on the interview where it is appropriate (the topic of the interview is thematically relevant to your content piece).
Online Communities
Participate on high-traffic online communities such as forums and blogs where you can mention your content as a resource. Don’t spam every blog post on authority sties but add value to each conversation so you can get clicks going to your site from blogs where you contribute insights to.
Guest blogs
Never underestimate the power of guest blogging as one of your content distribution channels. By creating a high quality post on someone’s blog and including your best content pieces on it, you do not only get a link and traffic from the target site but may also increase your conversions (which would vary depending on your goals).
Tip: Use long tail keywords on your guest posts. The moment your post rank high on search results for a certain long tail phrase, the chances of being mentioned by other bloggers and brands on their sites/blogs are higher.
I wrote a guest post on Search Engine Journal few months ago about building a strong brand identity. This post is still ranking for the keyphrase “how to build a brand identity”. This also got some attention from brand owners particularly those who are searching for industry guides (how-tos) to use as external sources for their content.
Last month, the post was mentioned in one of the top (offline) newsletters in Minnesota, USA which brought brand exposure for my site.
This is only one of the opportunities that are possible to attain when you contribute high quality guest posts (articles where people can learn and get value from).
Social
Do you still remember the list of influencers on your spreadsheet? Use them to promote your content.
Below is an email template that you can use to promote your content to social influencers (make sure you offer an awesome content).
Hey [Site Owner],
[Personalized this part]
By the way, I published a group interview this week entitled, "The 38 Creative Ideas I've Ever Seen" - it's a compilation of creative content examples from famous content marketers including Rand Fishkin and Neil Patel.
Here's the link to the interview – [Url]
I know that your readers/followers would love to see this great content piece.
Please let me know your thoughts,
Kind regards,
Venchito
Boom!
Mark Traphagen shared one of my posts (creative content marketing) in his Google+ which exposed my brand to thousands of Google+ users (knowing that he has 60K+ followers!).
Online Newsletters
There are several niche-specific newsletters where you can contribute your content to. Contact the newsletter owner and give him a shot of your content piece (you can use the above approaches to give value to these newsletter owners).
Conclusion
Promoting your content is not as difficult as you think it is. You just have to connect with the right people and give them value more than what you can get from your content promotion.
Feel free to add your content promotion techniques below. Email me at venchitotampon [at] gmail [dot] com if you have any questions or suggestions for my future posts.
If you liked this post, kindly share it to your circles/networks and follow me on twitter @venchito14.