Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Automate Link Building (Group Interview)

Natural links are products of any online marketing efforts that can bring positive sentiments about a brand being endorsed in a marketing campaign.

The process to getting natural high quality backlinks may or may not involve automation, whether it is for the use of tools or to do an activity in link building.

When automating link building, it is important to really be careful with your actions. One single move can ruin your entire link building campaign. Here are a few insights from experts on why you need to be careful with automated link building and/or should stop doing it in a black hat way.

Don’t try to automate link building! If you can automate a link building tactic, people will eventually scale and abuse it, making the tactic (at best) less effective. For example, regular link requests, directory submissions and guest blogging have all been pretty much ruined by automation.

Also, if you don’t automate your tactics, you force yourself to use your creativity and only focus on the best targets. This makes it a lot harder for competitors to replicate your link building strategy.

Don’t get me wrong - there are many processes and actions that you can (and probably should) automate for yourself. We have developed and use several inhouse tools that make some parts of our link building activities easier. Evaluate which tactics work best for you and analyze if there are any processes that could be automated to save time, to help you become more efficient, or simply to make your job easier. But please don’t try to automate entire link building tactics.

 - Wiep Knol

Don’t automate link building.

I could talk about using BuzzStream or doing broken link building or image theft shaming outreach or inventive operator searches and they can all be effective. But my fear is that people jump to these things first and use them as the centerpiece of a strategy. That's a losing strategy.

The links you really want, the links you earn ... they aren't automated.

- AJ Kohn

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Now, let's head over to a good list of tips to automate link building (in the white hat way) coming from the prominent SEOs/link builders in the world.

I'd recommend dedicating a portion of budget to paid social ads for the topic or piece of content you're working on building links for, and targeting it at users that are bloggers or journalists. It's easier to do this on Twitter and LinkedIn than it is on Facebook, but you can also try using certain targeting tactics like the one described at the bottom of this Social Media Today infographic. Using clever ad copy like that example may get better responses than the typical email pitches that journalists get each day.

It's not fully automated, but it's a program that you can put a little bit of time into each week or month, and might be worthwhile in industries where typical email outreach is ineffective.

- Kane Jamison

When I think about automated link building, I immediately think about Penguin updates and unnatural links penalties.

Therefore, I'm going to answer a slightly different question.  Instead of helping you automate link building, I'm going to help you automate the discovery of link building opportunities.

I actually mentioned the two easiest ways to identify linking opportunities in my most actionable link building tip: broken link building and link reclamation.

Broken link building is a very simple process that involves identifying pages with broken links and contacting the webmasters for those pages to suggest alternative, live resources.  You can easily automate this process with tools such as Broken Link Index and Link Builder (or you can build your own).

Link Reclamation is the process of claiming links that you should already be receiving (e.g., unlinked brand mentions, broken links to your site, improperly attributed resources, etc.), and you can automate this process with a variety of different tools (e.g., Mention to monitor brand mentions, Screaming Frog  to identify broken links, Image Raider to perform reverse image searches, etc.).

Aside from these popular techniques, you can also discover link building opportunities by automatically searching for specific footprints or signatures that consistently appear in link building targets. Jacob King's Scrapebox guide gives step-by-step instructions for identifying these footprints with Scrapebox.  You can also find valuable footprints in these tips by Chris Dyson and Jon Cooper.

- Steve Webb

The most successful way I've automated link building has been to integrate sharing and linkable content or widgets within the product itself. Instead of trying to go out and use software or a tool to scale/automate my link building efforts I suggest that you build it within product so that your customers can link to you or share their experience through social media. For example when working with cafepress.com I suggested they create a widget that allowed customers to link back from their blog. We also incorporated the widget and share buttons within our emails when we sent the customers a receipt of their purchase and a shipping notification. Since Cafepress customers are very passionate and often times have blogs we saw thousands of links come in that were not only relevant but deep links as well.

- Sujan Patel

When it comes to "Automating link building" in a white hat sense. A good way to make the process simple is by building niche specific lists of relevant partners you have a good relationship with in specific niches and have dealt with before. This way you can build out the process and work on a long term basis with a website owner to build long term branding.

For example if you work in the travel sector and you have say 10 different clients who are all producing great content you can work with your partner websites to do high quality guest posts and feature articles. You really need to build contacts over a long period of time and develop a strong relationship with them on an ongoing basis.

Even if you do not have any contacts and you are starting out it is a smart idea to get out to blogging events and meet industry specific bloggers and build relationships. A great example of a conference/ Community can be seen below for “Parent Bloggers” a popular segment, this is type of event you can make maybe 20+ contacts with bloggers in a few hours. If you cannot make it to an event pick up the phone and make some contacts that way or follow bloggers on Twitter and build a real connection.

I think many SEO’s and online marketers take the “easy way out”. They find blogs and use blog networks and do not put in the “hard work” and build real world relationships.

Matt Cutts endorses “relationship building” by his recent quote here;

“There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future.” – Matt Cutts 2014

If you work to build ongoing relationships with a community it can be beneficial to your brand.

Overall building niche specific lists of contacts you can work with on an on-going basis is my piece of Advice to somewhat “automate” the process, but my biggest saying is “focus on quality not quantity”.

- James Norquay

Unfortunately, I'm not really a white hat.. I prefer to call myself "grey" so I really wasn't too sure how to approach this when Venchito told me to automate link building, in terms of white hat. Then I realized I already do it on a number of my own sites that I prefer to have a "clean" link profile (compared to some of my darker arts based sites).

There's 2 sites that I'd specifically suggest to generate backlinks, almost automatically.

Method 1)

The first is Tumblr, people can share your post and if it has a link within said post, the user that shared it will also be building a link from their Tumblr profile/micro-site which is on a different sub-domain to your own Tumblr page. Therefore building multiple links from a ton of different subdomains on Tumblr, often which are niche relevant to your strategy.

Jay did an epic video tutorial on this here.

Method 2)

The other is Reddit, it's pretty simple to share content on Reddit and if it gets popular within the community it'll easily be picked up by 100s of other users and sites.

The best guide I've ever seen on using Reddit was on Social Media Examiner. It goes into detail about how you can find your audience, make content for that specific "subreddit" community and get a ton of traffic, as well as links! - Reddit links are all dofollow.

- Charles Floate

My type of automation is not responsible for actual link creation, but instead I use tools to surface up interesting opportunities. Previously I used 80legs to do the job, but eventually had a tool developed which crawls the web and looks for broken links on random websites. All broken links are then classified and presented in a report. This allows me to find interesting opportunities. If I see a high quality page linking to a broken resource I often re-create that type of content on my site and advise the linking site to correct a dead link by pointing to my resource. This is obviously done when it makes sense contextually and it's meaningful to my site to have that type of content in the first place.

- Dan Petrovic

I love doing and publishing research as a scalable link building tactic. When you are creating data that doesn't exist, or replaces existing outdated information, you will get links from people talking about what you've done. A really good example of this is AYTM Market Research - they publish research pertaining to current events on a daily basis on their blog. These posts are picked up and referenced by news sites and other blogs.

Of course for this to work, people have to find your content. This means you'll either need a lot of people regularly coming to your blog (direct visits), a big social following that you can promote your resource to, or you'll have to initially promote via outreach and paid social ads. Once your resource gains some traction and does well in the SERPs, this process will fuel itself as people searching for data will continue to cite you.

- Geoff Kenyon

The most effective way to automate or scale link building is to make a piece of content that a niche target audience (that is prominent and active online and has mainstream appeal) will react to and feel the need to share. By pitching the piece to a large mainstream publication that the niche segment reads, it's possible to get mainstream press coverage and niche press coverage at the same time. Movoto is a great example of this, their Harry Potter/Hogwarts Property Estimate infographic  It's has earned links from over 140 domains including big authoritative news sites like Daily Mail, Fox News and Daily Finance – and it also scored links from niche harry potter/magic/science fiction fan sites like Nerdophiles, Toy To The World and Potter Talk.

- John Henry Scherck

The best way to automate your link building is through making sure that you understand which parts of the link building process can be automated. It’s a habit within our industry that we want to scale and automate as many processes as possible, but the reality is that to get the best links, you need to have a personal element in there somewhere.

Automating your prospecting through tools like the Link Prospector tool from Citation Labs or brand monitoring through Mention.net/Fresh Web Explorer will help with this. Also, a lot of your data collection can be automated through some clever XPath tricks which can then filter into your wider outreach campaign.

The key is to avoid over-automation because, inevitably, quality will drop.

- Matthew Barby

The days of automated link building should be dead now. Google has shown that with the introduction of Penguin, Panda and most recently, Hummingbird, Google has openly showed their cards that any unnatural link building will be penalised and penalised heavily.

What Google is trying to achieve is that websites that are engaging and relevant to visitors will be ranked higher rather than those websites that are openly trying to bend the rules and play the system will be penalised - sooner rather than later.

Don't mess about with automated link building, or even manual link building - make your website better, make both people and search engines want to visit your website and create content that people will want to link to. It's not an easy way, but it's the right way.

- Paul Thornton

I don't particularly like the term "white hat" or differentiating things between white hat / black hat / pharrell's hat / whatever hat,  but I do understand the context of how it's being used in this example so I'll let it slide :). When I hear "automate" I think of something that should be working when you're not. And when I hear "white hat" I'm assuming 'above the board' strategies. With that, my answer would be something that sounds simple, but is pretty excruciating and takes hard work. Build an audience & relationships. Work hard to build an audience and those relationships. Even though that's a lot of up front and consistent work, it pays off in the long run so you can become more" automated" in the sense that you're generating links when you're not necessarily trying.

Audience: Because that audience will be the ones that gives legs to your content. You can't "automate" anything if you're throwing your work into an empty room. You should always be sharing what you create on your social networks, email lists, etc, and over time, as your audience builds, they'll be your wind that carries your sailboat. They're the ones who may automatically start including you in their weekly roundups or email newsletters because you provide useful content and planting your seeds with their audience. This can generate natural links over time.

Relationships: As you work with publishers, you should be providing something of value [unique data, research, etc] so that they're always looking to see if you're published something useful that could support a piece they're putting out, or looking to see if you could collaborate on something interesting with them. In this instance, when you nurture relationships, you're working with both your and their audience/distribution list, which expands your reach exponentially and also generates natural links for the long-run.

Of course, there are other strategies out there, but this is one that is general enough where it can apply to the majority.

- Selena Narayanasamy

One of the most easy and reliable ways to automate link building in a white hat way is to turn citations into links. You can do this by setting up a Google Alert for your business name or trademarks, then whenever you generate press mentions, just check the stories to see if the mention included a link to your site or not. If not, you have an opportunity to turn your citation into a link by sending a thank you note to whoever mentioned your business, then very gently asking if they’d consider adding a link to where your company’s name is mentioned. Don’t press the issue too hard though, since you ought to be thankful for the fact that they mentioned you at all. However, I’ve noticed that this link outreach tactic works nearly 50% of the time which is a very high success rate for link building pitches. The reason is because the author probably thought highly of your company in the first place, which is why they bothered mentioning you in the first place.

- Larry Kim

"Just keep on creating/doing things that'll be really hard or would take so much time for your competitors to replicate. I believe that's the best way to become a genuine link magnet - and to semi-automate your link building efforts.

Start with your own products/solutions/culture/services, to the content you produce, and down to the relationships that you build within your space. Building on a strong brand presence through these aspects of your business are the ones that can really result to a scalable link building process.

I've written a post about automating link building a couple of years ago, perhaps that post can explain my approach further."

- Jason Acidre

My favorite way to "automate" link building really has to do with measuring commitment. If it's passive, it will scale with little effort, obviously. "Things worth embedding" fit this mark quite well, but infographics are played out. We've tried something new at Help Scout by creating resources like the Customer Service Quotes Database, which allows people to search a large collection of quotes about support, and then embed the quotes on their website. It's become an "automated" source of linkbuilding simply because it takes up none of my time, and isn't spammy or pushy because people embed by choice.

- Gregory Ciotti

I’d say automating link building in a white hat way basically means getting links without any effort. If you are the best resource in your niche, you have a quite constant stream of natural incoming links, so the best tip to automate link building would be try to be the best one, but I bet this will not satisfy who’s looking for tactics. Anyway I’ve found that lists of “best of” work nicely: compile a list of the “best” blogs in your niche and promote it. Other bloggers will like to be included in it and you’ll ask them to publish a post (with a link) to cite the inclusion. Other new bloggers will read those posts, and contact you, and so on. Once you’ve reached an initial critical mass, it will continue by itself.

- Giuseppe Pastore

I think we’re entering into a period where anything automatic/scalable is in a gray zone, if not straight-up “black-hat” in the Google spam team’s eyes. When marketers find something effective that’s scalable, Google starts issuing warnings and doing algo updates. This is why Larry Kim and I think links are bound to lose value in the next five years.

That said, link building is still totally viable for now. One of the best semi-automatic ways to build links is to include plenty of internal links in your own content, blog posts in particular – then, when those posts get syndicated, scraped, quoted, etc., the links are often preserved.

- Elisa Gabbert

I don't know many quality link building strategies that are totally automatic but there are definitely ways to scale strategies. One of my favorite scalable strategies is getting links from websites who are using my images without linking.

Steps to getting links from images:

1. Drop your images into Image Raider, which will check and alert you when people are using your images.

2. Find if they are not linking to you as the source ( I use the link analysis chrome extension ).

3. Use a canned response to request that these websites link to you.

Types of images to monitor for link opportunities:

• infographics
• logos (old and new)
• badges
• profile pictures

- Benjamin Beck

SEO industry has changed heavily over the past few years and Google has started to target and crack down much of the automated link building methods. There are quite less methods that are actually work well and that will ensure that you stand the right side of Google.

The best way to think about automated link building strategies is to think more about semi-automated link building. That's where you might look for a service, or a solution that helps to do what someone might actually do manually or you actually pay someone to do manually but it is still automated for you because you don't need to do it. Some examples of automated link building would include submission through to some high-end directories, manual submission to a service like WhiteSpark.

Another would be taking video and chopping it up into pieces, uploading that into Youtube, transcribing the video and then posting the video and transcription on your website and using press releases and social media to announce the new content. That can be an automated process with a service like Melbourne SEO Services. Using all of these link building methods shows you an automated way for link buliding for you. However, it is still done manually, maintaining a high quality standard, remaining white hat and giving you long lasting results with Google.

- David Jenyns

There are actually multiple ways you can use to make your website a magnet that receive relevant and quality links automatically and on regular basis but most of them are difficult or take years to become one.

There is one way that I use for few of my clients and receives and good amount of natural links on regular basis without much efforts. The idea is to own all the long tail informative key phrases.

How to do that?

The idea is to use SEM Rush and collect all the long tail informative keywords at one place, export the list in an excel sheet and try to create content against those key phrases.

Once the content pieces are live work on those pieces and make them rank against those key phrases (this will be easy as most long tail informative keywords contain less or no competition at all).

How will this Automate Link Building?

The keywords you are trying to rank are mostly informational and not commercial so most people who will search for the key phrases will be bloggers or people who are looking for some information. Usually when content creators and bloggers find the information they are looking for they tend to link the same resource.

If you will be ranking for good amount of long tail informational keywords, you probably will see links pointing back to your website on regular basis.

- Moosa Hemani

Link building automation is very risky and potentially spammy in case you do it wrong. Never automate the whole process of building links but just aspects of it. There are tools that assist you with finding broken links for example. Monitor Backlinks is one of them. SEOcrawler is another one.

I have written a post about that: http://seo2.0.onreact.com/easy-broken-link-outreach-using-the-free-seo-crawler

They will notify or show you once they discover a broken link on a site you monitored so that you can approach the webmaster to replace the link with one leading to your site. You can also create an outreach message template and reuse it even automatically just by replacing the name, URL, website, issue at stake and so on.

Automation in the technical sense is just a workaround in my opinion.

What you really need is a plan where you get links automatically without creating them by a software or something like that. You should aim at a way of generating links by itself naturally. Giving content away under a Creative Commons license that requires an attribution is such a method. This works great for images of course.

Another great way to get links "automatically" is to mirror a high traffic site (with the consent of the owner of course). I have done that several years ago for a popular Flash animated movie and never touched the site ever since. It earned more links over the years than my blog I've spend countless hours on.

- Tad Chef

I’m personally not a huge fan of automating link building, because the more automated it gets, the less personal it gets. However, when doing things at a large scale, it’s near impossible to avoid. That being said, I always encourage people to split test their messaging, subject lines, and email length. By improving the response rate of your emails, you can spend less time on automating; keeping your responses more natural and appealing to higher quality sites.

Beyond that, I think the most important thing is prospecting efficiently. One tool I’ve been impressed by recently is Group High. This allows you to sort bloggers by their following in specific social networks, making it easy to use for various industries. It’s a little pricey, but totally worth it if outreach is a big part of your business.

- Peter Attia

"Use a service like Mention.net to automatically monitor and track mentions of your brand or topics that you write about on your site. Then use email outreach for link reclamation (Ross Hudgens did an awesome White Board Friday on that) or to promote content that you've written on that topic and want to share.

It's not super-automated, but it's as automated as white hat gets :-)"

- Brian Dean

Create a brilliant piece of content and make people aware of it through digital PR and social; amplification to reach as many eyeballs as possible. If that content resonates, as it should, with your audience they WILL link to it!

- Simon Penson

This is a tricky question to answer because link building, good link building that is, shouldn't be automated. But I suppose that the most automation I've used are tools like Citation Labs Link Prospector or Buzzfeed, that are tools that automate alot of the process. Outside of that, I automate local citation building by using vendors like Citation Labs and Yext Power Listings. So basically automation occurs for me via usage of tools to automate parts of the link building process, or via using vendors to execute certain specific link building activities.

- Miguel Salcido

My best tip to automate link building is to leverage mail merge for initial outreach. Here is a great article and video on how to do this through gmail, which I often share with others.

Image Credit 1

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Price Your Link Building Services

The demand for link building services had grown for the past several years given that companies still believe that links are still a huge factor in search rankings.

Link building firms are now looking for ways to offer a service that can grab the attention of their target clients.

And one way to attract clients is to lower their link building prices.

Lowering your prices so as to win over your competitors will help you win the competition but you will lose money in the end. Your proposal will be accepted by your prospect client but when you start working on the link building campaign, your services will result to loss instead of profit since your total costs will be higher than your sales.

Now, the question is, how can you set a price for your link building services in a way that you can attract more clients to your business and at the same time, earn your desired profit?

Before going through some basic formulas in determining the right selling price for your link building services, let’s first discuss some factors that can affect your pricing decisions:

• Total costs (both variable and fixed costs)
• Skills
• Capacities
• Work experience

Total Costs

Total costs are the sum of variable and fixed costs.

Variable Costs

Variable costs are costs that changes, in total, directly proportional to the changes in the level of activity (or cost driver). If an activity increased by 20%, total variable cost increases by 20% also, and vice versa.

For link building companies, one of their variable costs would be labor costs. Labor costs are the salaries of their team members (or employees). They may be paying their staff in an hourly or monthly basis. It depends on the company size, sales and profit  every month.

Total labor costs can be determined by multiplying the hours spent by all of the employees to the labor rate (rate per hour).

For instance, you have 4 team members working with you and each of them has the rate of $10 per hour. If all of your team members are working full time, then they would consume 160 hours of monthly work each (40 hours every week).

By using this formula (labor rate X labor hours = total labor costs), you’ll be able to compute for the total labor costs:

If you don’t have any variable costs aside from labor costs, then your total labor costs are your total variable costs.

Fixed Costs

Fixed costs are costs that remain unchanged, in total, as the level of activity (or cost driver) varies within the relevant range. If activity increases or decreases by 20%, total fixed costs remains the same.

For link building firms, here are their fixed costs (but are not limited to the items below):

Overhead costs (for SEO tools)

SEO products/tools have their own pricing tables that list down monthly costs for their customers.

If you are providing link building services, then you might be using the following paid SEO tools:

• Ahrefs or OSE (link prospecting, backlink profile reporting, link audit)
• Buzzstream (PR and linker outreach)
• Cognitive SEO (link prospecting, advanced link analysis)

To compute for the total fixed overhead costs for SEO tools, then you need only to sum up all the monthly costs incurred for using SEO tools.

For instance, you have the following monthly fixed costs:

• $79 – Ahrefs’ monthly cost for Professional plan.
• $99 – Buzzstream’s monthly cost for Plus plan.
• $99 – Cognitive SEO’s monthly cost for Professional plan.

By simply adding all the monthly costs above, you will get a total monthly fixed cost of $277.

Utility costs

If you own a company and you’re doing in-house work with your team members, then perhaps, you are renting an office space for your team. And aside from renting an office space which is an expense for your business, you also incur electricity, water and internet costs every month.

By adding all the above costs, you can compute for the actual monthly utility costs.

Total Fixed Costs

To compute for the total fixed costs, simply add the fixed overhead costs (for your SEO tools) and utility costs.

If you have a total utility cost of $700 and total overhead cost (for SEO tools) of $300, then you will have $1000 as your monthly fixed costs.

Total Costs

Add your variable and fixed costs to compute for the total costs.

Now the question is, “How do you compute for the selling price of your link building services?

There are two ways to price your link building services: hourly basis or link building packages.

Let’s first discuss the per hour link building service.

Hourly Link Building Service

In a per hour type of link building service, you need to compute for the selling price per hour.

To compute for your selling price, you will need the data you gathered earlier (total fixed costs and total variable costs/variable cost per unit).

Then by using the formula below, you can now compute for the selling price.

Other items to be considered:

Contribution margin per unit – is the difference between your selling price per hour and variable cost per hour. If you have a selling price of $25/hour and a variable cost of $10 per hour, then you have a contribution margin per unit/hour of $15.

Desired sales in units – this will be the number of hours you need to complete a certain link building task for your client. Let’s say you need 25 hours to complete a monthly link building campaign for one client and you have 4 clients, then you will get 100 as your total number of hours.

For instance, you have the following items to compute for your selling price:

• Fixed costs - $700
• Variable cost per hour - $10 per hour ($6400 / 640 hours) 640 hours is the total number of working hours of all your four employees.
• Desired profit per month - $2000
• Desired sales in units/hours – 200 hours

Using the formula above, you can compute for the selling price:

This is now the selling price that you will offer to your potential clients.

Link Building Packages

The old packages for link building service are ineffective in this age of internet marketing since there are a lot of things that need to be considered such as the quality of links being acquired for a certain website and the effects of each link built for a particular site.

Here is a bad example of an old link building package:

This type of link building doesn’t add real value to a certain business given that the links are built for the sole purpose of ranking a certain keyword on search results. It can achieve short term goals but can be the cause for future penalty issues (because of the acquired unnatural links).

Now let me discuss one way to price your link building packages.

To compute for the selling price per link building package, you need the formula you used earlier for hourly link building service.

For instance, you have the same items you gathered earlier:

• Fixed costs - $700
• Variable cost per hour - $10 per hour
• Desired profit per month - $2000
• Desired sales in units/hours – 200 hours

By using the same formula, you will get $17 as your selling price per hour.

Multiply $17 by your desired sales in units (which is 200 hours) to get the sales of $3400. Then divide the product by the number of packages that you can offer for a 200 hour work.

Number of packages will depend on the number of hours you spend for one link building campaign. Let’s say you can do broken link building for one client and it will consume 25 hours to complete all the activities in that particular link building technique (from link prospecting to outreach). If you have a desired sales in hours of 100 hours, you can offer four packages (100 divided by 25).

Going back to my earlier example, if you have $3400 sales and you have 200 available hours of work every month, then you can compute for the selling price: $425 per link building package (see the computation below).

How to Increase Your Profit as a Link Building Service Provider

Lower your fixed costs

Instead of using several SEO tools to perform your link building activities from link prospecting to actual link acquisition, why not think of free tools that can offer the same features as other premium SEO tools do. For instance, you can use Gmail, Boomerang and spreadsheets instead of premium outreach management tools to track your link targets’ responses and conversations. By doing this, you can lower your fixed costs and thus, earn a higher profit.

Another way to lower your fixed costs is to contribute articles to product companies in exchange for free access to premium SEO tools. Using this technique, you can reduce your fixed costs by $200 or more every month. You are almost free of charge to all of your SEO tools when you managed to provide regular guest articles on SEO product websites.

Train your team to improve their efficiency in work

To accommodate more clients for your company, you need to train your team members. Training will help your team to become more efficient in their work.

For instance, they can prospect for 100 high quality link targets within the span of 60 minutes. This can happen actually if you can provide them tips to qualify a link target quickly.

Adding new members to your team doesn’t guarantee an increase in your profit as a business owner. Even if you have 25 members in your team but they are not well trained and efficient, then your team can only handle 5-10 clients. This will result to a lower profit since your labor costs will be higher than your sales.

Show the exact (or estimated) link building prices in your service pages.

To push your clients down through the marketing funnel, make sure that you show your link building prices in your landing pages (either in an hourly rate or in a package rate basis). Stating the prices in your service pages (landing pages) will let your prospect clients aware of the value of your service.

It would be easy for you to track clients who’re really interested for high quality link building services and are able to pay a considerable price for the quality of work done. It is a waste of time talking to someone who demand many working hours but are not willing to pay the right price.

A service page that lists down link building prices can discourage those low-paying potential clients.

Determine which marketing channel gives you the highest conversion rate

A regular audit of your Google Analytics to identify the marketing channel that highly converts your visitors to clients is a good way to help you get the most out of your marketing efforts for your services. Once you tracked the highest converting channel, you can now exert more effort in getting more brand visibility for that specific channel.

If you want to get more link building tips, subscribe to this blog (use the optin form below) and follow me on @venchito and Google+. 

by Venchito Tampon Jr

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:

• How to Build and Run an SEO Company
• 7 Outsourcing Fundamentals to Master

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!

by Venchito Tampon Jr

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.

by Venchito Tampon Jr