Venchito Tampon Jr

101 Actionable Link Building Tips

If you are tired of reading other SEO content without any actionable link building tips, then this post is for you.

I’m fairly honest, these 101 actionable link building tips guide is not complete

The good news:

This post will always keep updated.

So if you want to increase your domain authority, get more exposure and increase your rankings, check out this new link building guide:

 

[toc]

1. Become a Content Contributor for Authority Websites

The problem with SEO community:

We are debating on a not-so-controversial topic: quality vs quantity in link building.

In essence, both of them are important.

But could that be possible?

While aiming to build high-quality backlinks, you are also targeting a higher amount of it.

Yes.

This is possible with becoming a regular columnist on authority sites.

Look at how Buffer and Sujan Patel Voila Nobert co-founder, gained from this content marketing strategy.

How can you start becoming a regular content contributor for top news-sites and blogs?

Watch this video below:

2. Get EDU Backlinks Using Scholarships

Backlinks from educational sites are high-authority type of links you won’t just get with simple outreach.

But let me tell you this:

There’s one way to acquire those powerful types of links.

Through scholarship link building.

Check out the following pages for higher education:

These are examples of edu backlinks you can get from creating a scholarship page targeted to a specific audience.

Start this technique with knowing who your market audience is.

For example, your website is in digital marketing industry, your audience would be marketing, entrepreneurship and advertising students.

Then go create your scholarship page and include the following information:

• Your applicants details (who?)
• Application process (how?)
• Where they can apply (how?) – through your website
• Deadline of application
• Review process of application
• Value of your scholarship

Once you’re done with that, find existing scholarship pages that list down relevant scholarship content - start with this Google search query, site:.edu inurl:scholarship “industry” to find them.

Populate your list by looking at other scholarship pages linking to a similar scholarship of yours. Semi-automate this by using Ahrefs.

3. Curate Industry Scholarships

It’s fairly easy to say, create a scholarship page and build links.

But if your main hindrance on how to get backlinks to your site is your existing resources, it would be a bit harder on your part.

Why not create a list of available scholarships in your industry?

Take a look at this example:

It took tens of hours to create a page without spending a penny.

Time and effort is what it takes.

What to do next:

Reach out to webmasters you’ve included your curated scholarship page, you’ll be surprised they are willing to add a link from their sites.

Next:

Reach out to .edu sites and ask if they can include your curated content in their existing scholarship page.

Don’t worry about getting .edu links now:

Start implementing the strategy above.

4. Get Links from Link Roundups

You start to worry that:

You can’t acquire links at the end of the week and just let your competitors outrank you in search.

What if I tell you that there’s an easy way to earn links simply by doing this untapped link building strategy

It’s called, link roundups.

Link roundups are regular posts published by bloggers to curate the best resources of any content format in their industry.

This link roundup from a fashion store.

Finding this type of content is very easy.

Type in any of the following keyphrases plus your content’s target keyword or topic:

• Blog hops
• Link ups

Make a list of these bloggers who regularly do roundups.

Get their contact emails and proceed to outreach.

To increase your chances of getting links using this approach, it is best to start identifying the specific day they published the article.

If they post on Thursday, schedule your outreach emails one or two days before – i.e. Tuesday.

It won’t make sense for them to add your link once they have finally decided what resources to add to their link round-ups.

The next time you publish your content, take a look at available industry link roundups and see if you can build links from them.

5. Co-author a Content Piece

A single content creator for one content asset is good.

But co-authorship is much better.

You can try reaching out to content partners who’d be interested to distribute your content (which most of the information is done by you) to their own blog and to blogs they’ve connected with.

It’s a win-win situation:

They get links from other blogs without spending much time in content writing.

You get links from blogs you even didn’t do outreach at all.

6. Publish Data-driven Content

Industry publishers, especially those in top-notch blogs, prefer to link to content pieces that have information from credible sources.

If you have collected data either from internal resources or from external (but only from credible sources just like this one from Backlinko), then don’t hesitate to publish it.

7. Contribute to Crowdsourced Content

It’s sad to see people being frustrated with links they’ve built in a month, when you know that they have the capacity to do so, especially if they have an authority built in place.

One type of link you can actually leverage on a consistent basis are crowdsourced content links

If people know about you on the web, they’ll start to send emails to you and ask simple questions.

I’m a fan of this link earning technique because you don’t spend too much time to get a single link.

Imagine:

If you can acquire at least four backlinks every month by spending only 20 minutes for this approach, then that’s a big return of investment not everyone can achieve.

8. Create Free Tools

Tools are everywhere.

And if you can build a simple tool that helps certain group of people with their needs, then they’d likely return the favor in the form of links.

Bryan Harris from Videofruit had this awesome email list building tool that helps you to set goals and motivate to reach them in a specific time period.

If that helps me with the task and I have a blog, wouldn’t I be kind enough to link to his page?

After all, links main core principle is providing value to others.

9. Produce a Co-Marketed Visual Content

Believe me or not, without content promotion, most content assets will fail (source).

However, you can take most of the load off yourself when sharing your content to others.

Look for websites who’d published a visual content of any form (static, interactive, etc..) and get them as your distribution partners.

FilmSavvy makes it easy for other relevant sites to publish their content by including other sites’ logos in their visual content.

10. Find Link Opportunities on Twitter

Wouldn’t it be great if Twitter isn’t just used for social sharing?

While many blogger still don’t know, Twitter can also be a link prospecting tool.

If you are finding niche-specific bloggers to reach out to and build relationships with, try a Twitter search for “INDUSTRY” “bloggers”.

You’ll find another set of bloggers that aren’t included in your link prospecting sheet.

It gets better.

Because you won’t only get links from them, they will even share your content as well to their existing followers – which amplifies your content to acquire more links.

11. Build More Contextual Links

Those higher links up in the HTML code of a page seem to pass more ranking ability to those lower down (source from Moz).

In a nutshell:

You can say contextual links from content above the fold is more valuable than blog comment links.

When you strategize your next link building campaign, try to leverage tactics that could give you contextual links from qualified domains.

12. Follow up Out-of-office Email Responses

Have you ever received an out-of-office email from a person you pitched to?

What did you do with it?

Say yes if you deleted it right away and moved on to another list.

Don’t regret if I say you that you take too much time to research for that domain and just wasted those minutes of research simply by not taking further action.

The next time you receive an email just like that,identify his date of return by reading his automated email.

Schedule an email message one day from the time he returns so your email won’t just be part of bunch of emails he’ll receive on the date of return.

13. Get Interviewed on Podcasts

Authority makes it easy to acquire links.

But what if you are still starting out in the industry?

No subscribers. No followers.

One way to increase your following and links in general is to get interviewed on podcasts.

Start with producing top-notch content on your blog – this will serve as your authority and social proof.

Then find reputable sites with regular podcasts in place.

Do Google searches for industry “podcasts” to get a bunch of them.

Once done, reach out to those mid-authority blogs then scale it up to higher level when you had a few podcasts interviews made already.

14. Give Student Discounts

If you own an eCommerce site, you can leverage your existing offers to acquire links from highly-valued edu websites.

One offer you can make is a discount code for students in colleges and universities.

If you had this type of content, then maximize it for link acquisition.

Keep reading.

Start your link search with “keyword” “alumni discount” inurl:.edu.

You can replace key phrases with “student discount” OR “sponsors” page to find more link opportunities.

Make a list of them and use your discount code as your value proposition in outreach.

Here’s what the paragraph with a link looks like:

15. Offer Member Discounts

Discount offers are an untapped value most eCommerce sites aren’t using for their link building campaign.

If this is something resource curators are looking to add to their pages, it is definitely a goldmine to consider for links today.

Take a look at this example:

It is a member discount page hosted in an organizational site.

If there are hundreds of member discount pages just like that, then you’re missing out those high caliber backlink opportunities.

To find them:

Do Google searches for site:.org “member discount” “keyword”. You can replace search queries with “member discount list”, “member discount benefits” or “member discount program” to expand your link lists.

Then list them down in a sheet and prepare to do some outreach.

Trust me it is not too difficult to acquire links from those types of pages.

16. Provide Employee Discounts

We had students and member discounts as eCommerce link building tactics, shared above.

But there’s one thing still missing:

Employee discounts.

They are pretty much the same with other discounts. It’s just that they are only offered to employees of companies (self-explanatory).

Look for them using Google searches like “keyword” “employee discount”. Replace employee discounts with “employee discount program” and “employee discount list” to add more sites to your backlink list.

If this value is something that you offer as an eCommerce store, make this part of your link building plan.

17. Do Outreach to Bloggers with Recently Published Content

Knowing if bloggers had the capacity and availability to update his current page can make or break your chances of acquiring a link.

One type of these bloggers are those who recently published their posts related to yours.

They are more receptive to pitches particularly to link request emails given that they are still on the mode of adding more references and resources for their recent content.

How to find them?

Do a quick search for your target keyword/topic in Google.

Filter the results by all published date to only get pages that are indexed by Google within that time period.

Take note that Google will only provide indexed pages, so if bloggers didn’t allow Google to index their recent content pieces, it won’t appear in search results.

Imagine:

If you can find at least five bloggers every week who just published a similar post, and you got 15% conversion rate using this approach, you can acquire 3 additional links every month for every single piece.

If you need help with your campaign, you can check out our blogger outreach services.

 

18. Forward Your Email to the Right Person

There are different responses you can receive from your pitches:

One may be a failed message, automated reply of returning back from a vacation or a direct email saying you need to forward this to the right person.

When you receive this reply, forward your email to the right person, with a subject line: forward to [topic].

This tells your contact person that your email has been sent for that reason and not just another pitch they receive on a regular basis.

19. Participate in Offline Events

If you get invited to speak at conferences, seminars or any other offline events, take advantage of mentions acquired from speaking pages.

Mostly these mentions would be accompanied with links, but if not, ask the organizers if they could link to your own branded profile page - offer it as a page to link to.

If you want to start leveraging this branding technique, you can create profile pages in top community sites like Inbound.org and participate well to be noticed.

20. Do Reverse Guest Posting

Guest blogging is still an effective link building tactic for many bloggers, marketers and business owners today.

But there’s something that we missed with this SEO technique:

It is not just a one-way process.

You can actually do reverse guest posting on your blog and still acquire links.

Revere guest posting, as it defines itself, is inviting other bloggers in your industry to contribute a content for your blog.

There are three types of links you’ll get using this approach:

First, links from the guest blogger’s own sites referencing their work on your blog.

Second, links from the contributor’s network of bloggers.

Third, links from your own network referencing a top-notch content contributed by the guest blogger.

All of these three are very useful in helping your site to build its authority and branding in your niche.

21. Schedule Outreach Emails

Most pitches that I got from bloggers came in either early morning or late afternoon – when I mostly available to respond to emails.

If you can time your emails just like that, you’ll get more responses that the usual, and potentially convert them into links.

Simple, isn’t it?

22. Transcribe Content to Other Formats

Besides visual content, there are also other ways you can take advantage of non-text content, i.e. audio and videos.

What to do?

Look for videos that can be transcribed into text.

You can go directly to Youtube or do a search for a specific topic.

Check the website hosting the video if they had transcribed it already, as it won’t make sense to make a duplicate copy.

Upload your video to Speechpad (paid tool for video transcription). It would normally take 24 to 48 hours, choose whatever works for your schedule and budget.

Once you have the transcribed content, check the article if it could be used as a guest post, i.e. running it through CopyScape if it is a duplicate of others.

A simple editing of the article – adding bullet points will do to make it a good content that can distributed to a particular blog.

23. Update Other People's Outdated Content

Learning from others is one factor that makes some content to be the most successful resource on the web.

Think about it:

If others’ content had acquired good results in terms of links and social shares, but lack in something like information, do you think you’d have a chance to achieve the same success?

Yes and no.

Updating other people’s content isn’t a guaranteed success for content-based link acquisition.

But:

If you will apply the following steps below, you are on your way to the right track:

Use outdated content finder to find old pages that need more updated and in-depth information.

Below are instructions on how you can use it properly.

Check each webpage in results and look at their numbers of referring domains (use Ahrefs Bulk Checker for this activity).

Grab content pieces with ~100 unique linking websites from your list.

Determine which of them are feasible to invest by asking yourself questions: a.) can you beat the content with more information (i.e. 100 tips > 38) b.) can you make information much better (i.e. more references/data/resources) c.) can you outrank them with better design? – are you willing to invest in the content to make it more appealing to readers?

If these questions have been answered, proceed to creating the content.

Finally, reach out to those linkers of outdated content and share your better content to them.

24. Find Blog Opportunities Using Reverse Image Search

Let’s face it:

Guest blogging is saturated.

If your only link prospecting method is following footprints of guest post by, write for us, then sooner or later, you’ll be running out of backlink prospects.

What other ways to prospect for guest blogs?

Use Reverse Image Search to find blogs that published content of any form on a similar topic.

Given that they have posted content assets from other bloggers, they’d also be receptive to pitches for guest blogging.

25. Use Linkclump to Ease Tab Opening

Productivity is very important in link prospecting, especially if you are targeting hundreds of backlink targets every week.

You have to maximize every minute of your time.

Raise your right hand if you are that person struggling with opening multiple tabs every time?

What most of you do when opening tabs is to right click on each links and click open in new tab.

But what if:

You have long list of domains to qualify, let’s say 300 or 400. Doing the normal tab opening takes too much time.

LinkClump solves that problem.

With this tool, you are able to semi-automate link opening with a simple right click plus drag combination.

This saves a lot of your time.

26. Build Testimonial Links

Have you ever seen a page with three or more testimonials from customers, clients and influencers?

They are not just good for conversions, they are also a great channel for link acquisition.

Visit Google and search for “related keyword” “testimonials” site:.org  to find them.

There might be some clutters in search results, so be sure to pick only pages that are related to your industry.

27. Use Stylist for Link Prospecting

Are there times that you have visited the same link prospect twice?

Several times, isn’t it?

Now you can avoid that to save you wasted time in link prospecting.

Install Stylist in your Chrome browser and insert this code in the settings.

Visited pages will be highlighted with your preferred color.

If you find this tip great, proceed to the next link prospecting strategy:

28. Insert Internal Links to Guest Posts

Have you submitted a guest post but found out later that it’s been rejected by the publisher?

You know that your content is of high-quality. So what could be the reason?

First, you didn’t pass the guest blogging guidelines.

Second, you didn’t even include an internal link to the publishers’ past content.

The next time you submit a guest post, make sure to include at least two internal links to the guest blog’s posts. This increases your chances of landing a placement for your guest content.

29. Do Broken Link Replacements

If you are not familiar with broken link building, it is simply a process of telling the webmaster of a certain site that there’s a broken link found in one of his pages, and suggesting that the content on your blog is a good replacement for their broken resource.

What makes the big difference between a link builder making 2 to 5% conversion rate from someone who only had 1% or less than success rate – both are using broken link building as their link building approach?

Value

The best way of doing broken link building is not just providing the webmaster with a list of broken resources, but make sure to give them replacements for those defunct links.

Don’t just give them your resource as a replacement; this should be your last value.

See the outreach email below. This was my response to the webmaster asking me what links I’ve found on their sites.

After giving them replacements and suggestions on how to fix their broken links, it’s time to let them see the resource of my client.

Much greater success than what you are traditionally doing.

Good news:

There are more link prospecting techniques below.

30. Find Networks to Build Links For You

Networks.

They’re not just useful for increasing influence, authority and following, they could be great sources of links too.

Ask your sales department or your client if you are in an agency if they have a list of manufacturers (for retailers), retailers (for manufacturers) and suppliers (for both).

See if they have a specific page for retailers/manufacturers/suppliers and reach out to them – ask if you can be included in that page.

31. Exchange Content With Others

If you are doing law firm SEO, you know that a simple guest post won’t work instantly.

Yes, those pitched bloggers can get free content but that’s it. They don’t have much value to get from you.

What’s more effective?

Find a non-competing blog to do a guest post for.

If you are in the legal industry and offers bankruptcy and any business law services, you may want to find legal sites with blogs that offer non-legal business specific services.

Pitch them and ask them if they are interested to distributing content to your blog and your content to theirs.

A quick exact process of content exchange. Simple yet very effective.

32. Use Tools to Identify Potential Penalties

You become aware of how important identification of quality in link building when Google released Penguin filters announcement way back in 2010.

Whether links comes from a pure outreach-based link building campaign or an organic one, determining the health score of a prospect website is very essential.

Use Ahrefs or SEMRush to determine if a prospect domain had a sudden traffic drop. If it appears to, it is a good indication of possible penalty. Move on to your next link prospect.

Be sure to see a steady growth of organic traffic on a website, not just for indicating possible penalties, but for getting constant flow of referral traffic from the said site.

Very effective.

But wait, there’s more.

Read the next link prospecting tip.

33. Use URL Profiler for Bulk Link Metrics

Have you been overwhelmed with many link prospects that you didn’t have a chance to check which ones are high quality?

If yes, here’s what you can do:

Upload your file of backlink targets to URL Profiler (make sure you download the software first).

Check the metrics that you prefer – Moz, Ahrefs or Majestic.

Then wait for a few minutes, and you’ll get a CSV file of target domains with their respective quality metrics.

What to do next:

Grab all websites or pages that pass your benchmarks – for example, choose sites with Domain Authority of 30 and above.

Target them for your outreach.

Continue reading:

There are outreach tips below to continue your link building process.

34. Identify Link Obtainability Rate

Responses from resource curators should be evaluated and help your outreach process.

When you get a reply just like that, you typically ignore it and move on to the next prospect in your list.

But take a closer look.

Resource pages with all external links pointing to a similar type of website should give a valuable insight then.

The next time you quality a resource page based on obtainability, you would want to look at the type of site all of these external links are pointing to.

If they tend to point to a .gov, .edu and other non-profit sites - ~80% or more and you don’t see any similar resource just like yours, that’s a good indication of low link obtainability score of that page.

Great observation, isn’t it?

35. Offer Premium Images to Bloggers

Non-stock photos and those without copyright tend to populate blogs – making it not appealing for old as well as to new readers.

Make sure:

You take advantage of this problem:

Offer premium bloggers to niche bloggers (may it be too close or not with relevance) – after all, links are still links built.

It would be also useful if you can create a page solely for that purpose.

Look at this:

Design should not be as elegant as possible – just make sure all premium mages are sorted and arrange properly.

36. Get Image-site Links for Competitive Industries

What do you do when you’re trying to build links in a lucrative yet challenging industries like payday loans and gambling?

You go to your last resort – Private Blog Networks.

I doubt if links built using that approach will last for decades.

Anyway, what you can do is to try different approaches to build links to those types of sites.

Check this out:

Ryan Stewart had this client in the gambling industry.

So what he did was to get image links from other linking pages for another client.

Sounds confusing? Look at the example below:

An image link built from a digital marketing blog – may not be as good with relevance, but can pretty draw some high link juice to your other client’s site.

37. Diversify Your Anchor Texts

Anchor text diversity is what makes a natural link profile different from others.

It is not normal to see an anchor text section of 90% pure commercial anchor texts. It’s inorganic.

But there is a simple and best way to diversify your anchor text.

That is:

Let bloggers and webmasters decide the proper anchor text to link to you.

Don’t be aggressive with exact match anchor texts. You can still rank for relevant terms when you add LSI terms to your linking pages – more to that later.

But for now:

Proceed to the next link building tip.

38. Reformat Other People's Content

Let’s admit:

It’s hard to create content especially if you don’t have any idea about the industry.

Does this sound familiar?

You may be experiencing this but there’s actually a secret to overcoming content creation headache.

You can start your content ideation process with identifying a few success content assets in your industry.

Use Buzzsumo to check top performing content.

Sort the results from highest to lowest social shares and/or linking pages.

Create a visual version of the content.

Make an infographic if the content is much more appealing to users where there is a visual version.

Next is to outreach all webmasters linking to the original version of the content.

Build more links.

Take a look at this:

The team at Hosting Facts created a visual format of the popular post of Gregory Ciotti on how to speed up your wordpress.

Because the original post had gained [number] of backlinks directly pointing to the page, there is a great indication of success in outreach.

Update: Tung Tran published an updated article on speed up your wordpress site.

You see:

39. Buy Content from Real Bloggers

In my experience, scaling link building is one hard truth.

It’s not easy.

One reason is that you don’t have a specific link building to execute right away.

But what if I tell you, you can scale link building without sacrificing the quality of links built.

Here’s how:

Reach out to bloggers with top notch content on their blogs.

Ask if they are doing freelance for others. If they say no, ask if they’d be interested to do so.

Buy content from them.

In return, keep the authorship of the content while your team maintains the outreach and content distribution campaigns.

Returns are awesome:

You get top-notch content and a link from an authority blog pointing to your site or to your client.

The blogger gets a link pointing to his blog, since you’ll be using his authorship. He also gets a writing fee for his content.

40. Use "Because" in your Outreach

Have you tried everything in outreach but are still getting the same results as before?

I know that feeling.

But do you know that there’s one thing you can do to increase your response and conversion rates in outreach?

It is acquiring the skill to magnify the value of your pitch.

When you emphasize the value of what you’re offering, it becomes easy to convince people to convince about your email and what you’re trying to tell them.

One way to do that is to start using because in outreach.

Brian Dean found that there’s an incremental positive effect in response/conversion rate when you use the word “because” in outreach.

It is a psychological effect that turns your request seems more legitimate.

In outreach, legit messages get better responses.

41. Provide Three Reasons in Follow Up

When you send emails to people, there are two things that happen:

Some people reply.

Others don’t.

With the 30% of webmasters who don’t respond to your pitch, do you know their reasons?

One way to know that is to send them three reasons of non-linking in your follow-up emails.

See this image below:

Webmasters only have to choose one among these reasons.

So what do we usually get from this approach?

These types of emails are better than receiving none. Not knowing the reasons gives you a blurry idea of what to do next.

With your next follow-up outreach campaigns, test this strategy and see their answers for yourself.

42. Use Email Hunter

There are different aspects in link building that consumes so much time – which you can actually delegate to someone else.

Like finding emails.

If you take each one link prospect and look for their corresponding contact emails, you could have spent hours doing that.

And if you don’t have a team to help you with email hunting, it’s obviously a time wasted on your part.

But don’t worry.

There’s a simple way to get things done.

You can use EmailHunter to semi-automate this data mining process.

You can generate emails available on each website prospected by clicking on Google Chrome tool button.

Easy.

Then after, what you need to do is to choose your preferred email.

43. Find Direct Email In Resource Pages

The biggest outreach mistake you can do is to totally depend on your email hunting tools.

Remember:

These link building tools aren’t perfect and won’t give you assurance of higher response and link acquisition rates.

When you encounter a prospect page, let’s say a resource page, what you normally do is check the contact us page and direct your pitch.

You forget something:

Those resource pages that you target have direct email addresses included in the top or below sections of the page.

The next time you find contact emails, skim the page from top to bottom and address your pitch to the right contact email.

44. Avoid Industry Jargons

Emails should be as straightforward and simple as possible.

Take note:

Not all webmasters and bloggers know about SEO.

And even if they do, they get alarmed easily with SEO concerns, one reason why we don’t usually get a link from them.

Try to avoid saying link to this resource or content.

You can use words like cite, reference or share (but share mostly implies social share).

Use your words carefully.

45. Associate Two Resources in BLB

When recommending a resource to be included in a resource page, it’s fairly common to see a link builder just providing his own content alone.

That’s not to say it’s a bad practice.

However:

You can still improve the conversion rate by recommending a secondary resource.

Your recommended secondary resource in your vertical can help lower the commercial intent to the webmaster.

The advantage?

It can increase your chances of getting the resource link to your content.

46. Tell Your Content Value for Sponsored Posts

If you’ve been blogging for years, you know how saturated some industries are.

A few examples are finance, mommy and coupon verticals.

Almost half of blogs in those niches won’t provide you a link for free.

With that, what do you do?

Move on and prospect another list of domains?

No.

One way to counteract their responses of asking you for sponsored post fee is to tell them this value:

The price of your content

It’s a psychology effect that can increase your chances of placing your guest post on their blog.

If your writing is valued at $100 to $150 per post, you can mention that in your response plus the traffic that type of content can generate for their sites.

Also, a simple question just like this would help you a lot as well:

Is there any way you’d consider waiving the sponsored post fee?

Most kind bloggers will prefer not to charge you for a post if they’ve found your content more valuable than other guest bloggers pitching them.

47. Find More Prospects from Broken Pages

One biggest problem of link builders:

Running out of link prospects.

If you are that person, especially if you are working on a broken link building campaign, one way to expand your link lists is to look at your previous campaign.

See broken links you’ve suggested to your past potential linkers.

Plug them in Ahrefs and determine if they are highly linkable by resource curators.

The best in this strategy?

You’ll find hundreds of qualified prospects that you won’t find simply using Google search.

48. Check Top Pages of Broken Content

Have you come across a broken link?

Don’t just add it to your spreadsheet.

See if it could be a channel of multiple link opportunities.

Plug broken websites into Ahrefs to find their top pages.

Sort from highest to lowest root domains.

Go to Wayback Machine and check what those pages are.

Reproduce the content with more in-depth information (10x content).

Once done, reach out to webmasters linking to that dead page and tell them about the broken link and your 10x content.

Because they had history of linking and yours is a better content, there’ll be a guaranteed success.

But wait there’s more:

49. Wikipedia Content Recreation

Ever find a dead Wikipedia resource?

If yes, use that to your own advantage.

How?

Find a Wikipedia page in your industry that is outdated and/or requires additional information. You’re your research process with a simple Google search for "This article has multiple issues" + "topic keyword" site:wikipedia.org or use WikiGrabber.

Once you’ve find a target, check out if there is a good number of links pointing to the Wikipedia page.

Create a high-utility content, make it better than the original version by adding more up-to-date information to it.

Get your first list of prospects by exporting a list of links that cite the old Wikipedia page.

50. Use DMOZ to Find Shoulder Niches

You start to worry that:

If you stuck in just one industry to tap for your link building campaign, you won’t have any links built at the end of the month.

This happens all the time:

However, you can solve this typical problem using the top directory site – DMOZ.

How might that tool can help you?

It can show you what industries you can ideally consider in building links for a specific vertical.

Horizontal.

Vertical

This works wonders in how you can expand your reach with your link building campaign.

Make this as your regular habit:

51. Make Your Tweet Short and Sweet

If you think outreach is highly dependent on email, that’s not the case.

There are many people who actually leverage the power of 145-character tweet when doing actual outreach.

See this example:

It wouldn’t take you five minutes to compose a simple Twitter just like that. But who knows, that might increase your link acquisition rate.

52. Leverage Pre-Announcement Outreach

You know what, you can increase your social shares and backlinks to your content.

Wait.

Deep down you know this is true, but how can you make it?

Simple.

By announcing your future post even before it goes live.

Psychology-speaking, if you ask someone to do a little commitment, it would be easy for him to respond to you.

Higher response rate.

And the next time you do a pitch of sharing the link of your content, it’s now easy to build the trust and earn the link that you desire.

53. Use Videos in Outreach

A blogger receives several pitches in a day, especially those who are in PR and news companies.

Picture this:

If a blogger receives minimum of 50 emails in a day, how possible it is that your pitch will get opened?

Don’t say no until I say this possible solution.

Think about ways on how you can make your pitch stand out.

One way is to include a video in your pitch.

It works because:

• It is personalized.
• It is a unique format of pitch.

In other words, it pulls your pitch from other similar pitches and makes your outreach email stand out.

This is time-consuming and if you want to do video-outreach to those who haven’t respond to you yet, there’s a better way.

When the person didn’t respond to you, send him over a quick video to his Twitter profile.

He’ll more likely to notice.

54. Get Links Using Slideshare

Conferences and seminars in every industry are everywhere.

And when there are events like that, speakers tend to upload their presentations to Slideshare.

And guess what?

Those Slideshare presentations have good amount of links.

With good filtering, you will get some gems of links you can reclaim to link to your website.

What’s better is when you create a specific page in your website that includes all seminars/events you’ve spoken at.

This makes reaching out to potential linkers more effective.

But don’t stop from there.

Check if you also got links pointing to your Slideshare profile.

You’ll certainly find more opportunities you can add to your bucket of links.

Reach out to those prospects and ask them to link to a specific page (just like what I told you earlier) or to your homepage (if you don’t have a new branded page).

55. Invest in Content Design

When you share a link to a webmaster or blogger, the first thing that they’d see is your content design.

Design directly affects results in outreach.

Let me share one example.

This is a resource guide about cyberbullying. It got links from 890+ unique relevant referring domains.

It’s just for one content asset.

Imagine if you have several resource guides well-formatted and designed just like that, you would be surprised with potential high-authority links you can obtain every single month.

56. Suggest Post Ideas for Guest Blogs

If you received an email like this, you probably hit the delete button right away.

Three reasons why:

You don’t get a straight value from the pitch.

The guest blogger doesn’t know about you.

He does provide generic blog topics you’re not interested in.

If you will ask me:

My primary reason of rejecting a guest blogging pitch is the last reason above – not suggesting content ideas tailored to my blog.

Why is that so?

If you look at it closely, you can simply identify if the person takes an effort of pitching to you when he started to know what topics will resonate with your audience.

So your next question:

How can I think of content ideas that best fit to my target guest blog?

Find the most common pain points of your audience.

57. Ask Referrals From Bloggers

One undertook advantage of many link builders is maximizing their existing linkers to prospect for more backlink targets.

You will never run out of prospects using this approach.

And to tell you:

It is very easy.

You only need to ask your existing linkers if they know someone who’d also be interested in the same kind of value you are offering to them.

Results?

Most of them will respond to you.

Just imagine:

If you got 10 links last month and 8 of them can refer to you another two bloggers, then you already have 20 additional link prospects.

You don’t do anything. You simply just reach out to them and you already got another list.

Practice it today and see how it works.

58. Distinguish Company Blogs From Full-time Bloggers

If you are expecting responses from writers/bloggers from company sites, you’ll be disappointed.

Compared to full-time bloggers who are 24/7 ready to respond to pitches, company webmasters normally don’t respond to people unless it’d have an impact to their direct business (i.e. sales support).

How can you identify company blogs from full-time bloggers?

It’s so simple:

By looking at page SERP structure, you’ll be able to see directly if a site is owned by a company or not.

When you prospect for a blog, make sure you master identification between a company blog and a niche blog.

Proceed to the next tip to get more blog opportunities:

59. Use Comment-based Prospecting

The social proof that a blog is authoritative if it has a community of active commenters.

True enough,it’s not that easy to find many sites with that kind of authority.

But you can leverage the use of search queries combined with comment keyphrases to make high-authority link prospecting possible.

That search query signifies that results should have that number of comments in their posts

This can help ensure that you will only prospect for blogs with mid to high-level community.

If you lack with blog opportunities in your industry, try the above approach and comment below this guide if you find it effective.

Move to the next advanced link prospecting tip:

60. Use CMS-based Prospecting

One way to add more blog prospects to your list is by using CMS keyphrases.

Check examples below:

Google will exactly provide blogs that are powered/generated using Wordpress or other content management system you’ve indicated in your search.

When adding more backlink targets to your list, aforementioned approach might work for you.

Don’t stop reading.

You may miss the next big tip.

61. Find Link Exchange Phrases Easily

Link exchanges are obviously evident on blogs and resource pages.

Take a look:

When qualifying resource curators’ list pages, one of your top qualifying factors should be:

The website/page webmaster shouldn’t be involved in any link exchange or reciprocal link programs.

Simple way:

Use the Find and replace function and do searches for: reciprocal or exchange and you’ll instantly see if the page has any of those keywords.

62. Tailor Content to Linkable Audiences

As we execute broken link building for clients, our mindset has changed.

It’s not “create content” and ”build links” approach that works.

But go into this:

Identify link opportunities first, then create a content asset to serve them.

When you approach broken link building the right away, you want to find linkable audiences that will fit to your site – it may not be your direct customers/clients that you want to cater to, but a group of so called, “linkable audience”.

What is linkable audience?

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

Garrett French

Garrett had a list of available linkable audiences ready to be served.

Your next step:

Determine which of these audiences you can serve based on the topics aligned to your website.

For example:

If you are in a travel insurance industry, doing a search for inurl:links.html “travel” will give you resource pages that you can further check to know the type of audience you’d want to cater your content to:

63. Use Author Bylines for Prospecting

When finding link prospects for your website, you mostly ignore names of industry bloggers.

In this case, you missed out on opportunities where you can further expand your link search.

What can you do?

Identify names of bloggers who recently published their guest posts on other blogs.

Use the Google search query, “guest post by” “keyword” and filter the search results by date.

Check if these blogs can be added to your list of target domains – use your link metrics/insights.

Next tip will surely fire you more resource page opportunities:

64. Undo Templated Mistakes in Gmail

Have you sent an email and just realized you forgot to change/add something to your pitch?

This happens in most cases.

Either:

You messed up with attribute tags, not been able to change {name} or {website} in your email template.

You sent the wrong version of an email, instead of BLB pitch, you sent a guest blogging email.

Both mistakes will kill your response and conversion rates.

So how do you avoid this from happening?

Enable Undo in Gmail Labs. Go to Settings – Labs – Enable.

65. Get Easy Rankings wiht Meetup Events

Have you heard about parasite SEO?

It’s not a total black hat.

As you know:

Parasite SEO is leveraging high-authority domains to acquire indirect links through ranking for very competitive keywords.

Instead of building links to your webpage with low authority, you can take advantage of big sites where you can easily create pages and target highly competitive keywords.

For example:

James Norquay created an event in Sydney. He named it with the exact keyword Online marketing Sydney and it now ranks for that keyword.

Best of all:

That keyphrase is not just informational, but it is something people are searching for to find a particular service – win!

For links?

It’s multiple.

People who signed up and attended your meetup might give you links from their blogs.

Bottomline:

Create an event and try to rank for highly competitive keyword.

Rankings and links.

Two birds with one stone.

66. Create Your Own Resource Page

Do you want to increase your links from resource curators?

There is one secret way:

Create your own resource page.

Come to think of it, if you link to other websites, may it be your competitors’ resources, you actually have a value to push in your pitch.

It is like baiting your competitors to link to your resource page, because you initiate doing so.

You are not just getting links from competitors but also from other resource curators as well.

For example:

This resource page about disability scholarship resources has been linked to many times by resource curators.

First, from websites listed in the resource page.

Second, from websites with their own resource pages as well.

Imagine:

Content isn’t expensive to create but you can acquire high-utility resource page backlinks.

67. Get Guestographic Links

Infographic promotion has been around for a long time.

Even up to now, it still works.

But one way to make this works more effective:

Pitching bloggers to write a mini-guest post right above your infographics.

If you can make a customized introduction for your visual content, you make it easy for them to publish your content – gives you more chances of getting relevant backlinks

The next time you promote an infographic:

Take away the burden from partner publishers by offering custom introductions for their infographics.

68. Use Blog Commenting for Referral Traffic

Blog comment is a branding strategy.

No doubt SEO experts still use it to market their blogs.

Check this out:

However, there’s one thing that differentiates their blog commenting strategy from others:

They do it to build their brand and to drive referral traffic.

If your mindset is just like that, you’ll have a good referral traffic from those top-notch blogs – see below of the traffic that I’ve gained from Brian Dean’s blog:

69. Link to Your Other Guest Posts

Does tier link building still works?

It depends on how you use it.

But for me, the proper way to do tier link building is to start with your external content.

Check out your guest posts. See which of them are still earning links.

If you have targeted keywords in a few guest posts, prioritize them

Make sure you link to them in your future guest posts.

When they are ranking at 6 to 10 for keywords with good search volume, you can still push them up to the 1^st spot.

70. Organize Guest Blogging Process

If your number one link building strategy is guest blogging, one thing you need to remember is

organize everything.

Organization is important to improve your guest blogging process.

See this image below.

It has columns for:

• Domain Name
• Source
• Guest Blogging Guidelines
• Sample Guest Article
• Contact Name
• Email Address / Contact Form
• Relationship Status

Even if you have 3, 5 or 10 clients or websites, you can easily track the status of relationships with each target guest blog.

The best part:

It builds accountability among your team members (both remote and in-house).

71. Use Millionshort for Prospecting

Google is your bestfriend in link prospecting.

But you know what, there is one tool that you can use to make your search more targeted.

By using MillionShort, a tool that allows you to remove the top million or thousands pages for your keyword, you enable your prospecting to target mid-level blogs or sites.

This is very useful if you are not targeting DA70+ blogs which normally ranks for most of the keywords out there.

Next time you do your prospecting, try using the said tool.

It works.

72. Seek Link Opportunities Using Delicious

If you’ve been sharing your content quite often, you probably know Delicious that it’s a good place to share, save and bookmark popular content on the web.

Did you know the secret?

You can actually use that social platform to find highly targeted linkers.

How?

Use its search function to look for people who recently share and bookmarked a similar content of yours.

Check each profile if they linked to their websites to ensure that they are capable of linking to your webpage.

Gather all potential linkers in one list and reach out to them.

73. Create an Industry Glossary

Every industry has its own jargons.

If you can combine all industry terms and definitions into one big post, it’s a linkable content asset you can maximize for links.

Check out this glossary about gardening, there are 100+ referring domains.

The next time you run out of content ideas, create your own industry glossary.

74. Coin a Term

If you are a follower of Backlinko, you probably heard these terms:

Guestographics

Content upgrade

Skyscraper technique

Yes?

These are not fundamental terms that exist since the origin of the Internet, they are what we call, “coined terms”.

Coined terms are created commonly used terms by industry experts, publishers or influencers to state or define a new thing, process or trend.

Look at how many links Brian Dean acquired using that approach:

The better?

When you also target other relevant keywords along with your coined term, it would be easy for you to rank for them.

75. Create a Wikipedia Page With Ease

Ever wanted to get a branded link from Wikipedia?

Follow this link building process:

Write up a Wikipedia page for your brand (you can a professional writer to make sure the history, values and any important information are put into proper sections).

Then make sure to proofread it to follow Wikipedia’s formatting guidelines.

Finally, hire an experienced editor to submit your entry.

http://www.peopleperhour.com/hourlie/create-a-wikipedia-page/31502

76. Build Links Using Job Ads

To create new content is to build links.

Not all the time:

You have to look at your existing web assets and determine which one of them you’ll be able to use to acquire links.

If you take a closer look:

Your latest job application page on your website is one asset you can leverage:

Start with:

Finding available job boards in your industry and in your location.

Use any of the following Google search queries:

“list of “industry” job boards”

“industry” + job listings

“city” + job boards

“city” + job listings

Then get your job page included in those links pages when you do outreach (remember to have the job page published on your site beforehand)

77. Guest Post on Edu Blogs

Acquiring edu links is not an easy task.

But there’s one way you can certainly penetrate those types of links:

Contribute highly targeted content to them.

Look at this example:

Ryan Stewart is a SEO guy and he writes for big SEO and digital marketing publications like Moz and Ahrefs.

What he did is to write a post targeted to the market audience of the edu site – which is non-profit organizations.

His post about non-profit local marketing is a testament of how possible it is to get a contextual edu link.

Try this yourself:

78. Find Mid-level Blogs in Page 3, 4..

Ever wonder why you can’t build links right away?

If you are a startup and are targeting high publications to acquire editorial links from, then it’s not possible to do it in weeks unless you have existing relationships with industry publishers from those sites.

What to do when you want to tap mid-level blogs/domains first?

This little trick will help:

Go to page 3, 4 and pages after, first before looking straight at the 1^st page for possible linkers.

Because chances are when you get straight to the first page, you’ll see top-domains (DA50 or 60+) for your head-term keywords.

79. Validate Contact Emails

Has this happened to you?

You pitch a webmaster then a few minutes, you receive a failed email delivery message.

What does that mean?

The email you’re contacting to is not working and is not anymore the webmaster’s email.

How can you avoid this?

Use an email validator to identify which emails are still working.

Thought it’s not 100% accurate (estimate of ~10% inaccuracy), this helps you a lot when pitching hundreds, even more thousands webmasters.

You don’t need to worry if your emails won’t get to their proper places.

80. Analyze Your Competitors Properly

Don’t get links from competitors’ linking pages because you are only following footprints.

Most link builders will argue with this statement—and I’m one of them.

Why?

First, not because you get a link from a page where your competitor has acquired means you are just following the similar footprint – it does if you only target just one competitor.

Second, competitor link building diversifies your link profile. When you get a link from a page discovered through manual search and another link from your competitors’ linking domain, then it helps make your link profile diversified effortlessly.

How to do proper competitor link analysis:

First, identify the goal of your campaign, i.e. trying to get links from a whole domain with or without its subdomain, from a specific prefix (e.g. product category) or from a specific content/page.

Second, plug the page into Ahrefs and use the proper URL type for competitor link analysis (prefix if you want to find linking pages of a, let’s say a category and all pages further down, URL if you want to find linking pages to that specific page alone and domain with or without subdomain – self-explanatory).

Finally, strategize how you’d be able to get links from pages you discovered. Apply any of the ink building tactics in this guide.

If you want to learn an advanced approach of this competitor link building tactic:

Continue reading:

81. Find Broken Links Using LinkMiner

Link rot is the new friend of every link builder – particularly those who practice broken link building.

It’s very time consuming when you manually find broken links on a resource page.

To ease the process, you can use LinkMiner to semi-automate looking for broken resources.

No wonder many link builders can scale broken link building because of this handy tool.

82. Use Interviews as Guest Posts

Have you interviewed someone and published his/her answers on your blog?

You get visits, shares, and links.

It’s even better if you use that content as a guest post to somebody else.

Win-win situation!

The interviewee gets an exposure.

You build a backlink to your website.

Examples are here below:

83. Use Videos for Guest Blogging

Writing a guest post for other blogs takes time, especially if you’re trying to make it as top-notch as possible.

But before you start writing, think about other ways you can leverage other content formats aside from text.

For example:

Dan Shure did a video-type guest post with few written texts.

Why this is effective:

• It sets you apart from other pitched emails, where they mostly offer text-based content (it increases your chances of landing a guest post).
• It improves user engagement on the target guest blog.

Try this strategy and see for yourself results.

84. Find Misspelled Domains and Get Links

Accidents happen.

Same goes when people link to your domain or page.

They might link to your site but had misspelled your domain name.

This mostly occurs when you had an established authority in your industry (not recommending this for startups).

Want to try this approach?

First, generate misspelled/typos of your brand name using this tool.

Second, find pages linking to those misspelled domains using Ahrefs Bulk Checker.

Finally, reach out to those webmasters of pages, let them know about their misspelled domains and ask them to update it.

85. Determine Websites That Used Your Old Logos

If your website has gone through a redesign or rebrand, you now have a link building plan to take.

First, use ImageRaider to upload all versions of your logo and the tool will send you a report of all websites not linking back to you.

Second, reach out to people who had been using old logo and ask them if they could update the image with the new version and link to you if they haven’t.

A short and sweet message will do:

Hi [FIRST NAME],

I noticed you’re using [brand]’s logo on this page on your site. We actually went through a rebrand [date/time] and part of our re-brand was a new logo. I’m attaching a new version of our logo, and we’d appreciate it if you could update the page with our new logo.

Thanks!

[your name]

86. Link to Influencer's Content

Reciprocation is one factor to influence someone (source: book).

It simply means that when you ask for something, you need to also provide value to that person.

This makes a big difference with how people will respond to your favor.

Think about it.

If you mentioned and linked to an influencer, expert, or blogger from your blog post, wouldn’t it be an instant value for them?

Next time you promote your blog post,gather all blogs and content you mentioned in your latest post. This will be your warm link prospecting list.

Reach out to them and tell them that you included their content in your latest post.

87. Use Related Search Op to Find Blog Prospects

Relevance should be your first considering factor when finding websites to target for links. Google looks at links (source)…

If you are having difficulty seeking for blogs in your industry, try this search operator – related:domain.com

This will give you results of websites thematically relevant to the domain related search operator points out to.

88. Offer Content to be Translated to Other Languages

If you have a website targeting global markets, one of the best ways to acquire more links to your pages is distributing your content to non-English blogs/sites.

Start by tracking in Google Analytics for non-English countries and have a list of them.

Once done,try doing searches for country-specific domains in Google.

You can use the site operator to target domains with country domain expectations. Add any blogs you find to your spreadsheet.

And if your list is not enough,don’t forget non-English sites already linked to one of your pages. Plug your domain to Ahrefs and check out those existing linking pages.

They are likely to be your recurring linkers.

Your next step:

Pitch webmasters and offer if they’d be interested to translate your content to the languages of their websites.

You’ll be amazed with the amount of caliber links you can obtain using this approach.

89. Do 2nd-level Broken Link Building

Linkrot is a huge advantage for many SEOs especially link builders.

Because every day, there are resource/curated/links pages that are getting outdated, where some of them linked to pages that are not available anymore (404).

If you are aiming tons of high-quality backlinks, then that is a good news for you.

Broken link building is, by far, the most beneficial link building tactic for SEOs.

It’s even better if they can go through deeper levels in broken link building.

Links could come from:

1. Resource page they’ve found.
2. Pages linking to that resource page.
3. Resource pages linking to external broken links of that resource page above.

So you actually have two actions in this approach:

Reach out to people who own those links pages in a and b.

Reach out to people who own those resource pages in c.

Getting confused?

Watch the video below to see the step by step process on how to properly execute 2^nd-level broken link building:

90. Diversify Your Backlinks

It’s been a huge discussion in the SEO community on what to do and what not to do in link building.

In my experience, it’s not the nature of the law matters, what should be given more importance is the practice of it.

The best way is to diversity your backlinks.

91. Build Alliances

Relationship building is good.

But building alliances is much better.

Imagine if you have a few friends willing to regularly place links to your latest content within their next blog posts (as long as they are relevant), it is a set of recurring links that you can effortlessly acquire almost every month.

However, it takes much time and effort to build these alliances.

The reason:

Those alliances don’t just have their Twitter accounts, but they have their own websites that need some benefits from you as well.

Remember:

Reciprocation.

If you can find a few people that can reciprocate your efforts, it’s an effective link building tool you can leverage in the long run.

92. Aim Links That Will Get Clicks

There are three reasons why people click on a link:

First, it is placed in a position where it could easily be seen.

Second, anchor texts used to describe a link calls users to take an action (to click)

Third, the link is on a high-traffic/authority/trusted website.

The next time you build a link, here’s what you need to do:

First, aim for links with prominent position in the document (the higher, the better).

Second, use highly descriptive and longer strings of anchor texts that tend to be clicked more.

Third, get links from high-authority blogs – there are many ways to do it (see more tips on this page).

93. Use Partial Match and Highly Descriptive Anchor Texts

Google is hitting websites with aggressive anchor texts (exact match) for keywords in backlinks (further reading).

With that, anchor text diversity should be every link builder’s arsenal.

Also:

The way a link is described using anchor texts makes an impact to clicks to links.

Shoot two birds with one stone.

Anchor text diversity helps you make your link profile good in the eyes of Google and helps your brand get more referral visits from linking pages too.

The next time you do your backlink audit, check if you have a diversified anchor texts from your backlink.

If not, start using partial match and highly descriptive anchor texts in links.

94. Execute a Better Internal Linking Strategy

Inbound links help boost rankings of your pages.

But what if you can’t acquire several links in a month, is there another way to boost their search performance?

Yes.

Use a proper internal linking strategy.

Start by identifying pages sitting in page 11 to 30 in search results (use Search Console).

Once you have determined them, find pages where you’ll be adding internal links to (these should be your authority informational pages). Ahrefs can help you with this.

Finally add internal links to your promising ranking content.

95. Find Broken Links On Other Webpages

If you can’t find a broken link on a resource page, that becomes a problem:

You don’t have any broken resource to tell to the webmaster.

Now, the secret to finding value in broken link building campaign:

look at other broken links and pages found on his website.

Here’s how:

Plug your target domain on Ahrefs.

Check broken links tab:

Now, you have some broken resources to tell and to help the webmaster fix them.

96. Expand Your Guest Post Relevance

In my five years’ experience in guest blogging:

Let me admit,it’s hard to penetrate top-notch and mid-level guest blogs in a highly targeted niche – motor company for example.

But here’s the interesting thing:

You can makes all your guest posts relevant regardless of niche:

If you are able to select a content that is both relevant to the blog niche and to your site’s theme, that’s a goldmine.

Take this as an example:

Photography Printing and Cards Company

Parenting: How to Make Fun Memories With Kids

Holiday: How to Take Your Summer to the Next Level – tips to make your days’ worth

Education: How to Upgrade Educational Materials with Photo Cards

Wedding: Top 10 Things You Need to Prepare Before Marriage – one tip should be to hire a professional photographer

It turns out, if you have exhausted all guest blogs in your industry, try to go to shoulder niches and you will never run out of backlink prospects.

97. Use Your Linking Page as a Secondary Resource

Maximizing link juice for links you’ve acquired is important, especially, if you have the luxury of choosing which link to be added to a linking page.

Example:

If you are recommending two pages to be included in a resource page, why not choose the site/page where your link has already been hosted – as your secondary resource?

Win/win for you:

You get link to your target content from that resource page.

You get another link pointing to a resource page where your other previous link has been placed (tiered link building).

98. Turn Your Evergreen Blog Post Into a Page

Authority pages with natural links have very powerful boost in your overall domain authority.

That statement is not debatable, isn’t it?

When you have several evergreen blog post published on your site, they can flow ranking authority to other internal pages.

But you have an evergreen blog post just like that, you can make it more powerful by turning it into a page.

Because pages have higher staying power in search results, it’s much more likely to increase the likelihood of ranking for other more relevant long tail keyphrases.

99. Increase Your Domain Authority With Links

Having the right mindset in search engine optimization, particularly in developing link building campaigns for several clients/sites is very critical to the success of one’s campaign.

In essence, if your website can’t beat its competitors because of its lack of content authority and primarily of low overall domain authority.

Your goal when building links should be directed towards increasing your domain authority first.

So once it goes up, any published content doesn’t require too much of outreach, as they can directly or indirectly can earn links from publishers or content creators finding references through organic search.

100. Add Co-occurences Around Backlinks

Co-occurrences are words that appear around your backlinks, which help Google tell what that page is all about (source from Moz).

For example:

If you do a Google search for the key phrase – backlink analysis, you’ll see that OSE is ranking on the first page.

The page doesn’t include the exact key phrase in its meta-title nor could you see it any section of the page itself.

The advantage of adding co-occurrences around your links is that it helps your pages rank for relevant keywords, whether they are competitive or not, as long as there are mentions to your page/site, linked or not, that occur alongside with keywords tend to have good search volume (just like the example above).

When you have a chance to choose the words around your links, i.e. for guest posting, make sure to add other relevant keywords around your backlinks to improve the linking page’s relevancy factor.

101. Find Linking Sites of Shutdown, Moved and Rebranded Domains

There are websites that shut down, changed their names, moved or simply just rebranded by their owners.

If you find these websites, go and reach out their existing linkers and increase your number of links to your website using this approach.

Here’s the step by step process from Brian Dean of Backlinko on how to execute the exact process:

FURTHER READING:

• Backlinko
• Kaiserthesage
• Pointblankseo
• Siegemedia
• Citation Labs

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building For Bands and Musicians

The blogosphere in the music industry is increasing as new bands, independent artists, musicians, and solo songwriters are paving their way into the music scene and building their own personal brands online.

Consumption of music content is no anymore out of reach. Just a few clicks away and anyone can discover new musicians and bands — people can start clamoring if the content (songs) are appealing to its target listeners.

Though there are massive opportunities for upcoming and promising artists and for existing established bands, music creators still don't know how to market their own content online — even more so acquiring additional brand impressions through mentions and music backlinks.

The list of tactics I've shared in this post on how to build links to music Ecommerce websites can also be applied to websites of independent artists, bands, and musicians.

There are only some nuances given that the discovery is more through branded searches (as people know specific names of bands and artists) before they even do some research about it. This is in comparison to the basic process of discovering new entities through informational pages and starts with searching of informational keywords.

Let's look at some sources of content creation tactics and link opportunities for musicians' websites.

 

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CONTENT FOR BRANDED SEARCHES

For musicians — solo artists, composers, and bands, you can maximize searches about your musician profiles. These are searches for any of your content — your album names, song names, lyrics, performance and other event dates, interviews, and a list of band members.

Identify any content gaps — where a keyphrase has a substantial search volume but without any content piece that serves the intended search.

Create new pages, if necessary, to serve the searches' needs, as those visitors who may be searching would have just been getting information from third-party websites.

 

Maximizing this exact opportunity is a great way of not only getting more organic traffic but nurture your visitors into potential loyal listeners through some series of information-capturing funnels.

LINK RECLAMATION

Whether the client is famous or not, people who are working behind marketing musicians' websites should start monitoring any mentions of the brand. It doesn't just help in maintaining positive sentiments about the personality, but also in ensuring that there are appropriate links deserved those profile mentions.

The idea is to discover blogs and websites where you and your content have been mentioned, but with no attribution of links.

Create a list of possible mentions of you. Obviously, band or musicians name, titles of albums you've released or plan to release, and song titles — these are things you should start monitoring as often as possible.

Go beyond those immediately apparent searches. You can list down any misspellings of your brand name, one or two famous lines of your songs (chorus maybe), and tour titles (different from song/album titles).

Take a look at this resource on link reclamation.

PRODUCE AND PROMOTE VIDEO CONTENT

Though fans are commonly uploading their own versions of you or your band's live performance events, the idea of capturing it yourself and publishing it on your site and video channels helps you add more solid content assets to your site and to other video platforms besides Youtube.

In addition to the demands for videos of live performances, you can search for any common searches about your brand using Ahrefs' Youtube search. By using the tool, for example, it can help you discover songs that get high demand in searches for lyrics.

 

People want to sing songs while looking at the lyrics. Publishing lyric versions of your songs is a must nowadays - helping you gain an additional following from that type of avid listener.

Additionally, there are listeners who knew how to sing the song but would want to find the exact title of it. There may be a lot of search volume for a single song. Single lines in chorus that are popular can be served with a specific section of the page (or could be targeted in other lyrics pages).

Another search suggestion (or already a search option) is popular live performances or any associations you or your brand has with. Go over and check in Ahrefs' Keyword Explorer Youtube filter to find these relevant searches and upcoming/suggested search phrases.

PUBLISH EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

You may also create your own exclusive content and not just rely on what Youtube and other search channels suggest that you satisfy with online assets.

Here are some suggestions or ideas for your music exclusive content:

• Clips of stories and inspiration about how and why songs were written
• An explanation about the name of the brand or album you or your brand has released or is releasing
• Images of where your brand has originally written certain songs
• Informal interviews of your brand before, or after the concert or performance

GET LISTED IN WIKIPEDIA

If you (musician) or your brand is notable enough to get into Wikipedia, start the process of getting it listed.

You can check out this slide page on how to create a Wikipedia page for your business. 

 

You can also hire an experienced Wikipedia writer in People Per Hour so you can semi-automate the process of getting you or your band listed in there.

ACQUIRE RESOURCE LINKS FROM ARTISTS OR "GENRE" PAGES

Resource link building is also applicable to websites of artists and bands.

Similar to other resource link approach, one has to know what types of topics get linked the most.

For example, in the music space, you'll find a lot of artists and music links pages. There are even resource pages that link out to specific genres of artist groups that can likely give a boost in relevant traffic to your site.

 

Artist links

 

Christian group links

 

Go over these links pages through using link prospecting phrases. Find them either on Google and/or competitor link analysis using tools like Ahrefs.

If you know an artist group with the same genre as yours, plug their website's domain in Ahrefs and see which pages they're getting links from.

If you want a solid process for this particular link building strategy, you can read this guide on broken link building.

BUILD "BANDS IN TOWN" ANNOUNCEMENTS FROM EDU SITES

Artist groups who perform in school events can take advantage of mentions and links from announcement sections of edu blogs.

If the artist group has a specific clamor from students to perform, edu student writers can feature their profiles on the article. "Bands in town" news-type articles are ones commonly being posted in those blogs.

OBTAIN LINKS FROM EVENT LISTING SITES

It is best to start creating pages for individual shows of your group. This approach will allow you to get official ticket links from event organizers who have their own pages dedicated for future event performances, as well as their own network of event listing sites for ticket purposes.

LOW HANGING FRUITS IN MUSIC DISTRIBUTION SITES AND FAN SITES

There are low-hanging fruits for link opportunities you can discover simply from music distribution and even fan websites.

Popular bands and artist groups normally have their own fan club sites. There are likely some demands for membership — which may even have the interest to start their own fan sites.

MusicBrainz, a music listing site, music distributions sites, and fans club sites are types of opportunities you can continuously monitor as relevant link targets.

GROOVES IN LINK BUILDING

It's natural that when you're starting to promote your website, you don't have many link opportunities at hand. But as you go over and search for how and where your competitors are getting engagements and relevant traffic from, you'll see all sorts of different types eager to give links straight to your most important pages.

Find these both low-hanging fruits and hard-to-replicate contextual links. Then build momentum along the way.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building For Music eCommerce Websites

The music industry is an exciting yet challenging field for link builders and SEO professionals, as it covers wide facets of approaches to link building phases such as link prospecting and outreach.

If you can execute strategies well, you can expect results just like this (see image below):

 

In mid-2017, we started building links to this eCommerce client that sells violins and cellos. As of today, the site is ranking for commercial keywords such as "violin" and "cello".

In this post, we'll cover how to build links specifically to music eCommerce websites (we'll have some more link building discussions in the next few weeks for musicians and bands per se).

For now, we'll have a closer look at online stores that produce and sell musical instruments, music sheets and music courses.

Let's go straight to some available link building tactics for online music stores.

 

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LEVERAGE WHERE TO BUY PAGES

Whether you are a retailer, dealer or any merchant of musical instruments, you can't simply overlook link opportunities from "where to buy" pages.

"Where to buy" pages are specific pages for vendors, resellers, retailers, suppliers of a specific or multiple product line or services.

 

They are dedicated for customers and potential customers looking for a specific store location of the product/service they wanted to purchase.

One approach that you can make to find these "where to buy" pages is to get an inventory of manufacturers or suppliers (If you are a retailer). Check if each product or product line has its own "where to buy" or store locator page.

 

The next approach to discover this eCommerce link opportunity is to do Google searches for any of the following phrases (take note that your search would depend on what type of vendor are you):

• "store locator" "PRODUCTNAME"
• "authorized retailers" "PRODUCTNAME"
• inurl:links "suppliers" "INDUSTRY"
• inurl:dealers "INDUSTRY"
• inurl:links "merchant" "PRODUCTNAME"
• inurl:links "merchant" "INDUSTRY"
• "where to buy" 'PRODUCTNAME"
• "where to purchase" "PRODUCTNAME"
• inurl:"where to buy" "PRODUCTNAME"

The next phase of link building is to reach out to contacts handling these "where to buy" pages. Conversion rates for this type of outreach depend on the legitimacy of your partnership (i.e. if you are an accredited vendor of the product).

Use the corporate email address when pitching, as it gives you the leverage of identification with a specific product line or service. A corporate email sticks more than a Gmail account in a link request outreach campaign for list pages of commercial links.

DISCOVER .edu MUSIC LINKS PAGES

One of the challenges of link builders and SEOs is building links to commercial pages.

For music eCommerce sites, there is a strategic way to do this. You can actually get high-quality contextual links by targeting your site's category and product pages for links from .edu commercial-like links/resource pages.

 

You can start by prospecting for backlink opportunities using any of these key phrases:

• site:.edu "MUSICALINSTRUMENT" "links"
• site:.edu "music links"
• site:.edu inurl:libguides "music links"
• site:.edu "music library"
• site:.edu "purchase supplies"

ACQUIRE ASSISTED CONVERSION IN FORUMS 

Forum link building is not dead. If it's executed properly, it can become one of the strongest lead generation sources of your site.

The reality in customer behavior is that they tend to conduct initial research before making purchasing decisions. So, if you're selling musical instruments and other related products (like chord charts and tutorial courses), you may look for any music-specific forums with ongoing threads on musical instruments.

 

Here are examples of forum threads on purchasing violin strings:

 

You can prospect by yourself or with the help of a virtual assistant thread discussions leveled on the decision stage of customers (e.g. want to purchase).

Here are some useful keyphrases that can get you started with niche forum prospecting:

• inurl:forum "case for violin"
• inurl:thread "case for violin"
• inurl:discussion "case for violin"
• inurl:forum "bass repair" needed
• inurl:thread "bass repair" needed
• inurl:discussion "bass repair" needed
• inurl:forum "best rosins"
• inurl:thread "best rosins"
• inurl:discussion "best rosins"
• inurl:forum "where to buy strings" "LOCATION"
• inurl:thread "where to buy strings" "LOCATION"
• inurl:discussion "where to buy strings" "LOCATION"
• inurl:forum "looking for" "MUSICALINSTRUMENT"
• inurl:thread "looking for" "MUSICALINSTRUMENT"
• inurl:discussion  "looking for" "MUSICALINSTRUMENT"
• inurl:forum "in search of" "MUSICALINSTRUMENT"
• inurl:thread "in search of" "MUSICALINSTRUMENT"
• inurl:discussion "in search of" "MUSICALINSTRUMENT"
• inurl:forum "recommendations" "MUSICALINSTRUMENT"
• inurl:thread "recommendations" "MUSICALINSTRUMENT"
• inurl:discussion "recommendations" "MUSICALINSTRUMENT"

Make variations with your keyphrases, i.e. for the query, "inurl:discussion "bass repair" needed, you can change bass repair to violin or cello repair (if you're offering repairs for violins).

GET CONTEXTUAL LINKS FROM RESOURCE PAGES FOR MUSIC CONTENT ASSETS 

We went over discussing getting links from links/resource pages for money pages.

Now, let's go over to some types of music resource pages where your content assets can earn organic links from.

If your eCommerce site has a blog section for publishing extremely good content assets that can be well received by links pages - like free music sheet downloads (if this is not one of your online products), you can find any related links pages.

Here is one example below of a resource page for bassists that links out to music sheets, guides about history of bass, learning materials for school teachers — to name a few.

BUILD INITIAL LINKS IN COUPON SITES

Any starting eCommerce sites in any space need a couple of links to get the ball rolling. And these links aren't the ones that are quickly automated, but you should find your initial set of links that are still relevant to what your business can offer.

For example, if you provide coupon codes for customers on a regular basis, you can submit your coupon code page that are likely to give links to your money (or money coupon pages, which you can internally link to its related offer page).

BE HARMONIOUS IN LINK BUILDING

There are a lot of facets in the link acquisition process - they may come as difficult in the execution process, but well-worth if you have to find the right opportunities in the market.

In the music industry, it's pretty much about understanding where the potential customers are engaging. Getting the most out of the links, not solely for rankings, gives you the ability to hit both top-line and bottom-line goals.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building For Travel Booking Companies

In a study conducted by Booking, a travel fare aggregator website, they found out that 80% of their customers prefer to self-serve in order to get the information they need.

This gives rise to the continuous establishment of tour, vacation management, and travel booking companies.

Aligned with this reality, there are a lot of marketing agencies that cater solely to brands in the travel and accommodation industry.

More often than not, they have core strategies for initiating research specific to the market, investing in technologies and platforms to adapt to travel trends, and executing both content and technical initiatives for more travel customer engagement.

However, there is still room for conversation when it comes to doing proper search engine optimization especially in doing link building for travel booking companies.

Let's discuss some of the best link building practices for this industry.

 

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LINKABLE CONTENT STRATEGY

You can't create any content in the travel industry. There has to be a demand in the link market for the topic you'll be discussing. It also requires local relevance to gain more value in terms of link juice and its authority for rankings.

To give you an example, there are a lot of historical attractions in your location that may need some content if you haven't discovered it later.

 

Here's an example of simple content about "Statue of Liberty Facts & History".

 

If you're not familiar with what places in your city you can be proud of, you can search for "attraction" "YOUR CITY" on Google. A quick search like that would give you attraction topic ideas that you might consider creating as content pieces.

While creating your local attraction-like content asset, you may prospect for resource pages who might be interested to link to your page — primarily, these are webpages that list down references and resources on history (see elementary pages below as an example), library pages from Edu sites (that can get you edu backlinks) and local webpages on travel.

 

There are hundreds of this type of page and may require some due diligence in prospecting to find a majority of them.

You may check out these guides on using link prospector to find thousands of backlink opportunities in minutes and this cheat sheet on search engine queries.

SEASONAL LINK BUILDING CAMPAIGNS

We've covered seasonal link building campaigns before. In a variety of ways, these initiatives get more often than not links if executed properly.

The hype of traffic and links to seasonal content assets must be properly taken care of to sustain performance, and not just conduct it as a one-off campaign.

For tour companies, one way to maximize link performance is to start ranking for seasonal events in a city.

By developing content pieces in advance (through proper planning) any brand in the travel space can integrate seasonal events to the theme of the blog.

 

For holidays like Mother's Day, Easter, and Valentine's Day, bloggers on the average plan ahead their editorial schedule — as early as 38 days in advance.

Timing is critical here if you're producing content, and it's quite challenging to land placement from those blog publishers.

For a seasonal campaign just like this, it takes planning to put everything into account. Improving relationships, pitching emails, and getting a sense of the average days/weeks in advance of content creators publish are all critical to the success of a link-based seasonal content campaign.

"THINGS TO DO", TRAVEL GUIDES, AND EVENT BLOGS

You don't have to reinvent the wheels in content creation. There are blog ideas that have been tested to provide value from time to time.

One example is "things to do" content — these are basically simple travel guides for first-time travelers and tourists in a specific location. You may also be seasonal in approach if you add a monthly series for that (e.g. things to do in New York in November) - depending on how frequent changes in local activities are.

In addition, there is still much demand for travel guides, whether it is for newbies, intermediate, or veteran travel enthusiasts. You can't go wrong with creating last-minute travel guides.

To stand out among travel guides out there, you need to make sure you're putting more comprehensive information on the topic than what other guides can provide — e.g. give them a quick hint list on top.

For busy people, it's well worth their time to read a very quick list of any travel information. You've got to understand how your target audience consumes content in your space. It's a good strategy to produce on-top list travel info at the top of your page (giving your visitors quick answers to their questions).

 

LAST-MINUTE TRAVEL GUIDE

 

VISITING PLACE CONTENT

LOCAL AND NICHE-SPECIFIC RESOURCE PAGE LINK BUILDING

Links pages are low-hanging fruits in every industry. Given that these resource pages have the inherent intention of giving out links, it would be easy to pitch an offering that matches their actions (to link out).

 

While that may be easy to say, it requires content assets that give value to their targeted audience to be able to deserve organic links from those pages.

Either you promote a travel resource you've just created or get straight to share what your brand does (for links pages that link out to money/commercial pages).

 

You can check out this guide on broken link building and finding more links pages to get an overview execution of the link acquisition process.

NON-COMPETING LINKS PAGES OUTREACH

Tour brands ignore their add-on offering as a way to increase contextual links for their site's backlink profile.

It would be an overlooked opportunity if that's the case, given that there are readily available link prospects that can point out to travel offering pages.

For example, if your tour company offers services like car rental service, you can search for links pages that list down brands that offer such services. There are lots of pages if you could diligently discover them.

LINKS THAT TRAVEL FROM PAGES THROUGH PAGES

There are a lot of link opportunities that are available out there in the travel space. You've just got to make sure you put the effort into finding ones that can drive referral traffic to your pages. Those acquired contextual links with traffic in mind drive more value than generic directory links. Find links that travel from pages through pages.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Use Reddit For Search and Content Marketing

With 330 million monthly active users (source), Reddit is a great place for traffic generation, additional content visibility, and content ideation.

By taking every initiative seriously, you'll get the maximum benefits from diving into how Reddit marketing works.

You would tap an incredible amount of feedback from users who are eager for new content in their specific industries and have the potential to distribute a content piece worth sharing.

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How to Find Subreddits For Your Content

Your success in Reddit content distribution is based on your own identification of subreddits that fit your brand.

I mean your brand, not your industry. Going generically with your industry for Reddit marketing won't make it a huge success. Start identifying a demographic fit for the content you are producing.

 

The question is, how do you find subreddits for your content?

Reddit search

Reddit has good search functionality based on the keywords you input. Start with that.

 

It is best you can create a spreadsheet that lists down all possible subreddits you can check later on.

Google Reddit search

Besides Reddit search, discover deeply relevant subreddits on Google search itself.

 

You will see subreddits that you wouldn't find in a Reddit search. Google will take subreddits where topical content has been submitted to, or has received good engagements — not always the case, but use this search methodology to add more subreddits to your list.

When you go to subreddits, you will also see related subreddits — which you can include to your list, as it fits.

Brainstorming with your team

Set up a meeting with your content team and try to tackle what topics you prefer to publish on your content.

Match those topics to available subreddits you discover.

Of course, the broader you get into your brand content strategy (in terms of content ideation), the more subreddits you can list down further.

Use Reddit websites to assess growing subreddits

There are new subreddits flying and growing an activity count.

You can use Subreddit Stats and Reddit Metrics to check any growing subreddits you think can be added to your Reddit spreadsheet.

Discover more with SiegeMedia's list

SiegeMedia curated popular subreddits by industry. You can check out their list to find ones fitting to your brand.

Reverse engineer with Ahrefs' organic keywords

At most, if you want to look for any subreddits, even specific Reddit discussion threads that are currently ranking for keywords related to your site, you can use Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Simply plug in reddit.com to Ahrefs, then go to the Organic Keywords section to find what keywords any Reddit page is currently ranking.

You can discover topical subreddits by searching for your industry keywords in Ahrefs search bar.

What to consider in subreddits?

Before we dive into specific Reddit marketing tactics, let me go over a few considerations you need to take in every content promotion or content marketing initiative.

Submission policies

Go over your list of subreddits and check each subreddit.

Look for sections about submission policies. There are subreddits that have a dedicated portion for that — letting existing and potential subscribers of what they should expect with some rules and guidelines for sub-communities.

There are subreddits with restrictive submission policies; others don't have it included in their overview sections.

For the latter, that doesn't mean you go to the subreddit and spam them regularly with your post links. Be careful not to do, or else your domain will be banned. 

Respect Reddit and its users.

Subreddit size

Subreddits plainly show their existing subscribers. This gives you an idea of how many eyeballs you can get when content is properly promoted in a specific subreddit.

But not only should you be looking for subreddit total subscribers, check also the next consideration:

Activity count

Activity count refers to how many people are currently online over their total subscribers.

Of course, people who go online during the time you visit the subreddit variably depend on timezone, day, time, and other factors. But this gives you a good assessment of the possible eyeballs you can get to your content.

Now, let's go straight to different methodologies where Reddit can be extensively used.

How to Use Reddit for Content Ideation

Content creators can generate enough ideas when they care enough about the subreddits users' behavior — what and when users post in a specific subreddit.

For instance, you can discover blog post topics simply by searching for any of these terms:

• how do you
• figure out
• I'm struggling with
• tips
• challenge

These are all leading words toward problems subreddit users want to get solutions or questions they quickly need answers.

On content formats

Subreddits have their own content formats users want to see and distribute to co-redditors.

You may opt to not just look at your industry-relevant subreddits, but try to replicate other subreddits' content formats. This is one great way to be the first in your industry to have the content format popularized.

On headline edits

Copywriting is a must skill when creating content to fit your Reddit marketing strategy.

By writing headlines that quickly capture the attention of users, you increase the chances of more eyeballs to your content.

You can check out this latest Reddit research on some tips when writing headlines for Reddit content.

See more:

• Getting Blog Post Ideas
• Content Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

How to Use Reddit for Content Promotion

Once you reverse engineer what type of content and which content idea has the potential to go mainstream in a specific subreddit, it's time to promote the piece.

Understand the specific subreddit communities you want to engage in. Before submitting any post links, have a good grasp of the community's behavior.

You can browse the past content types — images, Today I Learned, Ask Me anything, text submissions containing advice, questions, and even stories.

 

This means you don't jump quickly to the subreddit and post a link.

There would be a period of time where you just learn the behavior of co-redditors, even ask questions to any Ask Me Anything portions to see how people interact.

By doing research, you don't plan to ruin your content marketing strategy for Reddit.

See more: How to Promote Your Website Through Link Buiding

Care About The Community

Identify subreddits that fit your brand. Understand the behavioral patterns of redditors. Start sharing content that provides them value. Care about the community.

If you're looking for an agency to help you out with marketing, you can check out our content writing and link building services.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr