11 Link Earning Strategies to Spice Your Content Marketing  

by Venchito Tampon Jr | Last Updated on October 24, 2021

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

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

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

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

1. Infographics

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

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

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

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

2. Contest

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

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

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

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

3. Social Sharing

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

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

• For Post and Pages

o    AddThis (free/upgradable)

o    Digg Digg (free/upgradable)

o    Social Deux (paid)

• For Images

o    WP Easy Social Hover (paid)

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

4. Researches, White Papers, and Analyses

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

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

5. Free Resources and Guides

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

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

6. Tools

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

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

7. Quizzes

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

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

8. Memes

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

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

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

9. Quotes

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

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

10. Controversial Post

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

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

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

11. E-books

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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