Let’s talk about the task every blogger loves to hate: Link Building! Why do they hate it? Because it can be hard and time-consuming without the right link building strategies and tools.
Link building is simply getting another site relevant to your niche to add links pointing back to your site.
Why is Link Building Important?
Link building has become one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization because of its strong impact on rankings.
There is no better way to increase your search engine rankings and organic traffic than to increase the number and quality of your blog backlinks.
Backlinks increase your site’s authority in the eyes of search engines and directly affect how well they rank your content for your targeted keywords.
Have you ever wondered how top news sites can rank for any word they target – it is because of the high domain authority they have from the many other sites linking to them.
Wouldn’t it be great to publish an article targeting a high-volume keyword and have it rank on page one once it is indexed? It is possible with a high enough domain ranking!
If you make an effort and focus on link building as part of your search engine optimization strategy right from the beginning as you start your blog to make money, your traffic and earnings will explode within a few months. It can work that fast!
Now that I have established just how vital link-building is let’s dive into some simple link building strategies that make it possible to quickly gain more links for your blog and increase your site’s domain rank.
The key when using these link building strategies is to understand that links are very valuable, as I have shown above – and realize you need to provide value to get them. Think of every link-building opportunity as a partnership.
Utilizing Link Building Outreach Platforms
Link building is such an integral part of having a successful blog or website that you need to find systems that help you track, automate, and scale your outreach efforts.
Without tracking, you won’t know what is working, and if you don’t automate, you will be spending a lot of time reaching out to other blog owners.
If you don’t scale your outreach efforts, you will struggle to get enough backlinks to raise your site’s domain authority.
The following platforms can help you target relevant sites, automate your email outreach, and track the effectiveness of your outreach campaigns.
This will allow you to scale up your outreach efforts while freeing up your time to focus on building your business or developing more content.
What Are The Most Effective Link Building Strategies?
While there are many common link-building strategies, only a couple are effective at building links at scale.
If you want to increase your blog’s DR and Page Authority above 50, you will need many backlinks – so you want link-building strategies that work at scale. Ones that you can automate and outsource to leverage your time.
Based on our experience, we have found that the most effective strategies are Guest Posting and Shotgun Skyscraper methods.
The outreach is very similar for both methods, and you can use the same tools to automate much of the email outreach and focus on responding to sites that express interest.
We spend most of our limited link-building time setting up outreach campaigns targeting both methods – since these two methods generate the most links.
Don’t get me wrong, the other methods listed here will work, and you can get some pretty high DR backlinks with them, but we have found these to be the most effective at generating links versus the required time.
Guest Posting
Guest blogging is one of my favorite link building strategies and is the top link building strategy to get high-quality links back to your site from closely related web pages.
Guest blogging is simply writing guest posts with links to your site embedded in the content and then getting other site owners or blog owners to publish them on their relevant websites.
With a little effort, you can get highly relevant links from high-authority sites by offering to write a high-quality guest post for their target audience.
The great thing about this link building strategy is that you completely control the content (you are writing it) and the anchor text used to link back to your blog posts.
Here is my approach to getting guest posts accepted by high authority
Find Relevant Sites for Your Guest Posts
You first need to search for blogs and sites within your niche or use a platform like the ones discussed above, which helps you find relevant blogs to target and manage your link-building email outreach campaigns.
This is as simple as searching for keywords related to your niche and then making a list of the sites and blogs from the search results.
You can use a tool like Ahrefs or UberSuggest to see the domain authority for each site in your list, and I suggest you target a wide range of authority sites with your guest blogging.
If you are not using a platform that helps you manage your guest post outreach efforts, now is the time to put the list of sites you want to target into a spreadsheet along with their DA rating – this will help you track your guest blogging efforts.
Pitch Ideas to Potential Sites
Once you have your list of target sites, don’t be afraid to reach out to the blog owner – most site owners are happy to accept guest posts as long as they’re engaging, well-written, and highly relevant to their blog.
Your goal is to offer as much value as possible by pitching articles that target keywords they currently don’t rank for or by providing to rewrite an outdated article on their site to improve its SEO.
Spending the time to create customized pitches will greatly increase your chances of getting your guest post accepted.
Track Guest Post Outreach
As I stated before – it is vital to keep track of your efforts to maximize the effectiveness of your guest posting.
You must treat guest posting as crucial to your link-building strategy and blogging business.
Either choose one of the link-building platforms to manage and track your outreach or use Google sheets to keep track of your efforts.
You can make columns for each site; the articles pitched, the date the pitch email was sent, the date the pitch is accepted, the date when the article goes live, the linked blog post, and the link’s anchor text.
By tracking all your Guest Posting efforts, you can ensure that you are following the SEO best practices and measuring your various pitches’ effectiveness.
Tracking has helped us build backlinks to different internal pages on our blog, ensure the anchor texts are varied, and optimize our outreach pitches to get more posts excepted.
I couple this with tracking our backlink profile in Google Search Console and UberSuggest to ensure our efforts are working and that we don’t delete a linked blog post and create broken backlinks.
Write and Submit Guest Post
Once you get a site owner to accept one of your pitched ideas, it is time to write a high-quality, engaging, and SEO-optimized article targeting the keywords in your pitch.
This means including relevant keywords in titles and headings, using keyword-rich anchor text in links, and making sure your post is easy to read by breaking it up into smaller paragraphs with subheadings.
Remember, you can outsource this work to a freelance writer or utilize AI writing tools to reduce the time it takes to generate your guest posts. The goal is to find a system that you can automate as much as possible to scale your outreach efforts.
Once you finish writing your guest post, submit your guest post and make any changes requested by the blog owner. And once it is posted, celebrate gaining more backlinks to your blog.
One additional side benefit of guest blogging is increasing your reader audience and possibly getting visitors from your guest post. So you get both the value of improving your backlink profile and another potential traffic stream.
Guest Posting FAQ
What is guest posting?
Guest posting or guest blogging is the process to obtain links by creating content that you submit to other site owners to publish on there blogs.
This involves providing building a relationship with other site owners and providing valuable content that is relevant to your niche.
How many links to include in guest posts?
The best practice is to include at most 2 contextual links within your guest post, and some sites let you have an author info box that you can include another link back to your home page. The key is don’t push it and appear spammy when guest blogging.
Can do guest posting for free?
Some sites do charge for guest blogging posts, but it is easy to find free opportunities if you can find an angle to create value for the other sites.
Think of it as creating a partnership with the other site owner where you provide valuable content to helps them target an unreached audience, while you get more links back to your blog posts.
Shotgun (Scaled) Skyscraper Link Building Strategy
This is another one of our top link-building strategies; most of our non-organic links (80+%) come from these first two strategies: Guest Blogging and Shotgun Skyscraper.
I have to give credit to AuthorityHacker for the shotgun skyscraper link-building strategy; they took the concept of Skyscraper pages and developed a link building strategy out of them that works incredibly well.
The great thing about this strategy is this it is straightforward and scalable without breaking the bank. And best of all, it can be outsourced easily – anyone can follow the system once set up.
Linkable Content
I am sure you have heard of clickbait – articles with crazy headlines that get you to click. Well, now let me introduce you to link bait or linkable content.
This is where you create content assets so engaging and informative that it attracts other sites to link to it.
This is a great link building strategy for getting organic links back to your site over time.
This is the SEO equivalent of a passive income stream – you put in the time and effort upfront to create content, and the links keep coming.
What Types of Content are Linkable?
So, now you are wondering what types of content work as link bait. This can include anything engaging and informative that catches people’s attention.
The key is to research what types of content attract links within your target niche. Look at the article types, images, and videos with the most backlinks, then create something similar with your unique spin to improve it.
Here are the types of linkable content you can create to attract more links pointing to your site.
In-Depth Definite Guides
These are long-form posts that go in-depth into a specific topic. The goal is to find a famous guide and look at its structure and content, then make one that is more thorough and covers aspects or angles that the other one misses.
Your goal is to add your unique angle on the topic and establish yourself as an expert that other sites will want to reference.
Infographics
Infographics are images that provide information in graphical form. These work better in specific niches with processes and ideas that can be described graphically.
They have been a little overused recently, so standing out from the crowd is getting harder. The key is using eye-catching graphics and engaging headings and providing as much information as possible in an easy-to-understand image.
You can research and find out what types of infographics are popular in your target niche and then make a similar one with your unique spin.
Case Studies
Real-life case studies are a powerful way to showcase the results you or your clients have achieved for your clients or customers.
The more engaging and spectacular the case study, the better chance of them being picked up by other sites.
You can even use these as part of your PR and media outreach to find interested journalists to pick up your case study story and publish it to a high-authority news or press site.
These can turn into precious backlinks for your site!
Research Reports
To generate interest, research reports must provide unique insights or data that can only be found in your report.
You can conduct your original research through surveys and polls or aggregate research from various sources (giving credit and links to the sources) and make connections and insights on the aggregated data.
The design of your report is important because it affects how people perceive the quality of your research. Use graphs, tables, and other visual aids to make your report more engaging and highlight your report’s unique insights.
Promote and Share Your Linkable Content
Once you have created your new linkable content asset, promote it using social media, email, and every other available channel to help people find it.
You will not always hit a home run with every asset you create, but just a few good linkable assets can generate many organic backlinks.
Even for the ones that don’t generate many backlinks, every piece of valuable content you create as a linkable asset increases your credibility and expertise within your niche.
Linkable Content FAQ:
What is linkable content?
Linkable content is simply any piece of content that is designed with the express intent to gain backlinks to your blog.
This type of content whether an article, image or video will be appealing to a large audience and includes informative and engaging elements.
What are examples of linkable content?
Examples of linkable content include infographics, how-to articles or videos, case studies or research reports. This is any content that is informative, engaging and provides exclusive insights.
HARO (Help A Report Out)
This is one of the best link-building tools many bloggers don’t know about and can help you quickly gain high-quality editorial links. So what is HARO, and how can it help?
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is an online platform where reporters post requests for sources and information related to their stories. As a blogger, this is an excellent opportunity to get editorial links from popular publications with minimal effort!
Sign up for HARO’s free account and respond to relevant requests with a high-quality and informative answer, along with editorial links to your blog.
Tips for Winning HARO Pitches
HARO releases a new list of requests every day, so try to answer requests as soon as they are dropped and answer as many as you can to increase your chance of getting accepted.
Most requests will guide you on what type and how many links they will accept with your answer. There are other HARO-type sites out there, like Qwoted.
Some outsourcing companies will do the link-building work for you to get your content published through HARO.
HARO Outreach Services
Article Roundup Link Building Strategy
Link roundups are lists of interesting articles, resources, or websites related to a particular topic that you can use to curate content from other bloggers. Linking out to other bloggers’ work is one of the best ways to establish relationships and create mutually beneficial connections – plus, it’s an easy way to get some high-quality links!
Broken Link Building Strategy
Outdated or broken links can be a real issue for webmasters and bloggers. If someone notices something wrong with their website, they may appreciate being notified so they can take action. Doing this isn’t only a great way to help but also an opportunity for you to get a link in return!
Article Fixer Upper
Link building isn’t just about creating new content – it’s also about updating and improving existing content. If you find outdated articles on other websites that could benefit from some attention, consider offering your services as an article “fixer-upper.” This is a great way to build relationships with other bloggers, increase your exposure, and get valuable backlinks.
Reverse Image Search Link Building Strategies
Brand Name Reference Lookup Link Building Strategies
Resource Page Link Building Strategies
Link Reclamation Link Building Strategies
Outsource Link Building
This might be considered a gray link building strategy since you pay for your links. But if you work with a reputable link-building expert or link-building sites focusing on quality links, you should be fine as long as this isn’t your only source of building links.
Stay away from link schemes that put your links on sites created explicitly for generating backlinks, such as PBN (private blog networks), as these can get your site penalized by Google.
How to Find Good Link Building Services?
The key to finding an excellent link-building service is to look for services that focus on outreach and stay away from those that promise guest posts on high-domain sites – these are usually PBNs or general blogs.
The key is you want a service to utilize the same methods you would use to get high-quality backlinks. Here are some of the excellent link-building services we have found – they all focus on outreach and build links through either niche edits (link insertions like shotgun skyscraper targets) or guest posts.
This is a great way to extend your efforts and build up your backlinks quickly. I only do this once a blog starts earning money, and I can reinvest the earnings.
Work On Your Link Building Strategy Starting Today!
Link-building off-page SEO can be time-consuming and tricky, but when done correctly, it can be one of the most effective strategies for growing your blog’s visibility and search traffic.
By utilizing the link building tools and strategies outlined above, you’ll be able to build strong relationships with other bloggers and leverage those relationships to create powerful backlinks for your web pages. Good luck!