Author Bio: Danielle Canstello is party of the content marketing team at Pyramid Analytics. They provide data analytics and enterprise business intelligence software. In her spare time, she writes around the web to spread her knowledge of the marketing, business intelligence and analytics industries.
The importance of link building is clear: when high – quality sites link back to your page, search engines assume that your page brings value and is relevant in your industry and as a result ranks it higher on the search engine results page.
Not ranking ahead of other companies in your industry might be what is keeping you away from higher profits.
Therefore, earning backlinks will not only improve your ranking – but likely will impact your bottom line as well.
However, building an effective link building strategy that will maximize results and bring sustainable traffic and passive links in the long run is not easy.
Below we will discuss a couple of efficient ways to improve your link building efforts and prepare to scale.
It All Starts with Content
You cannot expect your link building efforts to yield any results unless you have great content (yes, the ‘Content is king’ saying still holds true).
A linkable asset is a piece of content or a part of your page that other websites around the web will be keen to use as a resource and link to.
Here are a couple of characteristics that great linkable assets have in common:
- They appeal to the masses
In order to scale, you need to go beyond the limits of your niche and build assets that will attract a broader target market.
Regardless of your business – you can broaden your niche by creating a second tier content that is more general than your primary business.
Let’s say you have a company about recruiting tech talent.
If you create content about tech talent only, there will come a time when your possibilities will dry out, and your progress will stall.
To give your business a push in a situation like this, you can broaden your perspective and create content that appeals to the entire recruitment industry, and not just those who are sourcing and hiring tech talent.
The broader you go, the more your chances of acquiring links grow.
Just make sure that you find the right balance: although being general can multiply your opportunities, being TOO general might stop you from building authority in your particular industry.
- They are timeless
Linkable assets that will continue getting links for a long time are timeless. These assets are not created around a specific temporal event – but discuss and study more perennial themes.
Although assets that are created around a current trending topic will probably get you an influx of traffic, this will only be temporary, until the initial buzz dies down. These kinds of assets might boost your traffic numbers, but are not sustainable in the long run and thus cannot help you in scaling your link building strategy which is what we are focusing on in this article.
- They provide value
Great linkable assets will provide value unlike any other in the industry.
An easy way to create a highly linkable and valuable asset is to condense your information in infographics that are easy to digest and share.
It’s Time to Step Up Your Prospecting Game
The truth is, even if you have a bunch of linkable assets that provide immense value in your industry, you won’t be able to scale unless you expand your network of prospects. Note that you need to look for prospects that matter – as only high quality links will bring you the results you’re striving to get.
How do you do this?
Simple:
By analysing your competition.
This is easy to do as there are many tools out there that allow you to export the backlinks of your competitors and merge them into a single list. This will be your master list, and it is where you will continue adding relevant domains as well as related keywords.
After you have compiled enough links (any number above 500 000 backlinks counts as ‘enough’), you need to go through the list and remove domain duplicates.
Now you will have a master list of domains that are interested in topics within your industry whom you can contact.
Strive for Excellence
Link building is just like any other skill – it requires constant practice and effort. The more you practice it, the better you will become. And along with excellence comes efficiency.
Over time, you will learn what works in a particular area, and you will need less time to get it done.
Another reason that your link building efforts are not efficient is lack of organization.
Link building comes with endless Excel spreadsheets made out of thousands of prospects.
So, if you are looking to make the process more efficient so that you are able to scale, you need to get organized.
You can do this easily by using two simple tricks: rating and color coding.
First, you want to go through your links one by one and rate them.
Ask yourself two questions:
- How easy it is for you to get that link?
- How valuable is that link to you?
After you’ve rated your links, sort them according to how important they are to you.
Once the actual outreach begins, use color coding, so that you always know where you are in the process. Green can mean that the job’s done, orange or pink can mean that you are still waiting, and red can mean that you did not succeed in getting a link.
Get Passive Links
Last, but not least, you need to position your website and linkable assets in a way that they will continue being discovered by people that will want to link to them, even without you doing the outreach.
This, of course, starts with what we talked about before: creating great evergreen content that others will want to use as a resource.
We also mentioned that infographics are great linkable assets as they are visually appealing and easily digestible, so adopt visuals in your strategy.
Note that content can never really be timeless, as a lot of things are changing, but you can make it timeless by frequently going back to it and making small improvements and tweaks to it.
Another great idea is to add your linkable assets to platforms that allow their discovery like Pinterest and Stumbleupon.
Finally, try to rank on the top of the search engine results page, as these are the resources that are deemed the most relevant.
Final Words
Creating a scalable link building strategy is easier than it might seem if you know the exact steps that need to be taken.
Although it all starts with great linkable assets, your efforts will not yield any results unless you follow through with powerful and organized prospecting, and continuous creation of process efficiencies.
All of these activities are equally important, and cannot be done in isolation – so make sure that you invest enough time in each part of the process and that you keep striving for excellence, by steadily improving your link building methodology.
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