For today’s Whiteboard Friday, I’ll be covering eight tips to help you build more links. This follows on from my talk at MozCon which covered 35 ways to get links in around 35 minutes.
At MozCon, I explained how link building is hard, it takes time and can be very tough for most of us. Unfortunately for most of us, it isn’t as simple as just producing content which automatically gets links. Our content needs a push to make it get links, and over time, it does become easier if you build the right relationships.
These techniques can help you build those relationships with the right people in your niche and get the links you deserve. Not only now, but in the future. Let’s get to it and I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.
Hi SEOmoz fans. I’m Paddy, I work at Distilled. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. We’re going to go through eight link building tips in eight minutes. I’ve just presented at MozCon, and we did 35 ways to get links in 35 minutes. This is a lot shorter, but hopefully you’ll get some good tips out of it.
So, number one, this is a little technique you can use to mine through your competitors backlinks and pull out the links which are good for you. So the process, you go to Open Site Explorer, put in your competitor’s URL, you can download an Excel file, put that Excel file into a Google custom search engine, then you can search for whatever you want. So you can search for guest posts, you can search for competition, you can search for sponsored links, you can find all of these really cool places your competitors have got links and average those guys as well and just piggyback off the back of their link building.
Number two: Go to Meetup.com and search for the word “blogger” and refine the results by your area, and you’ll find local bloggers meeting up in the same place. So you may find music bloggers, design bloggers, fashion bloggers. Instead of emailing all of those people, just go to the event. Go and meet them, say hello, buy them a drink, go and have dinner. It’s a much better way of building a relationship than just firing a bunch of emails out, and this is going to build a good long-term relationship with those guys.
Number three: Build good infographics quickly. Infogr.am is a really, really cool tool for uploading your own data. You can put headlines. You can create really pretty graphs. So without the need of a designer, you can just put out your own infographic really, really quickly. I wouldn’t recommend doing this over and over again. But if you get some good wins with it, take it to your boss and show how, “I did this. I’m not a designer. Get us a designer for a day and let’s see what we can do.” It’s really good for building that case, then showing your boss.
Number four: Finding your competitors’ guest posts. I’m guessing your competitors are doing guest posting as well as you. They’re going to be lazy. They usually write a byline, such as this, so written by “John Smith, CEO of Company X.” Just take a snippet out of that bio and search for it in Google. You’ll find a bunch of other places that they guest post. You can reach out to those guys as well, and you’ve got a few easy win links.
Number five: We did this one at Distilled for a client in the UK. Have a profile page for spokespeople and directors of your clients. So when they get quoted by newspapers, by magazines, you can just ask them to link to that profile page. They may not want to link to your homepage if it’s quite commercial, but they’re quite happy to link to a profile page because they’re not commercial. They’ve got good photos, good information about the person. They’re more likely to link to that than a homepage. Also set up Google alerts for the name of that person. So if that person ever gets quoted, you can go along and take a look at that website. See if there’s a link. If there’s not, contact the website and say, “Hey, thanks a lot for quoting our director. Did you know he’s got a profile page here?” And that’s going to link to the profile page.
Number six: This is a freebie for you guys. It’s a guest blog post search engine. You can get it at http://www.paddymoogan.com/guest-posting-search-engine/, and there will be a link in the blog post as well. When you search this engine for your keywords, you will only see results that accept guest posts. So search for the word “travel,”
search for the word “‘food,” whatever your industry is, and the only results that get returned, you can reach out to and get a guest post. At the moment, there are about 1,500 domains in the search engine. That’s going to grow over the next few weeks as I add more to it, but go away, use it, and get guest posts.
Number seven: This could be a little bit stalkerish, but it’s cool. Amazon have a facility where you can search for other people’s wish lists using their email address. So if there’s a really good blogger who you want to impress, put their email address into Amazon Wish Lists and see if they’ve got one. If they have, maybe send them a gift with a little note saying it’s from your company, you really appreciate the work they do and the blog posts they’re putting out. It’s a great way of building a relationship. They’re going to reply to you. They’re going to say thank you.
Number eight: If you’re doing any kind of content based link building–so infographics, that kind of thing–you probably want people to tweet it. When they do, use a service like Topsy or BackTweets. Go and see who has tweeted your content, click on their Twitter profile, see if they’ve got a website. If they have, approach them and say, “Hey, thank you so much for tweeting about our infographic. Did you know you can also embed it on your blog, and here’s the embed code.” You are going to get a much better response, right, from those people than people who you are just emailing who have never seen that content before. So these guys have already interacted, they’ve already tweeted, they’ve shown they like it. So just take that extra step and see if they can embed it and give you a proper link rather than just tweeting about it.
So that’s it. Eight link building tips in what was hopefully about eight minutes. I’m Paddy. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments, and thank you.
