Anybody who has been in digital marketing for more than six months can see that things have evolved dramatically in the past year. With the roll out of Penguin in 2012 and now Penguin 2.0, hopefully it has been a wakeup call to many on how careful you need to be in your link building tactics.
While the focus of your link building campaign should be with authoritative sites like magazines and blogs within your niche, it doesn’t hurt to accompany those powerful links with some smaller, but healthy links. I’ve been preaching quality over quantity since day one of joining this industry. Who says we can’t have both?
I’m going to go through nine different techniques to assist your link building efforts. Keep in mind these tactics don’t lead to instant links, as many require a bit of digging. These are various ways of finding links that will help your website, and if done correctly, won’t come back to haunt you after the next Google update.
1. MyBlogGuest
MyBlogGuest reverses the blog outreach process and has the blog editors coming to you. This is a great tool to get your articles published quickly and assuming you play your cards right, you might actually get some decent sites. Many of the blogs that will offer your article a home are crap micro sites with no real communities. Avoid those sites and look for ones that have social shares and comments.
One hidden gem of MyBlogGuest is the forums. Too many people only use this site to post articles for bidding, but there is actually an entire community of blog owners in the forums requesting people to write about a certain topic! To stay on top of things, set up your account to email you every time a request is made for a topic within your industry.
2. Infographics
We all know that a good infographic takes weeks to design. If you have a great design team then use them! If you don’t have the budget for one or need something really fast, I recommend Piktochart. This free service lets you select from a variety of infographic templates. Simply plug in your data, make some tweaks and you have an infographic! It’s a super quick way to get some unique content. Hit up blogs, social networks, and even upload your infographic to MyBlogGuest and have people offer to publish it for you. These are easy natural links that you may not have gotten with a guest post offer.
3. Tagxedo
This is very unique way of doing outreach. I have to give credit to my team member @bocaj03. It allows you to upload any logo and make a tag cloud out of it. Pick some sites within your industry, turn their logos into tag clouds and then hit up their social networks. Not only will many of them love it and post it on their website with a link back, but they’ll probably send you some free stuff. Check out this study on 97th Floor’s blog of how well it worked.
4. Twitter API
This is an awesome tool built by @ethanlyon and he wrote a great article on how to use it. It’s a Google Spreadsheet where all you have to do is type in a keyword relevant to your website/industry. It will then search Twitter for any tweets using that keyword along words such as “guest post” or “guest author.” Many blogs will push out their most recent guest posts via Twitter so this is a great tool to see who is active in taking guest posts.
5. Stalk Pen Names
This sounds creepier than it actually is. With the growing trend of Google Authorship, more and more link building is done under a consistent pen name. Find a website that would be a relevant site for you to publish your content on. It could be one you have already published with, or one you recently found. Now go through the various guest posts on the site and look at who the authors are. Many of your competitors will be using pen names followed by a link back to their site. Copy and paste that pen name along with a common keyword associated with them into Google and more often than not you will find a list of your competitors’ guest posts. These are easy leads to sites that your competition is already on. Keep in mind that if your competitor is spamming the crap out of the web or posting poor guest posts, you don’t want to follow their lead.
6. Search Query Generator
This is a tool I built several months ago that allows you to plug in a keyword and the spreadsheet will generate a Google search result that includes all of the popular search terms for finding guest posts. You can access the sheet at http://www.brandonhassler.com/guest-post-search-generator/. A pre-made search query that involves various guest posting terms such as “write for us,” “submit guest post,” “contribute,” etc. is inserted into the URL automatically with your keyword. This saves you time from searching for several individual queries or from trying to type in a long query every time you search for something.
If you are looking to contribute to sites in the travel niche, type in terms related to travel and click search. Simple as that!
7. Ask For Referrals
This is a rarely used yet wildly successful tactic in landing a great site to contribute to. We go through all that work to get in contact with someone, build a relationship, and become a contributor. Has it ever crossed your mind that the blog owner/editor has other fellow blogger friends likely in the same niche? Casually bring up that you are looking to increase your exposure and are looking for more blogs to write for. Assuming they like you, you’ll always get a couple names and phone numbers to call. Not only is this way effective, it’s 100 percent natural.
8. Use Followerwonk
Followerwonk has become one of my most favorite tools of all time. Not only can it be used to compare metrics you never even knew existed among Twitter profiles, but it’s a powerful tool for outreach. When it comes to outreach, there are typically two ways you can use Followerwonk.
The first way is to look for contributors/editors for a specific website. For example, if I wanted to contribute to Forbes.com, I’m not going to email their generic contact email only for it to get lost among thousands of other emails. I want to contact a real person. Under the “Search Twitter bios” tab, search the name of the magazine/website along with something like write, writer, contributor, editor, etc. This will search all of Twitter for bios that mention someone from that blog being a writer. You now have a direct way to getting in contact with the person, rather than a generic email.
The second way is to simply know the niche you want to contribute to. Much like the first process, rather than the name of the blog you will search the name of the industry. People who blog often put something like “Love to write about travel” in their Twitter bio. Search the word “travel” along with those various keywords about writing.
9. Set Up Alerts
If you are doing a good job at marketing people are going to be talking about your brand online. It’s important that you are on top of every conversation that happens. Set up an alert using a tool such as Google Alerts or IFTTT to notify you every time your brand is mentioned on the web. Do the same for other sites such as YouTube by setting up an alert for site:youtube.com “Your Brand”.
One of the most likely places a person will talk about your brand is on Twitter. Sure, you get notified when someone tags your company but more often than not people will just type out the name of your company rather than tag you. Constantly search Twitter for your company name. If you use applications like TweetDeck, set up a column for that search term and you’ll be notified the second someone mentions you. Check both your Google and Twitter alerts for links back to posts where they have mentioned you and may have forgotten to link.
These are just ten of many ways you can obtain some healthy links with fairly little effort. Let me emphasize that this should not be your entire digital marketing campaign. Link building is only a small part of a successful campaign. Your main focus should be dealing with producing quality content, and creating a brand that users love. If you have further ideas feel free to leave them below or tweet me at @BrandonHassler
