Link building with content is more than “create good content and they will come.” It not often works without a bit of human promotion. A common rule of thumb for link building: “the harder a link is to get, the more valuable it will be.” If you have created great content and published it only to watch it float in a sea of noise, you may have skipped the critical step – outreach. You may need to market your new content. Plenty of writers write great content so doesn’t wait for yours to reach the top physically. Push it to the front of the crowd. Be a marketer.
Performing Outreach
Outreach is one of the original SEO tactics. Find a site you want a link from, scour their webpage for an email address or contact form, and ask for a link. Finally you start to master the language that wins more links. You find your style and your maximum converting carrots. In the early days, the savvier SEOs kept a spreadsheet of in sequence and dates of each action so they could follow up if there was no response.
Why Does Outreach Work?
Outreach works because you recognize yourself as a human and prove you’re willing to help the view in some way. Whether it’s content for their site, help with their authority on a topic, or some kind of encouragement, the end result is usually a win-win scenario. However, while the link builder has become savvier, so have the webmasters. They’ve gotten pitched before. Unlike the cautiously planned PR pitch you might send to the New York Times, bloggers are used to much lazier pitch attempts. This is unfortunate, as it seems to have made many prospects more suspicious to a link building pitches.
How to playing field
Before you pitch, you need to spend time becoming well-known with the site, so you can develop a modified pitch. Show you have taken the time to understand their site and explain why you think your link is a good fit. For every view I successfully land a link within 1 or 2 emails, there’s an equal amount who take 4-8 emails. Just like sales, every prospect (and funnel) is different.
Some tips for successful pitching:
1. Don’t pitch hard
2. Find common
3. Be awesome
4. There’s Value in Updating Content
Broken down Link Building
One tactic that became popular in 2012 was broken link building. For example, perhaps a website links to an older blog with an educational article. But that domain has moved or has taken the resource offline. Your prospect now has a broken link that you can help repair.
Reach out to the webmaster and notify them that their link is broken, and provide them with content on your own site that they could link to in its place. Maybe you would need to rapidly create the content before you made the connection with the website owner, or perhaps you’re linking to something already built by your content strategy. It is easy, doesn’t need a lot of development, and is ripe with chance. Most webmasters who are managing big blogs or websites simply can’t keep up with all their outbound links. Some will welcome a friendly, like-minded individual contacting them with an easy fix. Garrett French has created a great tool to help you called the Broken Link Finder. It’s a robust engine of chance.
Content Refreshing
I’ve put a curl on broken link building with a tactic I call content refreshing In cases where broken link building is not pulling responses, I often get more reaction by telling someone their in rank is wrong. Nobody likes to be wrong, particularly when the credibility of their content is on the line. In content refreshing, the approach is very similar to broken link building, except instead of presenting content on your own site as an alternate; you’re submitting content that is updated where you have a link embedded back to your website. Are you an expert on changed laws? Do you know about a change that happened in 2008 where a lot of old information still exists on the web? Has there been a significant change in a product you sell? Look for that stale data in your vertical and provide an updated article. In many niches, you’ll have plenty of aged, trusted domains to earn a link from.
Pulling Together the Content
Both these tactics require some organization with the writers and experts in your organization or your clients’ business. You can’t refresh or fix links if you don’t have the assets. With broken link building you have a higher likelihood of having transferable content on your site. With content refreshing, you may need to get creative to provide an original post.
Additionally, I find that both tactics are huge for content inspiration. The broken link builder and out-of-date content finder often lead to topics you hadn’t considered for your own content strategies. The web will always grow old, and feat out to fix or update content is a tactic that never runs out of fish.
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