If you’re a digital marketer who believes that link building is easy, then you’re living in the dark ages.
In recent years, link building has become increasingly difficult.
It takes a lot of effort and planning to get high quality inbound links to your website.
And if you’re one of the new generation of marketers, then you must know how hard it is to create a backlink nowadays.
In this article, we won’t be focusing on the dozens of ways used in link building services, but will instead explore some of the more effective methods that really do work.
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Link Building Strategies vs Tactics
Before going into the nitty gritty of link building methods, it’s importantly to firstly distinguish what the difference are between a link building strategy and actual link building tactics.
In short, a strategy is just an overall plan of action.
A strategy essential lays out an overall plan of action but does not go into great detail as to how links will be attained and from where.
Tactics on the other hand, specify precisely how and where you intend to get links and the types of links you wish to acquire.
So essentially, you do not need a link building strategy. Just an understanding of what is regarded as a valuable link and how you are going to go about getting them.
Steps to High-Quality Link Building
Let’s take a detailed look at 6 proven methods to acquiring high quality inbound links:
Know Your Audience
If you want to grow your audience, then you must understand what you want to achieve.
To do so, there are two important things to note:
Firstly, you must have a clear idea of who your audience is.
Without knowing your audience you will not be able to understand how to cater to their needs, or gain their trust and loyalty.
Secondly, you must know your audiences attitudes and viewpoints. Without this, you won’t know how to tailor your content.
Once you’ve answered this question, you’ll have a better idea of your target audiences and know precisely what you need to create to get their attention.
Create a List of Sites Relevant to Your Audience
Using spreadsheet software, create an email list by carrying out deep-level research, and filter out the relevant websites.
Pull out the best keywords relevant to your site and services, and arrange them by traffic volume and competition.
By doing so, you’ll narrow down your search to specific sites only that are relevant to your services and audiences.
This will not only help you save time and hassle, but it will also guarantee you place links on sites that align to your audience.
Once your list is complete, reach out to those sites to discuss ways to contribute content that contain backlinks to your target website.
This tactic may seem restrictive seeing you are only dealing with a handful of websites, but in today’s digital marketing world, quality always beats quantity.
A single link from a high authority site will always have greater influence than dozens from poor quality sites.
Create Incredible Content
Once you’ve narrowed down your list of specific relevant sites, the next important step is to create content that inspires people and holds a unique appeal.
If you want other sites to link to you, then you need to create amazing content that is original, detailed and informative.
You cannot expect anyone to bother to link to a site with ordinary or substandard content.
So if you’re going to create content, make it the best content it can possibly be.
Match Content to Your Website Niche
The art of getting backlinks is to create unique content that is relevant to you and your target niche.
The only way to do that is to conduct thorough research on the sites that you want to gain links from, and tailor your content to them.
Looks at what others have published and try to explore gaps on subjects that they lack content on.
You can then write content on those subjects that match their niche and needs and approach them about acquiring a link to your content.
Research has proven this to be a very successful tactic in acquiring free, high quality inbound links.
Reach Out
Once you’ve put in the effort of creating great content, it’s time to start contacting people from your outreach list.
When contacting sites, try to personalize your emails and avoid using anything that appears automated or spammy.
We all receive tons of spam in our inboxes everyday, so it’s very easy to spot.
If your email resembles anything spammy, then it will be ignored. So don’t fall into that trap!
Contact sites telling them that you enjoy their content and want to link to them firstly.
This will help break the ice and start open dialogue, as everybody loves a free link.
Once you have struck up a rapport, the you can tell them about our content and see if they will link to you.
Use Social Media
If your content is new, fresh and well structured, it’s possible that it will perform well on social media.
Use as many social media channels as possible to create awareness of your content, with the aim of getting as big an audience as possible that may share and read your content.
Unsurprisingly, Facebook is a great platform to share your content.
And if you have some budget to hand, you can even spend some of it on a paid ads campaign to boost your reach.
This will help you to reach a much larger audience far quicker.
With the increase in engagement, your content is bound to get an increase in traffic, and hopefully some links in the process.
Conclusion
Link building strategy is not just about creating backlinks to your website. You must aim to bring in new, qualified audiences as well.
This will create an incredible knock-on effect that could also improve your organic ranks on search engines.
Just remember, you are conducting link building to improve your relationships with other site owners and trying to bring in new audiences with every backlink.
If you stick to this simple and basic principle, you are doing link building the right way.