Welcome to Complete Free Link Building for SEO Course from Courses Buddy!

What is Link Building?

Building links is often considered the most challenging aspect of SEO, requiring a blend of technical expertise, creativity, and perseverance.

In simple terms, it involves persuading other websites to link to pages on your site, creating what are known as backlinks. However, many struggle with this process due to a focus on the end goal rather than the relational aspect of building connections with relevant site owners.

A better definition of link building is the process of fostering relationships with site owners in your niche who are willing to link to your content because it adds value to theirs. This approach emphasizes relationships, relevance, and value exchange.

Understanding the importance of link building is crucial, as backlinks play a significant role in search engine ranking algorithms, particularly through factors like PageRank. Learning about PageRank and its impact is essential for effectively strategizing link building efforts.

Once you grasp the fundamentals, you can explore various strategies for acquiring backlinks to your site.

Now, if you’re a beginner to link building or you’ve tried building links without much success, then this link building course is going to help you get backlinks efficiently so you can rank your pages higher on Google.

Link building has built all sorts of reputations. But there are generally two dominant views. There’s one party of SEOs that lives and dies by it. And then there’s the opposition, which considers it to be a spammy tactic.

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to a page on your website. And these hyperlinks are called backlinks. So this definition isn’t just about you getting something. It includes relationships, relevance, and a value exchange.

While the end result might make sense conceptually and seem simple, the part that people don’t understand and can’t seem to get right is this part: The Process. And this ultimately boils down to execution.

Now, since effective link building is tough, you need to understand why it’s worth the effort. In short, backlinks are used by search engines like Google to help rank web pages. And it’s been this way since 1998 when Google created PageRank.

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a mathematical formula that judges the “value of a page” by looking at the quantity and quality of other pages that link to it. Google confirms the importance of backlinks on their “How search works” page.

Under their “Ranking useful pages” heading, they state: “If other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that’s a good sign that the information is of high quality.”

We also found a clear correlation between organic traffic and backlinks from unique websites in our study of over one billion web pages. So while getting backlinks may be harder than let’s say, creating a blog post, they’re absolutely critical if you want to rank for competitive phrases.

You might be thinking, well, not to focus on link building because high-quality content always attracts links. Well, how do you get that content in front of people in the first place? Unfortunately, the concept of “if you build it and they will come” is just pure fantasy. Or you might have heard other people say “I get tons of traffic without building backlinks, so no need to go through the struggle.”

Yes, it’s possible to rank pages without backlinks, but let me say this one more time. Backlinks are absolutely critical, if you want to rank for competitive phrases. And competitive phrases are usually the ones that’ll drive the most traffic and revenue for your business.

For example, queries related to SEO are extremely competitive, but they’re also very lucrative.

So, people will often start with keyword research. They’ll research subtopics and create content hubs because structure is important. They’ll hit the publish button and then be like “Oh yeah, we’re going to need links to rank for these topics.”

So they look at who’s linking to the top-ranking pages for their main topics. Then they export backlink profiles, filter prospects by metrics, and then do some sort of shotgun approach where they send a gazillion emails hoping for a 0.5% link acquisition rate.

Link building is a numbers game. You just got to keep on sending those emails. Now, assuming you’re not paying for links or doing link exchanges at scale, your content should dictate your outreach pitches. Your content should dictate your outreach pitches.

Your content is actually what gives you a good reason to contact someone and ask for a link. It sets context for your first conversation around a common interest or belief. I don’t think we should be bragging about 0.5% link acquisition rates because it doesn’t have to be this painful or spammy.

Well, I’m not saying that paying for links or doing link exchanges are ineffective. These are just blatantly against Google’s terms of service.   

Your content type matters in terms of success rates. As a very general rule of thumb, informational content like how-tos, tutorials and data studies are going to be easier to get links to than product pages, affiliate posts, or anything commercial for that matter. Why? Because there are a lot more opportunities to bake “value” into informational content. And again, “value” should be tied to your pitch angles.

Whereas commercial content is tougher to insert value, specifically for things like product pages, where the only real beneficiary of “value” is the recipient of the link. This is only meant to be a foundational lesson, I won’t expand on baking value into informational content right now, because first, we need to understand why people link to pages.

Why do people link to pages? Actually, seeing as a link is essentially an author sharing information through their website with web visitors, it’s easiest if we ask ourselves. Why do people share the things they share?

So as an example, a friend might share the latest news article or recipe because they recently had a conversation about it. Parents share things with kids to sometimes pass down nuggets of wisdom. Kids often share things with parents seeking wisdom or expressing a complaint. In all of these examples, there’s a relationship.

Now, if we put this in the context of link building, why does an author share another person’s page via. a hyperlink with their readers who are mostly anonymous strangers?

While there’s no set list of reasons, here are some common ones.

1. They link to pages to reference or support their point. They link to pages to reference Statistics are probably the most common.

2. They reference something they don’t need or want to expand on. 

For example, teamwork.com wrote this guide on SEO project management. And under the heading “What is SEO project management,” they say, “An SEO campaign encompasses various tasks such as technical SEO, a content audit, keyword research, etc. And for each area of SEO, they’ve linked to a guide, including our post on keyword research.

For a topic like SEO project management, there’s no point in expanding on these techniques because it’s easier to direct readers to a place where they can learn more if they want to.

3. It makes them look good. People often link to things like high profile mentions because it helps them build credibility and social proof with visitors.

Basically, SEOs create content like this where they mention influential people which often “baits” people into linking to them. there’s a relationship whether it’s explicit or implicit. Implicit relationships are usually content super fans. Implicit relationships: content super fans And while it’s tough to build a content fan base, they’re super effective in link building because they trust what’s written on a site without a shadow of a doubt. When they guest post, they frequently link to you.

When they go on podcast interviews, they frequently mention your content which often gets linked to in show notes. Explicit relationships on the other hand are your online friends who you talk shop with. And what often creates these professional relationships is respect and admiration for each other’s work.

As a result, you want to link to each others’ content whether that’s on your own site or on other people’s sites. This is one of the most powerful link building advantages you can have because the bottomline is that you want to help each other succeed.

Now, a few commonalities with most of these reasons are:

a) people link to things to prove that they’re not making stuff up,

b) they link to things to add credibility to themselves or their companies, or

c) they link to things they trust.

These are 3 main things you need to consider when you’re reaching out for links. Because if you go in with your own agenda to satisfy your needs and only your needs, then your intentions will be quite clear. And your chances of getting a link without paying for it, will be very slim.

Now, this might seem all meta and unfortunately, knowing why people link usually won’t be enough to get you links. It’s just foundational for your outreach pitches.

And this list is far from exhaustive. You need to dig into the data. And the best place to start is by analyzing how similar pages got their links. Because by understanding the “how,” you’re able to infer the “why” which also helps to form

How similar pages get their links your angles of attack for your link outreach pitches.

This is a super important skill to have because if you understand how a page got its links, then you’ll have direction in terms of how to replicate that link profile.

Finding a Competitor

So the first thing we need to do is find a competing page to analyze. Now, if your page is targeting a topic with the intent to rank, a good place to start finding competitors are the top 10 ranking pages for your target query. 

Afterall, backlinks are likely a reason for their high ranking position, especially if it’s a competitive non-local, non-freshness-dependent query.

Topics for linkable assets often have no search volume, but they have the potential to earn massive amounts of links because of their appeal. And then SEOs will add internal links from these pages to more commercial pages, passing PageRank.

Now, if you’re working on a linkable asset, chances are you fall into 1 of 2 categories.

Category 1: you were inspired from another page that’s generated a ton of links and you want to create a similar page. If that’s the case, then you already know the URL of your competing page.

Finding a Linkable Asset

Now, if you’re in category 2, you know you want to create a linkable asset, but you don’t know the exact angle you’ll be going with.

For example, if you have a personal finance site, you can start with a broad search like “personal finance.” Next, I’ll set a referring domains filter to narrow in on pages that have at least 100 referring domains. And to filter out a lot of low-quality results, I’ll exclude subdomains.

As a final measure, I’ll actually set a page traffic filter to only show pages that have a maximum value of 1,000 organic visits. Meaning, we don’t want to see pages that get a ton of search traffic because these are likely ones that you’ve discovered through keyword research.

Now, from here, you just need to skim through the results and look for topics that might inspire you. And I know that “finding inspiration” sounds kind of cliché, but this is where your expertise and creativity will guide you to your idea.

Also, design and UX would probably be a top priority to make this information searchable and easy to digest. Now would this work to generate a ton of links?

No one really knows. And that’s the thing about link building.

We need to make informed decisions based on a blend of data, creativity and some common sense. And by ensuring that your content supports both your link outreach pitches and the reason why people link to a page, you’ll increase your chances of having more successful campaigns.

How to Find Your Seed Prospects

Well, I’ve structured this lesson in three lessons where each lesson represents a step in creating personalized and scalable link building campaigns.

Step 1 is to find your seed prospects, which is what this lesson is all about.

Step 2 is to find lookalike prospects based on your seeds, which will broaden the scope of your link building campaign.

Step 3 is to segment your prospects which will help you scale your campaigns in a personalized way.

Seed prospects are simply people who link to a page for a specific reason. 

For example, did they link because of a specific  point that was made in the content, is it because they like the brand, or was it something else? Now, finding seed prospects is important because it’ll do two things for you.

1. You’ll understand why people are linking to a page, and

2. Because you know why, you’ll know how to approach them in your outreach pitch.

Now, the most important skill for a prospector to have when it comes to finding seed prospects is the ability to identify patterns. And by pattern, I’m referring to common reasons for linking or a commonality among linking pages.

It’s really just about looking for patterns in three places when analyzing a competing page’s link profile. And these places are:

The context of the backlinks, which help you understand why people are linking to a page. And we’ll specifically be looking at anchors and surrounding text. 

The referring pages’ titles which tells you where their links are coming from and/or the types of pages they’re coming from. And the actual content, which tells you what your email pitch will be based on.

We need to look for a commonality that can potentially expand our pool of prospects. And that commonality is in the titles of referring pages.

Alright, the third place to look for patterns is the actual content itself. And the easiest thing you can look for is incorrect, dangerous, or outdated recommendations. Now, this one is quite situational but nevertheless, it’s something worth paying attention to because it works pretty well.

We’re going to talk about who you should contact with your link outreach pitches. Generally speaking, you’ll want to contact one of these four people:

The author; editor; marketing or content marketing manager; or a webmaster. And if you can’t find contacts for any of these people, a last resort may be to reach out to a generic email like support@  or contact@ or help@ or whatever.

Now, in order to understand who you should contact, you need to consider these two things:

1. The goal you’re trying to achieve; and

2. The size of the company.

Let’s say you’re pitching a guest post. Your goal is to have someone within a company give you the “OK” to publish your content there. Now, you wouldn’t contact an author from the blog or a webmaster because they’re not going to be the decision makers when it comes to having guest writers.

You’ll probably want to contact the editor. The size of the company can also play an impact on who you contact.  You would need to contact the head of content, because he’s the person who would give you the yay or nay on a guest posting opportunity.

Let’s talk about requesting edits to an existing post. Contacting the author would be perfectly reasonable because they’re the ones who wrote the content and would know it best. Contacting the editor would also make sense because they have the power to link and if given a good enough reason, they might do it.

The Bottomline is: who you contact matters.

You need to contact people who can actually add your link to their page. If they don’t have the power to do it, then your outreach pitch will be more or less pointless. Now, identifying who to contact is pretty quick and easy.

What’s arguably the most time-consuming part of the entire link building process is finding these people’s emails. And to make matters worse, you don’t even know whether these campaigns are going to convert to a good number of links. But there’s a way you can find emails quickly and test your campaigns without investing a ton of time into them. It’s called the Blitz list. 

The Blitz List

A blitz list is simply a fully “ready-to-send” outreach list which is generated based on a sample of your vetted prospects. This is the key to testing outreach campaigns efficiently because the blitz list serves two distinct purposes.

1. It’s going to save you a ton of time from finding emails because it’s all done programmatically. And,

2. because only a sample of your big prospects list will be contacted, it’s going to help you validate your outreach pitch.

Basically, you’ll get an idea of how successful your campaign will be in under an hour so you can make an educated decision of whether  it’s worth continuing with the campaign, pivoting, or canceling it altogether. 

Now, before we get to this scaling process, let’s briefly look at how single emails are usually found. So assuming you’re contacting the author of a post, you’d take that author’s name and run a search through an email finding tool like Hunter. And if you were taking an extra step to clean your list of prospects, you’d verify that the email is deliverable using a tool like Neverbounce.

When you’re finding someone that’s not the author, the process takes significantly longer. You might look through a team page or the employee directory on LinkedIn to find the most appropriate contact. Then you’d have to run the names and domains through Hunter and validate again with Neverbounce. Now, assuming there is no team page or employee directory, you might look at their Facebook About page or a Terms and Conditions page only to find generic email addresses. And by this point, if we’re being honest, we’re kind of getting desperate.

The process of finding and validating email  addresses is extremely painful and time-consuming, which is why people look to networks like Upwork and Mechanical Turk to get people who will find emails for you. 

Some freelancers will find people’s personal email addresses like a gmail address, but you shouldn’t be contacting them there unless it’s stated on their site. Others will provide lists of invalid email addresses or generic email addresses when there are better options. Also, human error is real.

Well, for those of you with deep pockets, you might do it in-house where your link builders create content, find prospects, vet them, find the emails, and then send the outreach pitch. The quality is usually much better, but it’s a super inefficient way to build links. So is good quality email finding at affordable rates a lost cause? No, because there’s the blitz list which is going to help you find valid email addresses programmatically.

Now, at a high level, you run your list of URLs through Hunter’s Author API, where Hunter will search for the author of the page and show you the email address if it exists. Then you use Never Bounce’s API to validate whether the emails are likely to be deliverable or not.

To give you an understanding of the scale of this method, assuming you had a list of 1,000 prospects, it’s very possible to find 60-120 email addresses from your vetted list of prospects and start your outreach campaign, all within 15-30 minutes.

Now, there are 3 ways you can create your blitz list. The first way is to use Google Sheets.

Ideally, you’ll want the help of a developer to create some App Scripts around Hunter’s author finder call and Neverbounce’s email verification call. This will give you maximum flexibility in how you format your sheets. Now, if you want something quick and dirty, you can start by using Hunter for Sheets, which is a Google Sheets add-on made by Hunter.io.

Once you have it installed, all you need to do is go to the Finder tab, make sure author finder is selected, choose the column of your URLs in this box, and when you’re ready, hit the “Find Email Addresses” button.

Hunter will then search for author names and email addresses and print them into the corresponding cells when available. But it’s not perfect. And this is why you need to use an email verification API like Neverbounce. Again, a custom app script is ideal in this situation for the sake of speed, but if you want to go the quick and dirty route, just go to Neverbounce’s Clean tool, upload a CSV of found email addresses, and then hit the “Clean my list button.”

Once it’s completed, hit the Download button, select ‘All results’ and download your CSV file. Now, the CSV should look like this, so you can import that into Google Sheets and use the VLOOKUP function to match statuses with your found email addresses.

Alright, the second way is to create your own custom coded program. This in my opinion is the best route to go if you plan to scale email finding and have detailed specifications on how you want your workflow to go. So if you have a link building agency it is well worth the investment.

Hunter and Neverbounce’s APIs are really easy to work with and for the basic functionality of finding and verifying emails, you should be able to get a basic job done for under $50. More robust systems will obviously be much more expensive. And the third option is to use Google Sheets with a nocode tool like Zapier. This is basically like a blended version of the first two ways I showed you.

You get the simplicity of Google Sheets with the flexibility of custom coded. The downside is that it can take a while to set up if you’re not familiar with logic programming. And, you’ll have to use one of Zapier’s paid plans when Appscripts would just be a one-time fee to a developer.

After you’ve run your URLs through these APIs, you should have your blitz list of ready-to-send emails based on a small segment of your vetted list of prospects.

Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another. From the receiving end, these are often referred to as incoming links or inbound links. And from the linking side, they’re called external, outgoing or outbound links. And there are three reasons why they’re important.

First, it’s a factor that helps Google and other search engines determine which pages should rank the highest for a given query. Second, links to your website can send you more visitors through referral traffic. And third, backlinks can help search engines discover your pages faster.

Now, the easiest way to conceptualize backlinks are to think of them as votes. When a page receives a backlink, it’s essentially another website vouching for the content on the page. And the more “votes” you get from credible sources, the higher the trust. But not all backlinks are created equal.

At a basic level, there are two things that separate “good quality backlinks” from the not so great ones.

First is topical relevance. Google talks about this in their “reasonable surfer” model which explains how the likeliness of a link being clicked relates to its importance.

So let’s say that you have a web page on “How to make slime.” If you were to label this topic with a category, it would likely fall under DIY, crafts, or perhaps something for kids.

Now, assuming this page had two backlinks, one from a tech blog and another from a kid’s activity blog, the latter would hold more weight since there’s higher topical relevance from the page and domain.

Second is authority. When I’m talking about “authority,” I’m referring to the quality and quantity of backlinks from the referring websites and pages. Google places a score on this called “PageRank.” 

How to Check Backlinks

There are many ways but you can do this for free. Have you heard of Google Search Console? Yes. No. Yes. Don’t worry, if you haven’t already set up an account, just go through the verification process to prove that you own the site. 

Then go to the Links report. Here, you will see your pages that have gotten the most links. And the websites that have linked to your site the most, as well as the link texts that are most frequently used, also known as anchor text.

To see the actual web pages linking to you, click on the More button here. Then click on a page you want to investigate, so I’ll click on our post on free keyword research tools. You can then click on any of the linking websites to see the exact pages where they’re linking from.

This brings us to the final part: how do you get backlinks?

How to Get Backlinks

Well, there are three ways to get BACKLINKS. You can create them, buy them, or earn them. Let’s go through each method. Creating backlinks means to manually add links to your site. This can be done by adding your website to directories, leaving comments on blogs, or adding a website to your social media profile.

Anyone can do this with minimal effort, so they’re not that effective from an SEO and ranking perspective. 

Buying backlinks is exactly as it sounds. You pay webmasters or authors a fee and in return, they’ll link back to a page on your site. Now, this is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can potentially result in a penalty. That could be anything from losing ranking positions or even worse, getting your pages removed from Google’s search index. 

Also, buying links isn’t exactly cheap.

The final way to get backlinks is to earn them. And this is usually done by emailing other website owners and editors and asking them to link to you. This is the hardest method of the three, but generally speaking, the harder it is to obtain a link, the more valuable it’ll be. And for that reason, we’ll be focusing on earning backlinks through email outreach.

How to Define Good Backlinks?

Remember, not all links are created equal. Some will help propel your pages to the top of Google, while others can actually hurt your site. So what makes a link actually good?

To simplify it as much as possible, there are two main categories you should look at. First is relevance. Ideally, you want to get backlinks from relevant websites and pages. For example, let’s say you have a page on the best USB microphones. Getting a link from a page on the topic of video conferencing would be much more relevant than a link on a page about gardening tips. And this also plays out at the website level.

Getting a link from a tech site like Cnet would likely carry more weight than one from a recipe site like All Recipes.

The second category is authoritativeness. Now, if you’re unfamiliar with “authority” in the context of link building, it basically represents the so-called “link power” a web page has. And this relates to how PageRank works.

As we all know, both the quantity and quality of links matter. So the more quality links a page gets, the more PageRank it earns. Now, PageRank doesn’t appear out of thin air. It comes from other pages.

This means that pages with authority can pass it to other pages through hyperlinks. So the more PageRank a linking page has, the more it can pass to those outbound links. For example, let’s say page C has two links: one from page A and one from page B. Page A is stronger than page B and also has fewer outgoing links. Feed this information into the PageRank algorithm, and you get the PageRank of page C.

Now, this is obviously a simplified version of how PageRank works, but the key point here is that you want to get links from high-authority pages because they’ll likely have the greatest impact on your rankings.

Google doesn’t provide PageRank or website authority scores. 

Hyperlink Structure and Attribute

So let’s break down the anatomy of a hyperlink and the impact each part has on SEO. There are three basic parts to a link that matter in SEO. The destination URL, anchor text, and the “rel” attribute or lack of one.

The destination URL is simply the URL the person will visit when the link is clicked. The second part of a link is the anchor text. The anchor text is the clickable word, phrase, or image attached to the link.

Google uses anchor texts to better understand what a page is about and what terms it should rank for. But building lots of links with keyword-rich anchors is classified as a link scheme, and may result in a Google penalty as it looks unnatural.

People often use anchors such as the company’s brand name, the title of the page, the URL, or phrases like “click here.” With most earned links, you have very little or no control over the anchor text, so over-optimization isn’t something you really need to worry about.

And the last part is the “rel” attribute. Some links contain a “rel” attribute, which is intended to tell crawlers the relationship between the linking page and the linked page. And the three “rel” values that you should know about when it comes to link building are “nofollow,” “UGC,” and “sponsored.”

For your information, nofollow links told Google that the linking page would rather not associate themselves with the linked page. And for that reason, Google didn’t transfer “authority” through those links.

But then Google added a couple other “rel” values: “UGC,” which stands for “user-generated content,” and “sponsored,” which signifies a paid link. They also announced that going forward, they would look at these link attributes as “hints,” meaning, they may pass value through them at their discretion.

Now, if a link doesn’t have any of these “rel” values, then it would be called a “followed” link. Meaning, the link can pass PageRank and help boost your rankings.

I’d recommend focusing on building “followed” links, although that’s only partially within your control.

One other thing I want to touch on is link placement. Prominent links are more likely to be clicked, and it’s believed that Google takes this into account when determining how much authority a link transfers. For instance, an editorial link is more likely to be clicked than a link in the footer. So, all else being equal, the former would be better than the latter.

Importance of a Pitch for the Outreach 

Alright, so by now, you should have a general overview of the more technical things that are involved in link building. But as I mentioned, there’s also a creative part that’s required. And by creative, I’m talking about the content creative as well as getting creative with your email pitch.

Now, with enough willpower and determination, it’s possible to build links to any kind of page. But life is a lot easier when you have something that people actually want to link to.

So let’s talk about the content side of things first. There are a couple of key attributes that linkable content has. First, it’s usually non-commercial.

Commercial content, like product pages from an ecommerce store or sales pages, are tougher to get links to. Why? Because no one wants to contribute to your bank account without some kind of compensation or at the very least, having first-hand experience with your products or services.

So by creating non-commercial content, with high utility, you’re creating something that’s more deserving of a link. That leads us into the second attribute.

Linkable content is helpful. People want to link to helpful content because it directs their audience to resources that complement their own. And helpful content can be in all different forms. For instance, well-written blog posts with factual information can get lots of links.

Bottomline is: if your content is a helpful resource for their audience or it supports arguments they’re making like a stat or fact, then your chances of earning backlinks increases.

Now, the second part to link building where creativity is required is the pitch. Building links means you need to reach out to authors and editors and ask them to link to you. Just like in sales, these people are called “prospects.” It’s called a “pitch” for a reason. You can’t just ask people to link to you without a good reason. Let me put this into perspective.

A compelling pitch includes a good reason for contact, personalization, and a clear value exchange. For instance, mentioning past connections or offering benefits like tax receipts can enhance the pitch and increase conversion rates.

But remember, exchanging links for money or doing excessive link exchanges is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The same goes for sending products to a person in exchange for a backlink. So you’d need to get creative here to stay in line with the rules.

Link building is both an art and a science.

Pitches are also highly situational and will vary from person to person. But there are quite a few link building strategies that are streamlined and have been proven to work time and time again.

So let’s go through some of these strategies and I’ll explain what it is, why it works, and how you can do it.

The first link building strategy is guest blogging. Guest blogging is when you create content for another website. And the reason why this strategy works is because there’s a clear value exchange.

They get great content for free, and almost always, you should be able to get a link back to your site, whether that be within the content or in the author bio. So the way guest blogging works is to find other blogs in your industry, pitch and agree on a relevant topic, and then you would write a post for them.

Resource Page Link Building

The next link building tactic is called resource page link building. This is where you get backlinks from web pages that curate and link out to useful industry resources. This strategy works because the sole purpose of the pages’ existence is to link out to helpful and useful resources. So if your content is great and you bring it to their attention, you’re actually helping them fulfill the page’s purpose. 

The basic process is simple. First, you find industry resource pages, then you reach out to them and suggest your resource for inclusion. The easiest way to find relevant pages is to search in Google with a query like intitle:resources inurl:resources.html and then a phrase related to your topic.

Visit the pages and see if they’re actually resource pages that link out to other external pages. Then it’s just a matter of reaching out to the ones you want to be mentioned.

Broken Link Building

The next link building strategy is broken link building. Broken link building is a tactic where you find a dead link on a page, create your own page on that topic, then ask everyone linking to the dead resource to link to your page instead.  The reason why it works is because webmasters who care about their site don’t want to lead their visitors to broken pages. So, they’ll replace the dead link with yours.

Link Building with HARO

The next link building strategy is to use HARO. HARO is a website that connects journalists with sources and sources with journalists. Basically you’ll get emails where journalists from media outlets are requesting information on a specific topic.

Just filter through the topics and if you find something where you can add value, respond to the journalist with your expert opinion. And if they use you as a source, they’ll usually link back to your site. You’re exchanging your knowledge for a mention and usually a link from an authoritative site.

Link building is a critical aspect of SEO, crucial for enhancing organic traffic and improving search engine rankings. However, many struggle to secure quality backlinks effectively. In this guide, we’ll explore proven tactics to help you acquire your first 100 backlinks.

Why Aim for 100 Backlinks?

While the number 100 may seem arbitrary, it signifies a substantial milestone in link building, often resulting in a significant increase in organic traffic. Examples from various niches demonstrate the impact of achieving this goal. Building backlinks requires strategic planning and execution. We’ll delve into tried-and-tested methods to help you navigate this process effectively.

Leverage Existing Communities and Organizations

Begin by tapping into communities or organizations you’re already part of. These connections can provide valuable opportunities for acquiring relevant backlinks with minimal effort.

Utilize HARO for Authoritative Backlinks

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) offers a platform to connect journalists with credible sources. By responding to relevant queries, you can secure high-quality backlinks from reputable publications.

Engage in Guest Posting

Guest posting allows you to contribute valuable content to other websites in exchange for backlinks. Identify websites that accept guest posts within your niche and leverage this opportunity to showcase your expertise.

Participate in Podcast Interviews

Podcast interviews offer a platform to showcase your expertise and reach a broader audience. By strategically targeting podcasts relevant to your niche, you can secure backlinks while expanding your network.

Conduct Email Outreach for Top Content

Focus your outreach efforts on promoting your best-performing content. By highlighting unique and insightful resources, you can attract backlinks from interested parties within your industry.

Internal linking is arguably the most underrated SEO strategy. You don’t have to ask anyone to link to you, it’s completely free with a 100% success rate, and internal links can actually help you rank higher in Google.

So, I’m going to show you how to use internal links to rank higher in Google. 

If you’re new to SEO, internal links are simply links from one page to another on the same website. And they’re important for three main reasons. First, they help search engines like Google discover new pages so they can be added to their index.

Second, internal links help pass PageRank around your site, effectively “powering” other pages. And if you’re unfamiliar with PageRank, it’s a mathematical formula that tries to determine the “value of a page.”

Google has stated that even after 18 years, they continue to utilize PageRank as a factor in ranking web pages.

And third, internal links help search engines to better understand what a page is about. They do this by looking at anchor texts and the text that surrounds the link. So with these three things in mind – crawlability, authority, and relevance. Let’s go through a few ways you can boost your rankings with internal links.

Site Structure

The first way is to create a logical hierarchy in your site structure. Think of site structure as a mindmap. At the top, you’d have your homepage. Then you’d probably have main topics that branch out from your homepage like your services page, your blog, and About page. Then from these main topics, you’d probably have even more branches to other pages.

Structure helps search engines to understand the relationship between these pages, where branches are created using internal links. Well, this mindmap is pretty basic and doesn’t really give that much information to search engines.

Content Hubs

Content hubs are interlinked collections of content about a similar topic. Basically, you create multiple pages on a topic and its subtopics, then interlink between the pages. So if we zoom into the link building guide, you might add more pages, like one about broken link building, resource page link building, guest posting, and blogger outreach.

To create relationships between these posts, you could link to these posts from your link building guide and also link from your posts to your link building guide. Not only does this help to create relevance between pages, but as each of these pages get backlinks, PageRank will flow to and from each page within the hub, helping all of your pages rank higher in Google.

Site Search Operator

Content hubs aren’t for everyone. And if you’ve already created a ton of pages without any kind of structure in mind, there are three easy and free ways you can find internal linking opportunities.

The first way is to use the “site” search operator in Google. So let’s say we wanted to add internal links to our guide on search intent. I’ll go to Google and search for a site:coursesbuddy.com/blog and then add the phrase, “search intent” wrapped in quotes. And now you can see all pages on our blog that mention this phrase.

Link Authority Report

The last method is to look at your site’s power pages. Naturally, some pages will earn more links than others. So they have more so-called “authority” they can pass to other pages on your website.

Well, if you have an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account, you can do this for free. Just go to Site Explorer and enter your domain. Then go to the Best by links report. Here, you’ll see the pages on your site ordered by URL Rating, which represents the overall strength of a page’s backlink profile. Just skim through your pages and see if there are any relevant pages where you’d want to link from. Now, whichever method you decide to use, the most important thing to remember is that you don’t need to force internal links. 

So I wouldn’t bother linking from irrelevant pages. And that also means that you don’t need to overdo it.

It’s often easy for established sites to build backlinks without much effort. But what if you have a brand new website or if people don’t really know who you are in your industry? So assuming you’re starting with zero links pointing at your site, the first thing I’d focus on is building links to your home page. There are 3 strategies that I find work really well.

Build Citations

The first method is to build citations and create social media accounts to boost trust signals. Citations are online mentions of your business and they’re most commonly used in local SEO. So if you’re a local business, you’d basically find business directories and add your business name, address, and phone number, which are collectively known as NAP.

A 2018 study conducted by Moz revealed that citation signals play a significant role in improving the ranking of websites in both map pack and organic search results. These signals often consist of nofollow links, indicating that their purpose is not to enhance website or page-level authority. Instead, they serve to authenticate the existence of a legitimate business.

A great way to find these opportunities is to search in Google for something like “your city” and “your job.” From here, copy down a few domains from local competitors, ignoring anything like directories.

Next, we’ll utilize Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool, which reveals the websites linking to one or more of our target URLs. I’m inputting the homepage URLs of my plumbing competitors. Finally, I’ll set the mode to URL to focus on identifying websites linked to their homepages, as this is typically where the link will direct. Let’s proceed with the search.

The second thing you’ll want to do is build authority links to your homepage. To do this, I like using Help a Reporter Out, also known as HARO. HARO is a company that connects journalists to sources and sources to journalists. Just sign up for an account as a “source,” and you’ll get emails with a list of queries from journalists at various publications.

There are journalists from places like Forbes, The New York Times, Huffington Post and more. Responding to queries quickly and concisely can land you mentions and links to both your homepage and/or social profiles.

The third place that I think is absolutely awesome for homepage links are Podcasts. Podcasts are hot and there are a ton of them in almost every industry. Best of all, podcasters are always on the lookout for interesting guests that can provide value to their audience. And for almost every podcast I’ve seen, they’ll provide a link to the guest’s homepage as well as other resources that come up throughout the interview.

Not only are podcasts a great source for links, but they continue to send us new customers every month. Doing these three activities are a great way to build high quality homepage links as well as to boost trust signals.

Now, let’s move onto some page-level link building strategies because links to your homepage alone won’t be enough to build sustainable and growing traffic. One of my favorite strategies is resource page link building.

Resource Pages

This is where you get backlinks from web pages that curate and link out to useful industry resources. And the sole purpose of their existence is to link out to other relevant pages, making them easy links to get.

What I love about this strategy is that you can branch out to pages on broader topics. So let’s say you had a blog post on crossfit exercises. With a lot of link building tactics, you’d probably have to find a page where they mention something super-relevant, like crossfit. But with resource page link building, you can try and get links on pages that cover broader topics like fitness, weight loss, and exercise.

So just go to Google and search for something like inurl:resources.html intitle:fitness

Just visit the pages, make sure they’re actually resource pages and link out to external resources, and pitch your content appropriately.

Skyscraper

Another effective link building approach worth considering is the Skyscraper Technique. This method follows a straightforward process: first, identify a page with a substantial number of backlinks; next, enhance the content on that topic; finally, engage with those linking to the original page and request them to link to your improved version.

A fundamental aspect of the Skyscraper Technique involves identifying pages with a significant number of inbound links.

As I know, the majority of pages that don’t rank on a website are due to a lack of links more than anything else.

The first thing you should do is look at who’s linking to the top 10 ranking pages for your target keyword. Now, these prospects are relevant because they’re already linking to other pages on the same or a similar topic.  So a free way to find out who’s linking to them is to run a search on Google for your target keyword. So let’s say that I wanted to rank for “best hiking backpacks.”

Next, you can copy down the URLs for the top ranking pages and then paste each one separately into Ahrefs’ free backlink checker. With the free tool, you’ll be able to see the top 100 backlinks pointing at the page. Now, if you have an Ahrefs’ account, then just go to Keywords Explorer, search for your target keyword, and scroll to the bottom of the page.

To analyze each backlink profile, click on the number in the Backlinks column, make sure you set the filter to “Group similar,” which will weed out a lot of duplicate links from places like sidebars and footers, and then export the results. Filter for some good link prospects and you can start pitching your content.

Now, while these prospects are the easiest to find, you’ll need to come up with a good value-packed angle for your outreach emails.

Google’s ranking algorithm is complex. Just because you have more links, it doesn’t mean you’ll rank higher than competing pages. There are other elements that come into play like on-page SEO, quality of content, and content freshness to name a few.

So instead of looking at just the Top 10 ranking pages, we’re going to look at all articles on the same topic that have links worth pursuing. To do this, go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, and search for your target keyword. Let’s go with the “best hiking backpacks” example again. Finally, I’ll set it to a title search.

Now, since we’re looking for link prospects, let’s set a filter to only show pages that have at least five referring domains, meaning at least five links from unique websites. And we now have around 25 pages that all have links, and best of all, you’re going to see pages taking slightly different angles like “for women” and “for kids,” which we could easily add as subsections in our post. Here’s another example of a perfectly good place to look.

Now, quite often, “best [product name]”-type posts need to be updated at least every year since new manufacturers are always releasing new products. And if we look at the traffic history graph, you’ll see that this page was getting more and more traffic until 2019 hit. And then it just dropped.

Searchers aren’t interested in last year’s best hiking backpacks anymore. So they’re losing traffic, which could also act as an outreach angle for you. Rinse and repeat this for any pages that you want to build backlinks to, and you should be able to expand your list of link prospects.

Another great way to find link prospects is to look at your competitors’ newest links and then pitch those sites for guest posts. The way guest post prospecting normally works is you find a list of relevant websites and you pitch them content to post on their site.

Normally, you’ll get a link back to your site whether that be within the content or in the author bio. Now, a problem with this method is that you’re often pitching sites that are no longer active. So the way we can solve this problem is by looking at who has recently linked to your competitors. And this should be a good sign that the site is still active today.

Another great way to build links to existing content is to do resource page link building Resource pages in the context of SEO, curate and link to the best resources on a specific topic. And the reason why it’s so effective is because that’s what these pages were built for.

To literally link to other topically relevant pages. The great thing about this tactic for existing content is that you can target pages that are slightly on a broader topic. For example, if you’re trying to build links to an article targeting the query, “how to train for a half marathon,” you don’t need to find pages talking about marathon training like you would normally do for other link-building strategies. Instead, start thinking of broad niches related to your topic like “fitness,” “exercise,” “endurance training,” and so on.

After you have your list, go to Google and search for something like: inurl:links.html and intitle:your broad niche keyword, so in my case “fitness.”

Google will show pages where “links.html” is in the URL, which is a common footprint for resource pages and where the titles of those pages have the word “fitness” in them. Visit the pages to make sure they’re resource pages you’d want to get mentioned on.

These represent only a handful of effective link building strategies tailored to bolstering backlinks to your current content. However, not every page warrants the effort of link building. In reality, some pages may be better off removed altogether or merged and redirected elsewhere.

High-quality backlinks!? What does that even mean? Well, Google hints that links from “prominent websites” is a good sign that information is well trusted. But that’s kind of vague too. The thing is that not all backlinks are created equal.

Some help your pages rank higher in Google, others will seem like they’re doing absolutely nothing, and some may actually hurt your rankings. If you’re doing any kind of link building, I’m guessing you’ve done something like this. First, you start with keyword research and of course you’d look at the number of links that are pointing at the top-ranking pages.

So what you need to do is identify your competitor’s high-quality backlinks so you can know which pages will be worth getting a link from. And the way you’re going to do that is by asking yourself a series of questions.

First, ask yourself, is the site’s content relevant to my niche? Imagine this for a second. You ask two friends for a recommendation for the best Italian restaurant in the city. One of your friends is a chef at an upscale Italian restaurant and the other is a basketball coach who’s allergic to tomatoes. Who’s opinion would you hold higher?

Probably the chef since you know that they have experience with Italian cuisine. In the same way, links from a website about Italian food, Italy, or recipes would hold more weight than links from sites about technology or marketing.

Another thing to consider is “locational” relevance. For example, if you’re a Toronto based photographer you’d probably want to rank your pages in Toronto and the surrounding area. After all, that’s where the bulk of your customers will likely be.

So in my opinion, I think it’d also be worth building links from websites about Toronto. That might be from non-competing Toronto-based wedding vendors, or Toronto lifestyle blogs. Well, I don’t really use website authority as a main metric. Instead, I use it to gauge if these people have actually earned backlinks throughout their site. It’s also a great metric to use as an initial start for link prospecting.

It’s important to note that while this might be a good starting point, I wouldn’t recommend only reaching out to sites with a certain DR score. You have to also keep in mind that a DR-15 site today, could continually build authority over time, making your link on that page potentially more valuable in the future.

Alright, the next thing to ask yourself is: is the website getting consistent traffic from Google?

For all you know, you may be building links on sites that had previously been penalized for things like selling links. And you probably wouldn’t want your site to be associated with them. So long story short, it’s best to make sure that the site doesn’t appear to have been penalized or is getting steady organic traffic growth over time.

And getting links from pages with traffic can be good for a couple of reasons. First, you know that the page is likely still in Google’s good books because if they’re getting search traffic, then they’re ranking. And second, the more traffic a linking page gets, the better your chances of getting more referral traffic.

The next question is: are most external links on their site nofollowed? As far as we know, links with the nofollow attribute don’t pass value. So you wouldn’t want to waste time building nofollow links.

For example, let’s say that you’re running a guest posting campaign where you plan to link back to one of your resources. You can go to a web page, right-click on an external link, and then use Chrome’s “Inspect element” feature to see the HTML code of that link. And if you see a rel=”nofollow” tag, there’s a decent chance they may nofollow a lot of other external links on their site.

Finally, ask yourself, are they linking out to too many pages? And for me, this metric plays a big role when it comes to resource page link building. When a page has a ton of external links on their page, less authority is transferred via each external link. You probably don’t want links from pages that are linking to a thousand other pages. 

Now, should you only go for links that match all of the criteria that we’ve talked about? I’d say no because you’d be limiting your pool of prospects a bit too much. Instead, use these as guidelines to determine the amount of time and effort you’re willing to put into gaining links from certain pages and sites. And also use them to find which sites you’ll want to avoid building links on.

Why You’re not Getting Backlinks and How to Fix It

If you’re struggling to get backlinks, I’m going to show you why people won’t link to you and how to fix that. And a lot of this boils down to human psychology. If you’re contacting people and asking for links without a good reason, then you will be and should be ignored. Now, before we get into the link building and outreach mistakes that prevent good people like you from getting more backlinks.

First Mistake

The biggest mistakes I see SEOs making time and time again. The first mistake is that you’re not doing email outreach. I completely understand that you might feel nervous or feel like you’re bothering people by sending cold emails.

If you’re not actively promoting your content, how do you expect people to find it or link to it? Email outreach is an effective and affordable way to connect with people who can give you backlinks. And it doesn’t have to be disruptive.

Second Mistake

The second reason why you’re not getting links is because you’re robotically copying and pasting people’s templates. You can Google something like “link building templates,” and I’m sure you’ll find a ton of real examples. If these “templates” are working so well and consistently, why aren’t they working for you?

No, I’m not questioning anyone’s moral ethics, but one of two things likely happened. First, they used to work super well, but they’ve lost their effectiveness. So you’re late to the party. And second, what works on one person or in one industry might not work on the next.

I’m sure you’ve received templated emails like this that are basically saying, Hey, I found your site. You linked to my competitor. I published the same article but it’s going to take you longer to read. But believe me, it’s worth it. Now, can you link to me?

Emails should sound like they’re coming from a human being. They shouldn’t sound needy or like you’re asking a friend for a favor. Cold outreach means they’re not your friends. So instead, adopt the mentality of starting a relationship.

Third Mistake 

The third thing preventing you from getting links is that you’re sending an email without good reason. Here are a few reasonable “excuses,” you can use to contact someone when it comes to link building. They mentioned you, but didn’t link to you, so you’re contacting them to say thanks. At this point, they know you and probably like you.

They published or linked to inaccurate or outdated information, so you want to bring new research to light. They’re passionate about a topic and you have something unique to share with them that they’ll love. They have an issue with their page or website like a broken link that you want to bring to their attention.

This list is by no means exhaustive as outreach is situational, but they’re reasons that I personally think are fine.  Now, a good reason for contact isn’t going to be enough to earn you a link. There are other parts of your email that will impact your conversion rate.

I’m not saying you have to offer an incentive like money. In fact, buying backlinks is against Google’s Terms of Service. 

Instead, I’ve found offering something without expectation of getting a link to work best. And this is because of a social psychology principle called “the rule of reciprocity.” Reciprocity suggests that people want to respond to a positive action with another positive action. You might offer to share their content on social media, provide custom images to go with their imageless post, or use your talents to get their attention.

Negotiation is a critical skill when it comes to link building. And the best place to start is to try and understand what they want. If you don’t offer anything else that could be mutually beneficial, then you might kill some perfectly good link opportunities.

Fourth Mistake

The next reason why you’re not getting links is because you’re sending your pitches to the wrong people. In order to get link placements, you need to find people that can make changes or decisions for their site.

Generally speaking, you’ll need to look for the most appropriate contact in this order: Editors, authors who work for the company, content marketing managers, webmasters, and then generic emails as a last resort. If the person can’t make changes to the site, then they’re probably not the best person to contact. But this often comes down to the size of the company.

So in order to find the best person to contact, look through About and Team pages and look for editors or people with the word “content” in their name. If you can’t find anyone appropriate, then look to the company LinkedIn page, and search through the company directory.

Whereas, if you’re contacting a single-author site owner, contacting the owner would probably be your best bet. Use your best judgment rather than taking the first email you find.

Fifth Mistake

Next up is that you’re sending emails to the wrong email address. Email finding tools like Hunter are great for email discovery. But as far as I’m aware, they often work on “patterns,” meaning the emails are educated guesses based on other emails in their database.

Sixth Mistake

Last but certainly not least, you think your content is great when it’s actually not. Rehashing someone else’s information and making it longer doesn’t mean that it’s great content. Unfortunately, “quality content,” is impossible to quantify since it’s somewhat subjective. And it’s also very situational. But I do want to give my subjective view of objectively good content.

Here’s my take on the traits that make content great:

1. Great content solves problems and fulfills the reason why someone visits your page.

2. Great content is trustworthy. Let’s say you have an article on investing.

Are you and/or the sources you’re linking to credible? Anything that can impact people’s health, wealth, or happiness, should be thoroughly researched and ideally written by professionals when possible. Afterall, you could be dealing with a person’s livelihood. I also think this applies heavily to affiliate marketers.

Anyone and everyone can look up the 10 most expensive or popular products on Amazon and incorporate them into a “best of” post. But there are companies like the Wire Cutter who are actually buying these products, setting a list of quantifiable criteria, testing, and then reporting the results.

3. Great content incorporates media that enhances the user’s experience. For example, if you’re talking about the ripening process of strawberries, don’t just throw in a stock photo of a strawberry. Everyone knows what they look like. Show a supporting gif like this that really illustrates what you’re explaining.

4. Great content is unbiased or honestly biased. Some time back, we undertook a study comparing Wix SEO with WordPress SEO. To ensure impartiality, I enlisted the help of our data scientist to present all the findings in simple language. 

Given my potential bias, I acted as the messenger rather than the creator of the conclusions.

In this lesson, we’ll cover 3 link outreach approaches, and how to write these emails for a link building campaign. So let’s get this lesson started and talk about the different link outreach approaches and their pros and cons.

Shotgun Approach

There are traditionally two approaches to outreach. The first is the shotgun approach. This is when you send the exact same email to all prospects and the only personalization field might be the prospect’s name. The main pro of this method is that it’s fast because it basically removes the vetting stage of the link building process.

As for cons, you’ll naturally spam people, burn bridges or taint your brand’s reputation, risk building links on sites you wouldn’t typically want them on, and you’ll likely burn email addresses which can be a real problem if you’re building links at scale.

The shotgun approach is a pure numbers game and it’s worked effectively for a lot of people. But personally, it’s not for me because the potential negative impacts on the brand far outweigh any “quick wins” you might get from it.

Sniper Approach

This is literally the opposite of the shotgun approach. The sniper approach is when you carefully pick pages and websites you want to get a link from. And rather than using cookie-cutter email templates, you’ll send personalized emails where your first contact may be to start a conversation rather than to get a link.

The pros are that you’ll get better links, potentially start relationships that go beyond the one off link, and your link acquisition rates will probably be higher. As for the cons: it’s not scalable at all; it can potentially take months to get a link. And it requires above average skills in negotiation, persuasion, and actually understanding people’s desires.

Pure sniper outreach is too slow to grow in a popular industry where links are a requirement. But, I’ll still do it for links that are tough to get or where the relationship is more important than the link itself. Now, you don’t have to use either of these approaches exclusively – or any of them for that matter.

Hybrid Approach

And if you followed along with this method, then you’ll see that neither of these outreach approaches are optimal. For example, if you were to use the shotgun approach for these prospects, it wouldn’t make much sense because then all the upfront research and segmentation work would be for nothing.

Similarly, the sniper approach doesn’t really make sense either because each segment of prospects has a lot in common. So you don’t really need to do 100% bespoke outreach for each and every prospect. And this brings us nicely onto the link outreach approach we recommend in most situations, which is the hybrid approach.

Much like the shotgun approach, you send emails to a large group of prospects. And similar to the sniper approach, the emails are personalized to a degree. And the personalization is usually based on a commonality among a segment – otherwise known as a linkable point. Hence, it’s kind of a hybrid approach to link outreach.

The pros of this method is that you’re able to send personalized emails at scale and link acquisition rates from my experience  are typically in the 5 to 12% range. As for the cons, it can be quite difficult to consistently find seed prospects that are actually good. Meaning, you need to be able to analyze data and creatively come up with angles which sometimes won’t work. 

Now, regardless of the approach you use, the anatomy of the emails should more or less be the same. It’s about finding a good reason for contact and providing a value proposition that will resonate with a cold audience and this is by far the hardest part of outreach.

The great thing about using the hybrid approach is that your linkable point will be your “good reason for contact.” For example, if they have an outdated stat, your reason for contact is to tell them about it and share new data. Or if they’ve mentioned a specific tactic like the 50/30/20 budget rule, then you can use that to set the context of the conversation.

Now, finding a value proposition that appeals to the majority is the tough part because “value” is subjective to the person receiving the email. But because the hybrid approach forces you to segment prospects. And your value propositions can be more impactful because of the similar attributes that prospects have in a given segment.

There is no set list of value propositions because it depends highly on the context of your linkable point. But a good way to start brainstorming value props is to think about how your reason for contact impacts prospects and their audiences.

So we have our reason for contact that’s going to set the context of our email. Now, how does this impact prospects and their audience? And does it impact them enough to make an edit to their post and potentially link to us? Well, if someone follows their tips, there could potentially be lost lives and lawsuits. So in my eyes, there was potential for a pretty strong pitch.

Now, pitch angles don’t always have to be about life or death. And they won’t always be this strong. But sometimes, that isn’t even necessary to get good results.

Most people won’t care because everyone has outdated content on their site, and it’s impossible to keep everything up to date at all times. So the angle we went with was to tell them that the page they’re linking to doesn’t even mention the stat and we accentuated how outdated it is.

The bottomline is: when you’re coming up with value propositions, try and brainstorm ideas by segment.

Use your reason for contact as a starting point to understand how linking to you will impact prospects and benefit their audience. It’s not an easy exercise, but you’ll find that strong value propositions that are tied to your linkable point will

a) create a very easy to write outreach email; and

b) can lead to incredible conversion rates for link acquisition.

So, when people use templates, the result is usually a robotic sounding email. And that’s likely the reason why the majority of outreach emails in your inbox seem like spam.

We’re going to talk about writing templated outreach emails that are personalized and don’t feel or sound too templated. Now, why does this matter? Well, link building is often looked at as a spammy tactic from both SEO outsiders and insiders and for good reason.

People are sending emails like this that sound like they were swiped from templates on blog posts. They’re disingenuous and clearly transactional. Now, if you’re sending these generic templated emails, your chances of standing out are slim and link building is truly only a numbers game.

Practice and feedback are what will help you get better at this skill. And for that reason, I’m going to walk you through some examples and an exercise to help you get your reps in. But before we get to this exercise, let’s talk about a typical templated email and talk about why it sounds templated.

So, a huge reason for these robotic sounding emails is that people focus on creating templates rather than writing emails. And when you work off of a template, you’re basically searching for predefined personalization fields to satisfy the template. When in reality, it should be the other way around.

For example, a template might look like this.

“Hi {name},

I was reading your post on {topic} and really liked how you mentioned {something_that_you_liked}.”

No matter what you put into these blanks, it’s going to sound unnatural. Now, a much better way to do this is to write a personalized email to one of your prospects and then extract personalization fields, if any, to see if it can be templated.

Here’s what an email might look like:

“Hey Frank, Wondering if you’ve tried broken link building since you wrote this post (in 2019 it seems). I know that the Forbes writer you mentioned said they converted links at 20%, but boy oh boy… it’s tough to believe you can still convert links like that today with BLB.”

So if we extract the personalization fields from this sample, then we’d need to find the URL of the contact’s page, the publishing date, the competing page’s company name, and the 20% part.

Now, the beautiful thing about the hybrid method is that all of these personalization fields aside from the year of publishing can be easily templated because we’re sending emails to segments. For example, our segment for the example we just went through would be people who link to Forbes’ hypothetical page on broken link building because of their 20% success rate.

Now, if we were to templatize this email, it’d look something like this:

“Hey {name},

Wondering if you’ve tried broken link building  since you wrote this post (in a year it seems)).” And we’d link to the prospect’s URL with some HTML and a merge field. And everything after that would be the same because we’re only sending this email to our 20% segment.

Now, if you struggle to write natural outreach emails, you can do this simple exercise of writing an email and extracting merge fields from it. 

Let’s dig deeper into this exercise and write an email together. But first, we need a scenario to work with. Let’s say that you have a personal finance blog  and you wrote an awesome post on budgeting. Now, as you’re researching a competing page’s link profile, you notice that a good chunk of their links are attributable to a point  around the 50/30/20 budgeting method.

Now, for illustration purposes, we’ll say that you have a way better budgeting method that you created.

First Draft

So a rough pitch angle can be something like, “the 50/30/20 budgeting rule sucks. I made this awesome new method that you’re going to love because of X Y and Z.”  Great, we have a segment to work with and it’s time to start drafting our email. The first thing to do in this exercise is to choose one prospect from your segment and write an email to them as if they’re a friend.

Now, the page is clearly recommending to use the 50/30/20 budget rule and again, our hypothetical post has a better method  – let’s call it “the 40/10/10/40 rule.”

So as a first draft, I might write:

“Yo! Quick question: I’m seeing that you recommend the 50/30/20 budget rule on your blog. Are you personally using this? Because I think it’s a super impractical way for millennials to save with mortgage payments, kids, college funds etc.

If interested, I wrote about why the 50/30/20 budget rule is impractical and an alternative method on my blog which is better for millennials (the 40/10/10/40 rule). There’s a spreadsheet in there too if you want to give it a shot.

Let me know what you think and a link to my post would be super appreciated if you agree with my method.

This is obviously far from what you might send to someone, but the point of this step is to

a) break away from templates so you sound a little bit more like yourself,  and

b) to go in with the mentality of delivering value because that’s what friends do for each other.

So I’m going to move on to step 2 which is to go through our first round of edits.

Editing

And at this stage, you’ll want to remove any empty statements, false flattery, and language you typically wouldn’t use with a stranger. So I’ll change “Yo” to “Hey Frank” and remove the “Quick question” part because it’s kind of pointless to have.

Now, this part where I say that it’s “a super impractical way to budget” comes off a bit strong and arrogant, so I’ll change it to… “Are you using this method because I’ve personally found it to be an impractical way for millennials to save with mortgage payments, kids’ college funds etc.”

And in my opinion, this “personal angle” changes the context from “people who use this method are dumb” to “it didn’t work for me.” 

The next part seems fine at first read. But the “lmk” part that comes after is a bit too informal. Plus “let me know what you think” is an empty statement. So I’ll rework this sentence to… “If you agree with my method, a mention in your post would be super appreciated.

Alright, so this looks okay for me so I’ll move on to the next step which is to ask someone for feedback. And to give you a real simulation of what this might look like, I asked my friend and outreach extraordinaire, Bibi Raven, for input.

Let’s take a look through her feedback. So in the first part, “I’m seeing that you recommend”, she says that it’s good to get straight to the point but prefers to use some sort of “nicety” comment before the intro to make it sound more genuine and not like a zillion other emails. And the example she uses is wishing people an excellent cup of coffee. Now, she’s not talking about fake flattery or anything like that.

If you’ve ever talked with Bibi, when she says these things like hope you have an excellent cup of coffee, I think she actually means it. But it’s just not me, so I’m not going to take her suggestion here. And I think an important takeaway from this is that you shouldn’t try to sound or be like someone else because it will surface  in your email copy and play against you.

Alright, so next, she left a comment on this part: “your blog,” and she suggests using the brand’s name because a lot of link builders use this phrase in their outreach.

Now, while I agree on the whole, there are 2 reasons why I’m hesitant to take the suggestion.

1. I don’t think it’ll be worth the additional effort to manually format each person’s brand name. And,

2. Emails sometimes look more templated to me when people use a personalization field here. “Hey Frank, I see that you’re recommending the 50/30/20 budget rule on your blog. It’s definitely a great method if you own assets, but it has some drawbacks – especially for millennials and households that make under 80k/year in the US. With rising inflation and wages moving at a much slower pace, most households need to allocate more than 50% to needs and have very little left for wants, let alone savings.

Now, all you have to do is rinse and repeat the same steps for your other segments and you should be able to do hybrid outreach in an effective and impactful way. Now, everything I’ve shared in this course from prospecting to vetting to outreach can be done by yourself. But if you really want to scale up your link building operations, then you’ll need a team, a system, and workflows to follow.

Welcome to this module which is all about building a link building team and creating efficient systems and workflows. Let’s kick things off with the first lesson in this module where we’ll talk about structuring and hiring different members for your link building team.

Now, there are two team models. The first model is to have a team of all-in-one marketers who do everything from writing the content to finding prospects, finding emails, and doing all the outreach. And the second model is when each team member focuses on just one part of the link building process. For example, you might have a prospector who only does prospecting. A vetter who only does vetting. And an outreach manager who only does the outreach.

Now, the first model can be effective because the content creator will know their content best, and they’ll also have a good understanding of who their link prospects are. But I’ve never seen a team do this efficiently. Reason being, no one is a master of all the stages in the link building process and no one wants to do all of these things. For instance, content creators might love the content creation and prospecting aspects. But I highly doubt that many will enjoy finding emails, vetting prospects, and/or doing email outreach. This leads to inefficiencies and sloppiness in areas where these all-in-one marketers aren’t as strong.

As for the second model, it’s much more efficient because each person handles a part of the link building process. They become masters of their role and over time, synergy is created within the team, leading to a system that works like an efficient assembly line. Everyone’s doing their part. I’ll expand on why I think this is the best way to go in the next lesson when we talk about systems, but first, let’s talk about the different people you’ll need to hire, the skills, traits and qualifications you should look for, as well as an overview of their roles and responsibilities.

So, the first person is a prospector. Now, a lot of people look at this job as lower-level. And I think it’s because prospectors are often given an SOP to find prospects for common link building tactics like broken link building or the Skyscraper technique. These are easy to put into a step-by-step process because it rarely requires creativity. 

Prospecting is arguably the most important part of the link building process for the seed and lookalike approach. Your campaign’s success is dependent on the relevance and quality of your prospects. Meaning, if you get your prospects wrong, then your outreach will be ineffective and vetting would have just been a waste of time.

Now, as for skills and qualifications, this person should have strong knowledge in SEO, have solid researching skills, be an analytical thinker, and be creative. And their roles and responsibilities will primarily be behind the scenes. They’ll work with the outreach manager to come up with pitch angles, work with content, design, and dev teams to ensure all assets are ready and they’ll set up the campaigns in a data management tool like Google Sheets or whatever you use in your organization.

Now, their role also overlaps a lot with a project manager. And for that reason, I think they’re usually the best person to manage projects until or if you need a dedicated PM.

Alright, next up is the vetter. Now, this person’s job is to qualify and disqualify prospects based on a set list of criteria. And this criteria will vary depending on your organization’s SOPs and requirements.

As for skills and qualifications, the two things I look for are attention to detail and their ability to follow instructions consistently. Now, their roles and responsibilities will actually be the most time consuming. The majority of their time will be spent reviewing prospects and their pages to ensure they meet your list of quality standards.

They’ll also update prospect statuses in your spreadsheet and potentially find email addresses. Now, the reason why I say to potentially find email addresses is because some people prefer to hire a dedicated email finder. Also, the blitz list eases quite a bit of this pain too.

The final person on your team will be your outreach manager. This is the person responsible for sending all emails and managing the relationships that come from them. And because good outreach is all about relationship management, the skills I look for include: strong communication skills, good with people, organized, strong copywriters, and creativity.

As for roles and responsibilities, they’ll be writing emails, templatizing them, and building and maintaining relationships with key people. Now, contrary to what many believe, outside of the prospector, I don’t think vetters or outreach managers need any link building or SEO experience.

When hiring and building your team, it’s important to focus on the core competencies of the role rather than looking for “SEO specialists.” Things like metrics are easy to teach, while creativity and people skills are not.

Now, whether your team has a strong background or no background in SEO, you’re going to need a system for them to work in. And the system is going to help you stay organized because there are a lot of moving pieces in a link building campaign, and it’ll also smoothen out your processes to maximize your efficiency.

The question is how to create a link building system. 

Now, systems are key to scaling. They help your team stay organized and smoothen out processes. But many people think that a system is just a list of steps where you hire people to fill those roles. 

For example, an assembly line might have spots for 3 people. A packer, an inspector, and a sealer. The first person is responsible for packing the box. Then it moves down the conveyor belt to the second person, who’s responsible for inspecting the contents. Then it moves down again to the final person who seals the box.

Everything runs like a well-oiled machine and each person is doing their part. Now, while this all seems well and good, complex systems will almost never work this smoothly. And there are two reasons for that:

1. Systems need to be customized for the organization and the people in it. Systems need to be customized for the organization and the people in it. For instance, an organization may choose only to contact editors with bespoke emails to protect potential damage done to their brand via. templated emails. Or a company that outsources link building, may not want to give you an @ domain email, which can potentially change the angle you go in with. And,

2. The efficiency of a system is fragile. Like, if the first person in our assembly line were to quit, then the other two people have nothing to do. But that’s an easy fix.

Just hire and train someone else. The real fragility in a system that’s built for scale is alignment. For example, let’s say the first person packs the box and then the package moves down to the second person. They check the contents and they’re like… “Hey, you can’t just throw the item in the box like this. You need to place the item so it’s facing this way.” And then the first person might be like… “who cares?” They might continue to argue with no real conclusion.

All the while, the third person is just waiting to seal the box and the queue of items are just building up. In other words, while the system is designed to move in the same direction, the people aren’t aligned, which makes their impact null.

Now, because of these reasons, I’m going to share the 5 key components to create a link building system that will be right for your organization.

Key Components to Create a Link Building System

Structure of the Team

Alright, so the first component is the structure of the team. Ideally, you want to have different team members handle different parts of the link building process. This helps to create your assembly line from a structural standpoint and it also helps individuals to develop mastery in their role. And as people get better at their jobs, things move faster and more effectively.

Alignment in your company’s goals

The second is alignment in your company’s goals. It might sound cheesy to some, but I think it’s important to set specific goals for your link building team. For example, you may have a goal to get 50 new referring domains each month to revenue-generating pages. And the purpose of these links is to rank higher in Google and get more traffic as a result.

Now, when each member knows and understands this goal, it makes their work more meaningful because they know what they’re working towards and what it’ll take to get there. A common incentive I’ve seen companies do is to give their link building team monthly, Monthly, quarterly, or annual performance bonuses.

This can help to further incentivize the team as a unit because each person depends on the other to reach the company’s goals.

Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

The third component is to create standard operating procedures or SOPs. These are detailed documents and videos that explain how to carry out tasks from start to finish. They help to ensure that each person is moving in the same direction towards the same goal. And they’re also great resources to have when onboarding new hires.

The best way to create SOPs is to actually go through the process yourself, or have a team lead do it. And while you’re doing the prospecting, vetting, and outreach, you should document the process as if you’re teaching someone who’s never done it before. And when you hand these off to new employees, it should ease quite a bit of the hand holding that you’d have to do otherwise.

Use  Project Management Tool

Project management tools like Trello, Notion, Airtable, and Asana are a great way to organize all your campaigns in one spot. And they’re particularly useful if you have multiple campaigns running simultaneously.

When I say campaign management, I’m referring to the actual campaign data you’ll be working with. And the best tool for this is Google Sheets. You can customize your sheet however you’d like and multiple team members can work together simultaneously so no time is wasted. For example, if you had two vetters working on a campaign, one can start from the top of the list and another from the bottom to double the speed of vetting. You can also write your own functions in App Scripts, allowing you to connect to third party APIs. And this is how you’d run a blitz list right inside Sheets.

On top of that, Google Sheets has a ton of built in functions like QUERY, FILTER, and VLOOKUP Google Sheets Functions QUERY to name a few. These will help filter large datasets and match data from other sources. Now, no system is perfect and it’s going to require some tweaking.

So as you go through the process, be conscious of inefficiencies and blockers and find ways to eliminate them with the people who are involved in these processes. And I can’t stress how important it is to solve these quickly because a lot of time can be wasted by just dealing with inconveniences that can potentially be solved easily.

The system is just the structure of your everyday link building operations. Workflows on the other hand are what fuel the system. And that’s what your team will be using day in and day out to execute these link building campaigns.

The workflow of a link building team can often follow either a linear or triangular model. While the traditional linear approach involves sequential tasks from prospector to vetter to outreach manager, a more efficient triangular model can streamline the process.

In the triangular model, the prospector kicks off the process by identifying prospects based on linkable points and segments them for outreach. This research is then passed to the outreach manager, who starts drafting email templates. Meanwhile, the prospector organizes the prospect list and generates a blitz list, handing it over to the vetter.

The vetter reviews blitz list prospects in batches, focusing on valid emails to quickly validate campaign potential. Once vetting is complete, they inform the outreach manager to initiate the outreach process. Throughout this cycle, the prospector may move on to new campaigns or brainstorm ideas for future opportunities.

In a hypothetical scenario with team members John (Prospector), George (Vetter), and Josh (Outreach Manager), they collaborate to brainstorm campaign ideas, establish pitch angles, and create project management cards. John initiates research for campaigns, following established procedures and SOPs.

This collaborative approach ensures efficiency and productivity within the link building team, with continuous optimization and adaptation to enhance workflow and effectiveness.

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https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

https://www.semrush.com/blog/link-building/

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https://yoast.com/what-is-link-building/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/category/seo/linkbuilding/

https://neilpatel.com/blog/13-efficient-link-building-strategies-for-busy-marketers/