In general, when you lack one (or more) of the elements, you’ll have to compensate it with one or more of the others.

So if you have maximized Budget, Content and/ or Outreach, these are the link building styles that would probably suit you best. (click to enlarge)

This post, The Different Styles of Link Building, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

As soon as you’ve hit the launch-button, you hold tight to your chair and hope for hundreds or thousands of links to appear out of nowhere, but in stead… **crickets**

Ouch.

If linkbait fails in a forest, and no one is around to hear it...

Now there’s two things you can do. You can either curl up into a corner and start crying, or you can man yourself, try to find out what went wrong, and give it another try. After all, if your campaign didn’t succeed the first time, no one will know you’re fishing with old bait the second time.

Obviously, this also works for existing content on your website that wasn’t intended as linkbait (or was more succesful), such as white papers, evergreen content, great images or extensive resource lists.

Advertising

There, I said it. The a-word. The word that lots of SEOs and link builders hate, as paying for traffic is not in their vocabulary. But it can be *very* fruitful, even when it comes to link building.

One of my favorite advertising platforms to promote linkbaity content is StumbleUpon. A succesful StumbleUpon campaign is the gift that keeps on giving. You can buy Stumbles for $0,05 each, and if the people who get to see your content like it enough, you get rewarded with more (free) stumbles. And since Stumblers usually don’t pay attention to post dates, you can use if for old content as well.

I got another reminder of how wonderful StumbleUpon Paid Discovery (what their ad platform is called) works only recently, when a campaign resulted in around 100.000 stumbles, and counting. The costs: a mere $100.

Now everyone knows that StumbleUpon traffic isn’t the best in the world. However, although the 100.000 earlier mentioned Stumblers had a bounce rate of ~95%, they also attributed for a few thousand Facebook likes, a couple of hundred Tweets and a few dozen links. Not bad for $100, if you ask me.

When the traffic seems to be dying off, you simply pour in a bit of extra paid stumbles to get it going again. A regular refill can make sure that your link profile grows steadily as well.

Create a new boost in traffic (and social attention) with some extra ad budget.

Obviously, StumbleUpon isn’t the only ad platform you can try. Use AdWords or Facebook ads, but also advertorials, promoted Tweets, Reddit ads or whatever you think can convert to social votes or links.

Also, think about relevant journalists or bloggers writing an article that’s relevant to your content, and make sure to show up during their research. Give them the content they’re looking for and (hopefully) earn a link.

Alerts

In theory, Google Alerts are amazingly useful. According to Google, you receive “updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic”.

So when someone publishes an article that’s relevant to your website, you instantly receive an email with a link to it. You can then go check it out, and -when applicable- contact the owner to suggest adding a link to a page with further reading material. Again, in theory, as creating a Google Alert usually means that you receive notifications of your own blog posts or two-week-old Tweets in your mailbox…

Bing discontinued their alert service, but Yahoo! still offers it, as well as lots of individual news websites. Services like Trackle, SocialMention and Tweetbeep (for Twitter) can also be quite useful.

Another solution would be to create your own alerts service, for example via Yahoo! Pipes. Pipes has lots of options, which examples like this and this show, but creating your own would allow you to include sources of your choice as well.

Future (guest) content

Do you have some blog posts, guest content or interviews planned for the next few weeks? Make sure to include a link to the content page you’re trying to (re)promote.

Chances are that people have missed that page in the first place. With guest content or interviews you can deliver it to a whole new audience, which is yet another chance of your page getting picked up by others.

Make sure to take a look at your most popular pages as well, and include a link to your had-to-be-popular page here too – if it’s relevant and adds value, of course.

Al these options are great ways to get some good anchor text links to the page, which hopefully increases its search engine visibility. This in turn increases the chance of content researchers finding your piece and mentioning it in theirs. Chances of this happening are very small, but you simply never know. Sometimes it’s just a tiny snowflake that creates an avalanche.

Newsletters

Sending out newsletters regularly? Don’t forget to include to add links that are relevant to the main subject of your mailing or eZine.

Not everyone is in a shopping mood, so make sure to include some reading material for the people who just want to be entertained. If your mailing list is of a somewhat respectable size, you just might have some influential linkerati amongst your subscribers.

Make linking easy

Now this should be a no-brainer, but apparently some companies still have difficulties with this. Facepalm indeed.

Making linking easy goes further than this, though. Encourage your users to link to you, for example by providing embed codes next to your images or infographics, or by creating ‘Our company in the media’ pages – which are basically reciprocal 2.0 pages.

Link building

Now if all of the above fails, you can always revert to good ol’ link building. Contact relevant resource pages, link pages or any other website you deem appropriate, and kindly ask if they’d consider adding a link to your page.

Agreed, it’s not the most fun part of the job, but since most of your competitors probably think the same (and therefore don’t do it), not neglecting this part can actually lead to an advantage.

However, if you’ve made it to this part of your list with promotion options, chances are that your content wasn’t as good as you thought it was. Try to find out what was wrong with it, and fix it for the next time, so you don’t have to run through this list again.

Do you have other ways to promote your existing content (or failed linkbait campaigns) to share?

This post, How to Promote Existing Content (or Failed Linkbaits), was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Link building has been as essential part of search engine optimisation since practically before search engine optimisation was even a thing. A lot of the advice has stayed the same all this time (we’ve all known for ages that the easiest way to get people to link to something is to create great content).

But some of the advice – on whether or not you should have a blog or if getting links is worth the effort – has shifted over the years. So I thought it would be fun to look over some of the best link building advice over the last 10 years.

 

Jill Whalen – Link Popularity and PageRank (2001)

Jill answered a query from a reader who asked if she could write a more up-to-date post on link popularity. The other posts, he said, were all at least a year old and all said that links were helpful for higher rankings, but that we shouldn’t spend too much time or effort getting links to our sites (!). Jill did some research, trying to get her site to rank higher for ‘search engine optimization’, and after explaining what PageRank and backward links were, she announced her findings.

Top tip: The words used in the hyperlinks that link to your site have a big influence on what you rank for and how high you rank for it.

 

Robin Nobles, et al. – 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies (2002)

This comprehensive post outlines what was essentially all the link building expertise at that time. They discussed swapping reciprocal links with other site owners, (Rocky Rawstern of 7th Wave in particular felt blogs would become link farms that Google would eventually ignore), and building links to parts of your site besides the home page.

Top tip: Become a content provider. That gives people a reason to link to you.

 

Aaron Wall – Hubs & Authorities: Local Community Link Structure (2003)

By the time Aaron was writing this post, search engines tried to minimise the effects of the link exchanges so beloved by SEOs in previous years. So he set out to show what else a local business could do to get some of the ‘good’ links to their site.

Top tip: Check where your competitors’ backward links come from, and try to get those links, too.

 

Garrett French – SES London: Link Building and Domain Name Issues (2004)

Garrett wrote a round-up of Alan Webb’s Search Engine Strategies London conference posts, pulling out the most useful SEO tips. It had become a largely accepted tenet that search engines looked at links to determine the relevancy of sites for certain key phrases. Matt Cutts (then described as “a Google developer”) insisted that the quality of the links was the important thing, but SEOs were seeing evidence that quantity counted as well.

Top tip: Identical anchor text looks like (and usually is) an attempt to game the system. If you are going to buy links, make sure your anchor text alternates through a few phrases.

 

Darren Rowse – Linkbaiting with Attack (2005)

Darren used a post by Nick Wilson on the Performancing blog as the inspiration for his own post. Nick had advised on using one of five linkbait hooks he had identified. These were the news hook, the contrary hook, the attack hook, the resource hook and the humour hook. Darren (perhaps knowingly) used the contrary hook to advise against using the contrary and the attack hooks as the main way you build links and increase traffic to your site.

Top tip: Use the attack and contrary hooks like pepper. Put a dash here and a pinch there to spice up your blog, but don’t rely on it to build up your professional reputation.

 

Chris Bennett – Not Another Directory Submission Post! (2006)

Chris wrote a post, not about how you should submit your site to directories, but how to make sure you’ve got the strongest link from the directory as you can. He suggested starting, like with any link building campaign, with your site’s keywords and target anchor text in mind. Then you can find relevant pages on directories through certain searches. He then includes a list of some of his favourite directories.

Top tip: Search Google for [directory name] and [your keyword] to find the relevant pages for your site. This will ensure your directory link indicates to Google that you are relevant to your target keyword.

 

Eric Ward – Are You in the Circle of Link Trust? (2007)

Eric used the film Meet the Parents as a metaphor for Google’s algorithmic trust. Because his site, ericward.com, is relatively old and well-known to Google, because it had never been in trouble for doing black or greyhat SEO and because it had a load of links to other pages, Google ranked him in the first SERP for ‘linkbait strategies’, which at the time was a pretty new search query. His site is in Google’s circle of trust, unlike Ben Stiller’s character at the beginning of Meet the Parents. So the new pages on his site will rank higher immediately, all because Google know that ericward.com is a trustworthy, strong site.

Top tip: If you have an older, more trusted site, rely on the trust you’ve built up to buoy your newer pages, and if you have a newer site, try to build up Google’s trust. Your new pages will be stronger if you’re more trustworthy.

 

Tom Critchlow – A Linkbuilding Method so Effective I Can’t Believe it’s not Blackhat (2008)

Back in the day, Tom discovered that he could find pages on sites that no longer offer the content or service they once did. He could then get in touch with that site and ask them to link to his page. Alternatively, he could run an analysis to find out which sites were linking to that page, get in touch with those sites and explain the situation and ask the sites to link to his site.

Top tip: The whole post is one giant top tip, but Tom also listed phrases that you could search for to find the pages that no longer have content on them. These included “service no longer available” [keyword], “stopped selling [keyword]” and “site has been taken down”.

 

Wil Reynolds – Using Twitter for Linkbuilding in SEO (2009)

In this video, Wil detailed some amazing ways to use Twitter to build links. In his example, he used a company that fixed air conditioners. The owners could search Twitter for ‘broken a/c’, ‘my ac broke’ and the like, then contact the most influential Tweeters, inviting them to tell their story in a blog post, then add a widget (which linked back to the air conditioner company’s website) to that post so their friends and readers could vote for their story. The story that got the most votes would win an air conditioner.

Top tip: Build an API or use a tool like Twitter Grader to determine who has the most followers. That way, you’re not contacting people who do not have a lot of influence in your target niche.

 

Rand Fishkin – Link Building Tips for Personal Blogs (2010)

Rand outlined what in his opinion were the most effective ways to build links to a personal blog. He assumed that someone with a personal blog probably doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on link building but probably does have some time and a lot of passion to devote to link building efforts.

Top tip: Answer questions in online forums and Q&A sites. This can lead to a lot of relevant traffic as other visitors to the forums and Q&A sites check out your blog to see who you are.

 

Paddy Moogan – Getting Links and SEO Value From Your YouTube Videos (2011)

Paddy worked with Distilled’s web developer Andy to create an embed code for YouTube videos that would include a followed back link to the video creator’s site. The code puts a line after the video crediting its creator.

Top tip: Again, this entire post is a top tip, but it inspired Sean Lind to build a page that automatically generates the code for you. That way, you don’t have to worry about unclosed tags or an errant comma breaking the code.

 
>> Melissa Campbell is the Content Manager at Distilled, an internet marketing agency based in London. To bring you the latest and best link building advice, Distilled are hosting the Link Building Seminar 2011 in both London, UK, on 18 March and in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 25 March. You can find more information and buy tickets here.

This post, 10 Years of Link Building Advice, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

In my opinion, starting an online marketing campaign without a competitive link analysis is like starting a company with only half of a marketing plan. You want to be well aware of your surroundings, before you enter a market or start a new project. Sure, there are plenty examples of companies that succeeded without one, but I think that there are over twice that amount of companies that would still exist today, if they had made a thorough plan when they started. “A well prepared man is worth two others”, as a French saying goes.

Michael already mentioned one very valid reason to perform a competitive link analysis, which is securing links from sites that already link to competing websites. The sole fact that these sites already link to your competitors is not a bad thing, as that has absolutely no influence at all on whether these sites may pass traffic, link juice or conversions to yours. Agreed, you can never be 100% sure if a link passes value or not, but if you think that it may provide relevant traffic, any additional link juices comes as a bonus.

Most link builders don’t need any other reason to start a link analysis, but there are much more reasons to perform one.

Goal deprecation

When a prospect (or your employer) tells you “this is what we want to reach, and this is our budget”, a competitive link analysis may be a good way to find out whether it’s achievable or not.

For example, “we want to rank in the top three for keyword X, and we have a budget of $x,xxx to achieve it” might not be such a good idea when you find out that your competitors have been attracting lots of high quality links for several years, and you’re just starting. Of course, a goal like that is never a good idea, but in some cases you’ll simply end up with such a goal on your plate. And it’s good to have some data laying around that you can use to prove that this goal can probably not be achieved within the outlined time frame, as links are -whether you like it or not- of big influence on search engine visibility.

Content ideas

During a link analysis, you’ll come across lots of different pages. It’s remarkable to see how quickly you’ll get to know an industry that’s completely new to you, just by doing some research. This also helps you to find content gaps and to come up with other ideas for linkworthy content.

Identify networks and relationships

Some competitors may use link networks to artificially improve their search engine rankings, and a link analysis can identify such networks. Use this information to avoid contacting sites in this network, to keep track of linking behavior between these networks, or for any other reason that you think it’s valuable for.

The same goes for identifying relationships. In some cases, a link analysis can go as far as telling you which journalists your competitors knows, or where your competitor spends his entire sponsoring budget.

Identify timely patterns

One of the things that I like about Majestic SEO, is that they offer historical linking data. Although this is link discovery data, it can be used to identify patterns, or to show competitors that are either very lazy or very active, link building wize.

Competing websites that have not been attracting links for several months may be interesting targets to acquire, especially for affiliate publishers. Websites that more or less act as link magnets, on the other hand, are worth keeping a very close eye on. Just like you would do with an offline competitor who is suddenly getting a lot of traction.

If several of your competitors show seasonal patterns in their link growth (ie link spikes in the Summer, or near Mother’s Day), but you are not, it may be a good thing to investigate why this is happening. You might be wasting an opportunity – and not just a linking opportunity, but sometimes even a business opportunity in general.

Find common linking reasons

Persuasion plays an important role in link marketing. People always link for a reason, but the most important linking reasons can be different in another industry. In highly competitive industries, for example, reciprocation (link buys, link trades) plays an important role, while authority might be the main influencing factor in some other industries. Finding out who link to your competitors is not the most important thing, it’s learning why they do so.

Identify spammers

When you work at an agency, I think that it’s part of your duty to report any spammer (cloaking, blatantly buying links, or any other spam strategies) in your client’s industry you may come across to your client.

It’s up to you to provide your client with as much information as possible, and it’s up to them to decide what to do with this. Competitive link analysis can be of great assistance with identifying websites that use dodgy linking strategies.

General competitive intelligence

Almost any link analysis that I have performed thus far has provided other competitive information as well. It’s funny to see what kind of information a competitor’s backlinks can take you to sometimes. Content marketing strategies, press releases with business information about the company, interviews with former employees that you would not have found otherwise, and more stuff like that.

I’ve also used link analysis to determine the added SEO / link value of an offline marketing campaign, for example in print or press. This is a bit tricky, but if an offline campaign is somewhat isolated, it is possible to draw relatively safe assumptions.

 
I know that Michael is not a big fan of the artificial link building, in relation to the more natural link marketing. However, with the current link-driven algorithms that Google uses, deliberately neglecting the link building part in a competitive market is like wanting to ride with the Nazgûl on a pink My Little Pony.

PS – Although I don’t agree with Michael’s post about competitive link analysis, I do recommend subscribing to his blog. You don’t always have to agree with someone to learn new things.

This post, Why a Link Analysis is Anything But a Waste of Time, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

During the past eight years, I’ve learned a lot. I’m still learning new things every day, and I hope this will continue for years and years. When I was thinking about some of the things that I’ve learned thus far, I decided to write eight of them down.

 
1. People with the biggest mouths are not always right. Nor are people with the most experience, the best reputation or the most followers. The sole fact that you have eighteen years of experience doesn’t mean shit, except that you’re probably older than me.

 
2. Google makes the rules in SEO. If you’ve always blindly obeyed these rules, you’ve probably been thinking “Just wait until Google fixes things tomorrow, you mean spammer!” every day, for the past six years or so. Ain’t life a bitch?

 
3. Trial and error is the best teacher. Not an eBook, not a forum and certainly not some kind of 3-day online course. However, you can definitely use some of these sources to come up with ideas for things to test and try yourself.

 
4. Getting things done is the most important thing in online marketing. You can analyze things, write reports or fine-tune stuff all day long, but things don’t change unless you get shit done. Hit that publish button, press ‘send’ or kick someone in the nuts to make things happen.

 
5. If you never question anything or anyone, you don’t deserve to know the truth. If you want to believe that links don’t matter, or that 20,000 people a month are really searching for “ski chalet Miami, FL”, be my guest.

 
6. White hat link building is just the search engine friendly version of plain old marketing. You can talk about dofollow and nofollow all you want, but if you don’t know the principles of marketing, you’re doomed to fail.

 
7. Most SEO conferences are a just a nice way to see something of the world and to make your boss pay for your beer. Most of these conference’s networking events, on the other hand…

 
8. Paying for something only is a bad thing when the costs outweigh the benefits. It’s called ROI, and it not only applies on the CPM campaigns you’re managing for your clients, but also on the tools, forums, PR services, books, people, web hosting and many other things you use yourself. Don’t be a cheapskate.

 
Bonus lesson. Never, ever trust someone who calls him or herself a guru. If gurus are a disease, than social media gurus are a nasty STD. Okay, I didn’t need the full seven years to understand this one, it’s an important one to keep in mind ;)

 
Do you have any other important lessons to add? Like I said, I always love learning new things :)

This post, 8 Lessons I’ve Learned From Doing SEO, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

During the past few years, link building has changed drastically. At least, for me it has. Where it used to be part of SEO, link building has turned into a search engine friendly way of marketing. PR (the Google version) has been replaced by PR (the old-fashioned version) and Indian link building armies have been replaced by creative copywriters.

Image via Will Lion

The growing importance of content as a link building tool has made the life of a link builder much easier, a lot more fun, and much more diverse. There are so many things you can do with content that will result in links, whether it’s on your own website or on third party websites.

Define: content

Before I start, there’s one more misconception that I’d like to address. The word content is not equal to article. An article is probably the most common form of content, but there are many more content types you could use during a link building campaign.

Just a few examples: applications, audio files, awards, badges, blog posts, contests, eBooks, FAQ lists, glossaries, guides, how-tos, images, infographics, interviews, link lists, maps, news, press releases, quizzes, reports, research, reviews, testimonials, tools, tutorials, videos or widgets. And that’s just a selection…

Guest content does not have to be online content, by the way. You can reach lots of people (and get indirect links) with offline coverage or even email, too.

Self-hosted content

Content that is hosted on your own website has the most potential in attracting links and traffic. After all, when people visit the page or link to the content, your website will notice that directly.

Traffic (either directly, or indirectly via search engines) will end up at your pages, leading to -hopefully- more subscribers, newsletter subscriptions, sales and/ or repeated visits. In the long run, providing good content on a continuous basis will lead to an established brand and a loyal visitor base.

Although publishing the content on your own website gives you limited control over how other websites will link to you, it is the best way to attract as many links as possible, and to let the link strength flow to your own website. This, indirectly, will lead to better rankings in search engines, resulting in more sales, targeted traffic and -eventually- more conversions.

However, hosting the content yourself also has two disadvantages. Firstly, by publishing the content on your own blog or website, you are talking to your own, already existing audience only. Perhaps a few visitors will find the article, blog post or video through search engines or other websites, but that is usually about it.

Additionally, links in your own articles that point to other pages of your own do not carry the same value as when those links would have been in articles on other websites. This is because search engines weigh internal links in a different way than external links.

Both of these disadvantages do not have to be a problem, by the way. After all, when your content gets linked to from other websites, you divert the traffic- and link problem. However, in order to get linked to regularly, you’ll need to establish a solid brand and reader base first, or you would need heavy push-promotion.

Pros of self-hosted content
+ Link strength flows to own website directly
+ Exposure, bookmarks and traffic will have a positive impact on the perceived value of your brand
+ Self-hosted content adds value to your own website, as well as for the user experience as for (indirectly) search engine traffic
+ Self-hosted content marketing is great for aiming at specific, important link targets
+ Full control over the content itself, including subject, writing style and what to link to

Cons of self-hosted content
- Traffic to the content is mainly limited to the own (existing) audience
- Links in your own content do not have the same value as links from other websites
- Limited control over how other websites will link to you

Goals and audiences

From a link marketer’s perspective, there are two types of self-hosted content. You either publish content that is targeted at a general audience (for example a regular blog post or the home page of your website), or you try to target a specific audience.

Specifically targeted content does not have to be targeted at just one website or webmaster, but can be aimed at larger groups as well.

Define your content goals
Just like with any other action you take, it is important to set a goal for each piece of content you create. This does not have to be an extensive goal, but it should be enough to keep you on the right track while creating the content. This ensures that your efforts will have maximum effect.

For example, the goal of an article could be ‘to attract links from a select (predefined) group of websites’. In that case, you should write the entire article in a way that it is optimized for that select group of bloggers, journalists or others. An article that supposed to ‘attract as much traffic as possible’ should be interesting for a very large audience, and an article that has the goal ‘to be written within 15 minutes’ requires yet another approach.

Define your audience
This far down the content marketing process, your general audience should have already been defined. However, different articles, videos or contests could be targeted at (slightly) different audiences. This means that it is important to get a clear view of your audience before you start creating each individual piece of content.

Again, this does not have to be an in-depth analysis of the average reader, but some general thoughts about it would be very useful.

Even on the same site or blog, the exact audience may be (slightly) different per article or page. For example, writing for beginners requires a different approach, writing style and promotion strategy than when you are writing about an advanced topic.

Choosing the right platform

Every type of content has an ideal publishing platform. For a blog post, that would be probably your blog, for a video it might be a (Youtube) video channel (with embedded links from the website or blog), and for most specifically targeted content pieces, it would be somewhere else on your website.

Try to determine what the best publishing platform is for all content that you create. This is usually something you will do automatically, but it is still important to think about it.

Mixing it up

A website with a mixed content marketing strategy, and therefore a broad selection of content, should be able to build a diverse and strong link profile. Different types of content attract links from different types of websites, and continuously broadening your audience (while never moving away too far from your initial audience!) builds a large visitor base.

A diversified content marketing strategy builds a diversified link profile, which in turn can lead to better rankings for your website.

Before you start

Make sure that you have a clear picture of what you are after before you start. Determine your content marketing goals and strategy based on your overall goals and targets. Try to come up with content ideas that will allow you to reach these goals and targets.

Additionally, try to set some goals for your blog and content sections of the other websites as well. This can be in terms of links, traffic, subscribers, or nearly anything else you are after.

Determining where you want to be in X amount of time, and creating a matching strategy to achieve these goals, ensures that you are focused, and that you know which actions you will have to take, and why.

Externally hosted content

Besides publishing the content you have created on your own website, you can also choose to publish it elsewhere. Whether it is guest posting, writing a column, or giving an interview; literally thousands and thousands of websites are looking for fresh content every day. Since you can add some information about yourself and your company to most of the content you publish elsewhere, this turns these websites excellent link building and branding opportunities.

Although hosting content on your own website has more benefits than hosting it on a third party website, publishing content on other sites can be very useful and effective for three important reasons;

1. More traffic and/ or subscribers
Publishing content on other websites and blogs will increase the amount of traffic and/ or subscribers of your website. Interested readers of the third party website or blog will click through to your site, and hopefully become subscribers, regular visitors, or maybe even clients.

The actual traffic you receive depends on many things, like the quality and popularity of the target website, but it also depends on how prominently the webmaster links to the new content and, within this content, to you. That said, you will usually see your ‘referring sites’ traffic increase if you publish content elsewhere regularly.

2. Branding and exposure
Even if you don’t get lots of direct traffic or subscribers, promoting your brand via high profile blogs will give your brand an authority and visibility boost. Also, having written for a big name blog is a great benefit in opening doors for opportunities in future, as it can serve as social proof. Guest publishing also allows you to reach new audiences that would normally be difficult for you to reach directly.

3. Links
When, for some reason, you do not receive any traffic or subscribers from an article that you have published elsewhere, you still end up with one or more links back to your own website, coming from an on-topic source, and possibly even with an anchor text of your choice.

Not only that, but do a good job and the website owner might link to you more often in future as well. After all. The Principle of Consistency works for bloggers, journalists and webmasters, too.

Keep in mind that there are some (minor) disadvantages of hosting content elsewhere. For example, instead of receiving all traffic that ends up at the content page via search engines or links from other sites yourself, the third party websites received it all.

Also, because you will have to comply with the content guidelines of the third party website, you are not completely free in the way you write your content. In most cases, you will have to use a similar page lay-out and writing style as the site that will host the content, but as you will only be writing for highly relevant websites, this usually is not much of a problem.

Pros of externally hosted content
+ You reach a different audience, resulting in an increase in direct traffic and more subscribers
+ The exposure will have a positive branding impact
+ Guaranteed backlinks to one (or more) of your own websites, on websites you have selected yourself
+ Almost full control over where you link to, and which anchor text you can use

Cons of externally hosted content
- Search engine traffic ends up at the third party website, instead of on your own website
- Finding and contacting third party websites takes additional time and effort
- Not having full control over the content itself, as you will have to adjust to third party guidelines, and to a new audience

Where to find guest publishing targets

Now that you know why guest publishing can be useful, it is time to get out and find websites that may be open for hosting your content. The current popularity of guest blogging has resulted in websites like My Blog Guest, but apart from such services, the most efficient places to look are;

Your network
Take a close look at the people you know, for example in their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles, and try to find out if they are connected to high profile websites in a relevant industry. It does not matter if it is a blog, website, or a portal – as long as it is relevant. Contact the people who are directly or indirectly connected to such websites, and discuss the possibilities of hosting content on these sites.

Websites you visit regularly
Try to find out if websites you visit regularly -and hopefully leave comments at every now and then- are open for guest content. Some are easy to spot, carrying ‘Write for us’ buttons or having ‘Become a contributor’ links, but others may not publicly show that they are hosting other peoples content.

When even a peek in the blog categories (is there a ‘Guest post’ category?) or a site: query cannot be of any assistance, the only way to find out is by contacting the website directly.

Blog rolls of high profile blogs
The large majority of all blogs has a list with links to related websites or blogs in their sidebar. These navigational link lists (blog rolls) can be a great starting point when you are looking for new websites to write for.

Start at the high authority blogs in the most relevant niches, and work your way down from there. After all, websites and blogs that receive links from high authority links carry a portion of that authority themselves as well.

Blog award lists
In many industries, large and small online awards are being given away every year. Examples are the SEMMYs or (in other industries) the Lonely Planet Blog Awards or even the Times’ Business Blog 50.

These lists, which can contain up to 100 or even more websites, contain high quality and very related blogs, which may be interested in publishing your content.

Visit the websites that are listed in these Award lists (especially the top 10 ~ 25), and look for signs that these websites occasionally publish other people’s content.

Google searches
Whether it is the ‘regular’ search engine, or Blog Search, Google can help you to find new prospects as well.

You can try searching with basic keywords, but using advanced search queries may help you to find possible targets even quicker.

A few examples are:
- {keyword} “guest blogger” OR “guest post” OR “guest article” OR “guest column”
- {keyword} “become a contributor” OR “contribute to this site”
- {keyword} “write for us” OR “write for me”
- {keyword} inurl:category/guest
- {keyword} “submit guest blog” OR “submit a blog post” OR “submit guest post”

By using different keywords, you can use Google to compile a very large list of potential targets.

Competitive research
You will (hopefully) have gathered quite a long list with interesting link targets during the competitive research you did earlier. Some of these link targets (or maybe even websites that your competitors link out to) will be interested in publishing free content, so it’s recommended to check these sites for guest publishing opportunities as well.

How to approach third party websites

When you have created a list of websites that may (or may not) be interested in publishing your content, it is important to evaluate and sort them before you start contacting the people behind the websites.

I would not advise contacting the most important websites on your list first, as testing out different approaches and creating a solid track record is definitely recommended.

While there is no ‘prefect approach’, there certainly are some factors that may work (or not) in specific industries. For example, the SEO industry is quite an informal industry, making the approach process easier than in the legal industry.

It always starts with sending a message. Whether it is sending an email, a quick call, using a contact form, or a DM’ing via a social network; you need to send a brief note asking if they would be interested in publishing guest content.

Some websites have a page on which they openly invite submissions, but in other cases you may have to explain what guest posting is first. In such cases, it is important to highlight the possible benefits for the person you are contacting; a free piece of valuable content that you would be happy to promote via social media channels. Always keep WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) in mind, and explain What’s In It For the person you are talking with.

Although you think your proposal is a win-win and risk free, the person you are contacting might think you only have commercial intent (or might even mistake you for a spammer), so you need to reassure him or her of your honesty and quality. Showing examples of your previous work is a great way to do so, so make sure to provide one or two links to articles you have written in the past.

When you have received a first and positive reply, you can start discussing possible ideas. Also, if no clear guest blogging guidelines are being displayed on the website, it is advisable to ask about these. This avoids disappointments later on in the process.

In most cases, it is not advisable to start creating the content for the website you are contacting straight away. It is much safer to discuss ideas first, for example by creating a list with possible headlines of the article.

This way, it is less likely that you end up with an unpublished, but fully written article that you cannot use anymore in the future. Also, the website owner might have some great ideas they are burning to get written, which saves you the trouble inventing headlines.

Make sure to get all agreements clear, and that you know the answer to questions like;

- What will you have to write about? Make sure that you have the writing style, website audience and article length clear as well!
- Is it clear that you will insert one or more links into the article?
- When do you send the article, and should it be sent via email?
- Should you send the article formatted as Word, HTML or plain text?
- Who will add images to the article?

Who to target first?

Especially when sending out emails and trying to get your content published elsewhere is new to you, it is recommended to start with contacting a few easy targets first. This way, you can get a bit of a feeling with it, and be as efficient as possible.

Websites that are clearly open for guest content
Blogs and websites that publicly show that they are looking for guest writers, for example with a ‘write for us’ button or link or by being member of a guest blogging network, are the easiest to approach. After all, they have already let you know that they are interested in publishing third party content. Emailing the owner (either directly, via a contact form, or via a social media channel), asking if he is still looking for guest content will definitely get the ball rolling.

Websites that seem to be open for guest content
Slightly different from the previous example, but the approach is pretty similar. If you have found guest content on the website (for example articles from the author ‘Guest blogger’, or content in a ‘Guest posts’ category), but cannot find a clear sign that the website owner is still looking for contributors, it is simply a matter of asking.

Mentioning that you have found occasional articles from guest writers, while providing links to these articles, and asking if they are open for new contributions usually works perfectly.

Mid-profile targets
When the first easy targets have been crossed off the list, and you managed to get a few articles published, it is time to use this experience for the next level of targets.

In case you cannot find any signs that the website has accepted guest content in the past, it is recommended to highlight the benefits for this website clearly. Like mentioned before, ‘What’s In It For Me’ is a very important question to answer.

High profile targets
Save the high profile targets for when you have built a momentum, and feel confident enough to contact the most important websites in your industry.

Analyze all previous correspondence, and look for reasons why unsuccessful outreach failed to get results. Try avoid the mistakes you made earlier, and give it your best shot.

It is absolutely not a big deal if some bloggers or webmasters don’t respond or decline your offer. You can either move on to the next target on your list, or ask the person you have contacted if he or she would know any interesting websites to write for.

Getting the most out of externally hosted content

When you have received a positive reply and have agreed upon all details, you can start writing the content you have promised. The quality of the article itself, the links in your content, your promotion and responding to comments can help you to get the most out of your guest content.

Which writing style to use depends on the website, as it is always advisable to let your content blend in a bit. You can still try to keep your own style, but adjusting to your new audience makes your article easier to read for the website’s regular visitors.

Also make sure you bring your best work, as you do not want to be known for writing mediocre content.

Adding links to your content
One of the goals of writing guest content, is to grow a better link profile. This means that you will have to add links your website to the article you are submitting. However, it is very important to do this with care. After all, you do not want to give people the idea that you have written the article with linking back as the only goal.

Make sure to add links to interesting, highly relevant content that is not yours as well. This can either be links to other pages of the website you are contributing to, or to relevant pages on other websites. Do not link out just to link out though, but only add links in places where it seems relevant and adds value.

In content links
In the article itself, you can add one or two links to your own website, but only where it seems relevant. If it does not, simply leave them out, as you will get another opportunity.

Linking out to other guest content you have written can also help, as that would be promoting your own content, and indirectly promoting your own website.

Images and references
In every article you create that contains images, it is not more than appropriate to credit the owner of the image by linking to him or her. Whether it is for a Creative Commons image you found on Flickr, or it is for an image that took yourself, in such cases is linking very normal.

The same goes for references. When you quote a person, a website, a study, or anything else, it is common to link back to the original source. And if that source happens to be yours, that would mean it is a link back to your website.

Author bio
Most guest articles start or close off with a short author bio, introducing the guest writer.

This is your opportunity to tell who you are and what you do in just a few sentences, and to link back to your website(s). This is also the place where you can use the most optimal anchor text, as this may look a bit artificial in the body of the article, but is more common in the author bio.

Promote your content
When your guest article has be put online by the third party website, you can still do a few things that increase your chances of getting the maximum out of it.

Helping to promote the article, for example by sharing it via social media websites like Facebook or Twitter, or by voting for the article if it has been submitted to a social news platform. The more traffic and links your content receives, the more juice you will receive from it, and the more likely the webmaster will be interested in publishing more of your content.

Linking back to the article from a (future) page or article on your own website, or mentioning it in another one of your guest articles will also help getting the post some extra attention.

Responding to comments
In case your article has raised questions, or when people leave comments in general, it is appropriate to respond to these comments.

This not only underlines your professionalism, but will also improve your relationship with the website owner. Both readers and webmasters will appreciate it that you take time to read what they have to say, and to respond to it.

Which one to choose?

Actually, it’s not a matter of choosing between link baiting or guest publishing, it’s a matter of when to host the content yourself and when to host it elsewhere. After all, a natural link profile has all kinds of links, which makes both link building tactics perfectly suitable to include in your overall strategy.

Still Bored?

Do you still think link building is just a boring task that should either be outsourced to India, or taken care of with cheap automated solutions? Then I’d strongly recommend you to read this very thoroughly, as I suspect that you’ll be needing it.

Are you interested, but you don’t know where to start, or you don’t have the time? Then you should check out this page ;)

This post, Link Building with Content: Link Baiting vs. Guest Publishing, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Two additional tips:
1. Set up some Google Alerts to spot mentions of your press release that don’t link back, which you can turn into links quite easily.
2. Don’t forget social. Social link building can also play a role in your press release strategy, especially if you have a large user base, as your community could help you to build links.

And more great articles:

• Backlink Smackdown: Majestic vs. The Moz – Greg Niland
• What is SEO link building? – John Andrews
• Link building tips for personal blogs – Rand Fishkin
• DIY to succesful linkbait – Chris Tynski
• How to use infographics for SEO and linkbait – Tadeusz Szewczyk
• Link building interview: Ross Hudgens – Garrett French
• Broken link building: feast on your competitors – Napoleon Suarez
• Planning long term link building strategies – Paddy Moogan
• Linkfluence (Pubcon Vegas Recap)

PS – This is the last edition of Link Building this Month of the year, as I will be listing the best posts of the year later this month. Have you read (or written) a post that definitely should be included in this yearly roundup? Drop me an email, leave a comment, or let me know via Twitter.

This post, Link Building this Month (11.2010), was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Just like with regular content, I’ve seen examples of infographic guest posting, and companies that pay other webmasters to host their completely off-topic infographic. Not very creative anymore…

This doesn’t mean that you should remove infographics from your list with link building tactics. You just have think very well about the message you want to bring across, and very creative when it comes to delivering this message.

A very good example of this was sent to me earlier this week by Chris Tynski of Voltier Creative, an SEO company in Miami. I don’t link out to link building or SEO infographics very often (maybe except for the link building monopoly game we created ourselves :) ), but good infographics deserve a mention.

Besides the wonderful design and the excellent story it tries to tell, the best thing about this infographic is that it hardly needs any pushing to get tweeted about or linked to. You don’t have to publish it as guest content, and you certainly don’t have to pay to get it published. All you have to do is send out a small, easy email to a few dozen people to get the ball rolling.

Chris allowed me to publish his email (thanks for that, Chris!), which he used to make people aware of the infographic that his company created.

Hey,
I’m a longtime reader of your blog. You consistently write posts that have actual takeaways for SEO’s, internet marketers, and bloggers and I love to read your new posts.

My company Voltier Creative just published a really cool infographic about the best practices for creating a successful piece of linkbait, and I think the readers of your blog would love to see it. I’d really appreciate it if you would take a look, and if you like it, link to it or tweet it.

I’m sure you get lots of requests like this, but I’m confident you will think this is cool and will want to share it. If not, thanks so much for your time.

Here is the link: http://voltier.com/2010/11/02/lifecycle-of-linkbait-infographic/

Thanks again,
Chris

Now it could use some work on the personalization (maybe include my name and a link to a post that you enjoyed reading, to show that you actually *do* read my blog), but apart from that, I think it was a great email. Not too much information, not being overly salesy or pushy, and confidence that is backed up by a solid infographic.

That’s how you build traffic and links with infographics.

This post, Link Building with Infographics, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

1. Ads before content

If I want to see nothing but ads, I’ll go to Google. When I’m looking for content to link to, and I land on a page with a 336×280 AdSense block above the fold, or with bouncing banner ads that have to be minimized before I can read the content on the page, I will definitely not link to it. Why on earth would I want to let my visitors experience something annoying like that?

It’s not a problem that you try to monetize your website, but do you really have to turn your page into a blinking neon sign to do so? Ditch some ads and get more links!

2. Bad writing & grammar

You don’t have to be a best selling novelist, but you should be able to tell me a story without boring me to death. Also, when you’re too lazy to use a spell checker, you probably didn’t deserve that link. Remarkable writers score bonus points, though.

If you don’t like writing, hire someone to do it for you! You can usually tell if someone doesn’t like writing, just by reading one of his or her articles. Try Demand Media if you want to see some examples…

3. Sell, sell, sell

A good salesman knows when he should try to sell something, and when it’s time to socialize or to talk about other things. Bad salesmen try to sell nearly anything, at all times, to anyone, which can be quite annoying. Is your website a good or a bad salesman?

There’s nothing wrong with promoting your services every now and then, but when nearly every blog post is nothing but a lengthy sales pitch with a picture of a kitten, I won’t be linking out to you anytime soon.

4. Link greed and pink illness

The web is a social place. Linking out every now and then is not a bad thing. It might be the link builder in me, but when I see a blog that has zero outbound links in the last 10 or so articles, I’ll go and find a more social website to link out to. The same goes for linking out to your sources. Link out, and thou wilt receive.

Websites that automatically nofollow all outbound links are even worse, in my opinion. I don’t care if it’s company policy, a WordPress plugin going berserk, or ‘something that IT should have fixed two weeks ago’, I’ll do the same to you. Nofollow and thou wilt receive. Yes, karma can be a bitch.

5. Being mediocre

Just recently, I was looking for an article with beautiful city landscapes for an ‘additional resources’ section of a page. I ended up at a nicely written page about city landscapes and what’s beautiful about them, but that page did not contain any photographs. When the SERPS of the topic of your page contain image results (like so), your page should contain images. Period.

Also, when you do a ‘Top 101 Ways to do X’ article, make sure that it contains 101 ways to do X. Not 14, followed by 87 variations of the first fourteen ways. When I send my visitors away from my site to visit yours, I want them to go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’. Not ‘meh’ or ‘boo’.

Of course, there are several other reasons that will make me think twice about linking to your website (lack of uniqueness, very ugly web design, bad neighborhoods, not having an ‘about us’ section, being a direct competitor, etc.), but for me, the 5 reasons mentioned in this article are the most important ones.

How about you? What makes you link to other websites, or what prevents you from doing so?

This post, 5 Reasons Why I Won’t Link to Your Website, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Just think about it…

• Do you start your email with ‘Dear Webmaster’ or with ‘Dear Lauren’?
• Is your content good or great?
• Do you use a spell checker?
• Do you mention the word ‘Pagerank’ in your emails or not?
• Are you an ‘SEO Link Builder’ or a ‘Product manager’ according to your email signature?
• Do you send out thank you notes?
• Do you use the word ‘guru’ in your Twitter bio?
• Have you thought your content’s title well through, or did you just write down the first thing that came to mind?
• Do you test or do you assume?
• Do you block your HTTP referrer or not?
• Are you going to send a press release on Tuesday morning or Friday afternoon?
• Do you buy your links from a broker or privately?
• Do you take no for an answer?
• Can you answer the most important link building question?
• Do you *really* understand what you’re promoting?
• Do you *really* know who you need to target?
• Did you hire the expensive designer, or the one that was $50 cheaper?
• Do you use the phone as well, or email only?

And that’s just a *very* small portion of all the details you have to think about. Nothing special, it’s all common sense. Get it all wrong, and you’ll find yourself spending your Saturday nights at the DigitalPoint forums, complaining that ‘link building is so hard and it’s not working anymore’. Get it all right, and you’ve got a chance of dominating your niche.

This post, Link Building: It’s All In the Details, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.