10 More Ways to Build Links Without Buying Them
Loren Baker provided 10 great tips to build links without buying them, but there’s still plenty of room left for even more free link building tactics. Here’s a list of another 10 useful tactics that might work for you.
1. Interviews
Getting yourself interviewed by a local journalist, a specialist from your market or some other influential person gives you the possibility to mention your website as well. The interview is about you, right? To give you an example, Aaron Wall managed to get 5 links into this interview with Peter da Vanzo.
2. Guestposts
Guestposting (or better: create your own network) is a great way to not only spread your personal image, but to attract (or place) links as well. Since you’re the writer of the article, you decide where to link to. And what anchor text to use. Don’t overdo this, however. Linking to your own website(s) too often may result in a bad image or in never getting invited to write another post anymore.
This works the other way round as well; check out the amount of links pointing to SEOmoz’ UGC section (and that’s just the home page)…
3. Link out
A great way to get notified and to get links. And I’m not talking about trackbacks, but about real links without nofollow. It’s not only a way to show your readers what kind of stuff you’re reading, but the bloggers you’re linking to also watch their incoming links thanks to Technorati and to their WP Admin. By linking to them, they will notice you and might even link to you.
4. Link to your own pages
Bill Hartzer explained this one better than I ever could, so I’m not going to explain this link building technique. Go check out Bill’s article.
5. Discuss your favorite topics
Commenting your favorite blogs and forums regularly not only builds your personal brand, but can lead to visitors to your websites and links as well. Lots of forums and blogs don’t use nofollow (again: don’t overdo), so mentioning your websites every now and then will improve your link popularity. Thinking about a commenting strategy might pay off in the end.
6. Teach
This is one that I already mentioned earlier, but this technique can work like a charm. Teaching your favorite subject in a school in your area not only gives you the possibility to network with potential future employees, but also is a way to build your brand and even to get links. The school where you’re teaching probably has a website where you can add your own bio and publish your teaching material. Both .edu pages, of course, include a link to your website.
7. Do some research
Publishing the results of something you researched in your field of interest can lead to dozens of relevant, high quality links. Especially if the outcomes are funny, shocking or quite interesting. If the outcome is exceptionally valuable, you might even attract links from reputable news sources, .edus or other great sources.
8. Create a contest (or an award)
Contests, quizzes or awards not only can have a great viral effect, but can attract the attention of community members as well. Creating a yearly award is almost a guarantee for lots of attention, recognition and (quite important) relevant links and rankings.
9. Make pictures
Not only is Flickr a great way to get links (without nofollow), but some influential bloggers also give credits to the photographer of the pictures they use. And don’t forget that images are quite important in linkbait articles, so try to get your share out of it.
Especially when you manage to make some out of the box photos of common subjects, terms or goods (office, targeting, discuss, etc), you might be able to attract some great links. And get some great exposure on other blogs.
10. Donations
Ok, so technically, links you receive after donating something aren’t exactly free, but in this case I guess it’s ok. The money (or products) you used for getting links was for a good cause. You should at least donate something to charity once in your life, but if you’re only willing to do this if you get a link in return, so be it.











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18 comments on this post
As always Wiep … hreat post. I personally find the create a contest option a great one for generating links and interest, while users building out the content on your site.
Jeff, I already assumed that you liked that option, considering the Sphinn Awards you created
Nice article, again!
Guest posting has worked well for me. Of course, that can involve a lot of work for a link.
These are fantastic additions. Great job.
Here’s #11:
-take a popular blog post featuring a list
-add to the list in a blog post
-submit to Sphinn and make it hot
-get tons of links
Haha, nice.
nice tips - i think the flickr suggestion and the interview suggestion are 2 of the ones that i will be focusing on in the next few montsh.
Eduard; thanks, good to hear that you liked it
Steven; you’re right: a lot of work, but great links
Gyutae; sounds good, I’ll try it out some time
Matt; good luck trying those out
Great post! Research is definitely a great way to get links, especially if your research has good stats and screenshots!
great tips..
Great additions to the original post, and prob ended up with more attention. A great way to attract links
Thanks for the information! This article really helped me get some ideas about how to popularize my site :).
I really liked option number 6 - i think that it is a very unique way to add your links to a certificates websites (such as schools, universities etc’).
Thanks
Many thanks for the ideas explined here. I will use some to popularize my site.
Thanks, particularly for number 9! Maybe i’m a bit of a noob but I would never have thought of Flickr as a source of links! Will have to give it a try!
Flikr is a great idea, cheers. Also if you are knowledgeable about something then you must use that to your advantage.
John
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