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.