Backlinks are a digital form of “Word of mouth” that gives credibility to your website and products and thus contribute to your overall website strength. The more True Backlinks you have, the better traffic your website will drive which will eventually result in more conversions.
Rand Fishkin has broadly categorized link building efforts into three segments – Outreach, Broadcast, and Paid amplification.”
Outreach involves one-on-one personalized communication that aims at building relationships with individuals, organizations, and influencers who are relevant to your industry. This eventually helps in increasing the awareness and visibility of your brand. You can connect with them either with a professional email, a phone call, a comment on their blog post, or a LinkedIn connection request.
Broadcast Sending out messages in bulk to a particular audience and hoping that someone will pick it up and accept your request for backlinking. Email blasts, subscription to a newsletter, or a blog post.
Paid amplification Running social ads, native ads, retargeting, or a combination of all.
Among all these practices, Outreach is by far the best one. Before getting started with the outreach process, here are a few things you should know beforehand:
- None of this matters if you don’t have good quality content
- Request links only when your content is relevant to the blog readers
- Gather all the proper details beforehand – their Email ID, Website, Name, etc
- Prepare an email template for every situation, e.g., asking them for a backlink in exchange for a backlink, if you’ve something exclusive to offer, etc
Once you’ve everything in place, here’s what outreach will look like:
Using the techniques discussed in Chapter 2, you can find bloggers who can write about your niche. They can be some experts or influencers in the same niche, who have lots of followers(these followers can be your future customers).
As usual, Google always comes to our rescue when others fail. All you need is to use the right keywords to find them.
For example, you can type in something like:
- write for us <your niche>
- guest post <insert niche here>
- product review <insert niche here>
Did you know that the internet has separate directories for bloggers? Yes. These blogger directories are basically resourced pages or listings where bloggers add their sites and help fellow bloggers and people.
Some of the blog directories include:
- www.ontoplist.com
- www.blogs.botw.org
- www.bloglovin.com
You can also find blog directories using the techniques discussed in Chapter 2.
Keeping an eye on your competitors can provide you some useful insights, and getting bloggers is one of them.
A tool called SpyFu can be used for this. It will give you a peek at your competitors, and you can get information regarding their backlinks as well.
Once you know who is relevant to your product, you need to check who should you reach out to.
Journalists and Tech Writers
Since your aim is to get a review from them or mention, you’re looking for do-follow links that will effectively contribute to your web authority. As far as “mention” is concerned, you might get a no-follow link. In this case, you can write an email to the writer, requesting them for a do-follow link.
Content Marketers and Bloggers
In this case, you can pitch for a guest blogger slot on their blog where you can write about a topic their blog is about.
Industry analysts
For Industry bloggers who are writing for your website, you can ask them to check out your product or service and then If the influencer writes about products or services from our niche, we ask them to check to add their review to the existing product.
Podcasters
Influencers can, at times, mention your product or service in their podcasts as well. Our suggestion will be to go for influencers in the same niche.
Now that you know who you will be approaching, you need to establish a personal connection with them by researching about them and what are their hobbies, likes and then using that to connect with them on a personal level. For this, you can connect with them on different social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
- Engage with them on their blog.
- Connect with them via a personal account.
- Share their content on our social network profile
Now that you know them, write a highly personalized email. You don’t need to personalize the complete email, you can personalize the first couple of lines about them or their organization and then discuss your company and the product and your purpose behind writing the email.
There are 2 types of links on a webpage:
Do-Follow and No-follow links
Do-Follow links are the ones that pass link equity and are guaranteed to help you rank
better. If a link is followed and that too from a top relevant website, then that particular link is the best one for you. By default, links are followed on the internet unless specified. Do-Follow links tells google spiders that the site is vouching for the domain the link is pointing to..
Nofollow links are ones that are tagged and do not pass link equity. These types of links may not be editorially controlled by the site administrators. When a google spider encounters a no-follow link,it does not follow it to crawl the domain associated with it hence the link juice is not passed. All link profiles have a no-follow link it. Sites such as Quora, Slideshare have no follow links by default.
You also need to keep a check on the results of your efforts, right?
The sole purpose of blogger outreach is backlinking.
Keeping a track of your backlinks will help you analyze what you are doing right and what all you need to improve. For this, you can use Google Analytics and create an Advanced Segment. Create a single segment for all the domains you’ve guest posted for.
Then use Google Analytics to see what the data is from your backlink building efforts. This will tell you if your efforts were fruitful or not and will include the amount of traffic and conversions you’ve got.