4 Effective Link Building Techniques We Don’t Use (but you can)

There’s hundreds of techniques you could use to build/attract links to your website. Each technique has different requirements, costs, time to implement and effectiveness. Here’s 4 link building techniques which we don’t use for clients, for various reasons explained below, but you can do for yourself effectively.

Real Relationship Building

Relationship building isn’t a link building technique per se but a layer that you can add to many other techniques to make them more effective. The idea is to build relationships with those that have the potential to link to you and/or convince others to link to you. The fact that you have a relationship with them will make them both more likely to be aware of your linkable assets and have the motivation to add links to them.

How do you do it?

Make a list of all the influential linkers (and sharers) in your market along with their contact details and websites they contribute to. Here’s some ways you can find and identify them;

• People with large followings on social media
• Authors of blogs that frequently get shared, linked to and commented on
• People with large post counts and frequent activity in popular forums and other online groups
• People that regularly speak at events in your industry
• Think about the people that see your target customers before and after you do as well

If these people seem too big and famous (in your space) to be reachable, its probably still worth having a go because you might be pleasantly surprised but you can also try targeting people further down the list ie. the ‘B’ and ‘C’ listers.

Once you have all their details, use the following techniques to kickoff and nurture a relationship with them;

• Share, reshare and comment on their stuff on social media
• Link to their content from your website and then email them to tell them about it, and thank them for their awesome content
• Leave insightful comments on their blog posts
• Reach out to them with suggestions for improving their content such as correcting spelling errors or pointing out broken links
• Volunteer to help them make the improvement/s mentioned above
• Get on their mailing list and be sure to respond when they ask questions (which people often do)
• Go up and meet them at live events and follow up afterwards
• Ask for their advice or contributions when create content or trying to solve a difficult problem
• Be generally sociable

This should naturally get you on their radar which will make it more likely for them to see your content and generally more motivated to link to it if its good and relevant. Don’t be afraid to reach out to them every now and then and ask them to share your content or even link to you if relevant.

Why don’t we use this technique?

• Its time consuming and therefore expensive
• Its difficult to be authentic when you’re not close to the business
• It takes a long time to see significant results

Events

Events attract attention and usually have one or more websites dedicated to them and featuring information about them.  If you’re doing one of the following things you can probably get a link from the website/s featuring information about the event;

• Speaking at an event
• Hosting an event (your own or someone else’s)
• Exhibiting at or participating in an event

How do you do it?

Utilising Other People’s Events

If you want to leverage someone else’s event using one of these techniques, first you’ll have to find an event to get involved in.

1. Use Google and relevant event aggregation websites to look for events in your area or within travel distance which are related to your target market
2. Reach out to the organisers and ask if they’re looking for speakers/hosts/exhibitors for their next event
3. Volunteer yourself if they are
4. Once you get yourself involved in an event, help to promote it to relevant websites and communities, such as this one
5. Consider utilising a PR company to help with promotion
6. You’ll often get links from websites that mention the event without doing anything else but, if they don’t link to you, you can reach out to them and politely ask if they could add a link

In most cases you’ll be doing this for free for the publicity and marketing opportunities (including link building) rather than getting paid, unless its a really big event.

Here’s some specific tips for each method.

Speaking

• Prepare some materials to help attendees get the most out of your talk. This will provide an extra reason for websites to link to you so people can get access to the materials
• Create a blog post or page on your website with a summary of your presentation. Refer people to it within your talk if they want further information, a copy of slides etc. Let the event organisers know as well and there’s a good chance you’ll get some links after the event, not to mention targeted website visitors
• Deliver as much value as possible so people feel compelled to write about the event

Hosting

You’ll need a space suitable for hosting an event. At the basic level this means enough space to fit everyone in and a location which is convenience for people to get to.

• Make sure your website has details about your location so event websites can link to it for information on finding the venue

Exhibiting / Participating

• Consider ‘live blogging’ or reporting on the event to create a useful resource that others might refer to (anyone attending the event can do this)
• If exhibiting, give people something they can take away with them, even if its just a good photo opportunity. If attendees blog about their experiences, there’s a good chance they’ll mention you and add a link
• If the speaker asks for a volunteer or case study from the audience, put yourself forward and make sure you mention your business name and website address if possible. If the speaker spends a bit of time talking about you/your business there’s a decent chance that people covering the event will mention you and your business, hopefully with a link
• If you enjoyed the event, write a review about/of it and let the organisers/speakers/host know. They might use it in their marketing materials for future events

Utilising Your Own Events

You can leverage many of the techniques and tips I’ve mentioned above for your own events as well.

Further, if people reach out to you to host, speak or exhibit at your next event, consider it because they’ll help you with promotion and probably link from their websites back to yours.

Why don’t we use this technique?

• Its time consuming and therefore expensive
• You have to match up with the timing of events which doesn’t work well with our ‘on demand’ model of campaigns
• Many of the advantages of running events are not related to link building and SEO, as such, there are other link building techniques which are a better use of our time and resources

Reviews

This technique is fairly simple and can be quite effective. Essentially you offer bloggers and other websites your products and services for a free or cheap in exchange for them considering reviewing them/you on their websites. When they write about you, there’s a good chance they’ll add a link as well.

This technique is effective because there’s a strong value proposition for the reviewer; they get a free or cheap product/service and something to write about on their website. However, you need to be careful that you’re not giving a freebie in exchange for a link, which is against Google’s guidelines, or in exchange for positive press, which is against consumer laws. I covered the dangers of this technique in more detail here: Bloggers & Brands: You’re Doing it Wrong (SEO Edition).

How do you do it?

This technique is most suitable for those with lower priced product and services. If you have a higher priced item, think about how you might be able to provide a sample to bring the cost of your offer down.

1. Find bloggers and other websites that might like to review your products or services. There’s several ways to do this, including;
   • Run some advanced Google queries such as: inurl:blog “review” “disclaimer” [your keyword] to find websites that have a history of reviewing
     

     Here’s an example of a blogger reviewing some massage balls as a result of a review campaign by the brand.

   • Search for blogs related to your industry and or location
   • Search for blog lists related to your industry. Most industries will have lists of blogs that other people have curated which will save you the trouble of finding them yourself
   • Look for some websites that are specifically for connecting bloggers and brands for these types of relationships e.g. Bloggers Required & Nuff Nang
2. Come up with an offer that you will pitch to the websites and blogs you have chosen. This is where you need to be careful you’re staying within Google guidelines and consumer laws. You also need to plan how you will deliver the product/service/sample to the reviewer and/or how they will redeem it
3. Put all your target websites in a spreadsheet, collect their contact details and reach out to them with your offer
4. Answer any questions you get and facilitate the delivery of your offer
5. Keep in contact after delivery is complete, although don’t pester them, to keep you top of mind. Let them know which page of your website has more information about the product/service for their information (this will also be something they’ll probably link to if/when they write about you)
6. If they don’t end up writing about you, politely ask them why not. Maybe they can give you some feedback to help you run a better ‘review’ campaign next time. You can also ask if they have feedback about your product/service as perhaps they have some insights to help you make the your offering better

Competition variation: one variation on this technique is to offer a free product or service for the blog or website to give to someone in their audience via a competition. There’s a similarly good value proposition here as the website has something to write about and pass value onto their audience. It will be quite natural for them to include a link to your website and/or product page when writing about the competition.

Why don’t we use this technique?

• Most of our clients prefer ‘hands off’ campaigns which isn’t possible with this technique as you need to be crafting offers arranging for deliver etc.

Become Affiliated with Another Business, Organisation or Website

Businesses, organisations and websites that are affiliated often link back and forth between each other. There are five main affiliation types that will earn you links;

• Donation / sponsorship – when you’ve given a donation or sponsorship to an organisation and they recognise you with a link back. Must be used with care, see this post for more details: The Case for Sponsorship Links
• Membership – when you personally or your business becomes a member of some kind of organisation or community you’ll often be included in a member list or directory with an option for a link to be added to your website
• Customer / provider – when a service provider links out to their customers. Commonly occurs in the creative industry where people have ‘portfolios’ of past work
• Retailer / supplier – similar to above but covering product businesses where the retailer links to the supplier/brand to give customers more info about who created the product and the brand links to the retailer to let people know where they can buy their products
• Affiliation / partnership – this is a general category which covers any other type of affiliation not covered above

How do you do it?

With most of these affiliation types, links will only be added if there’s already precedent for that happening with their existing affiliations. Therefore, you should look to see if they already link out to other affiliation partners and, if they do, you’ll have a good case for getting a link to your website too, if you become affiliated. However, there are exceptions to this so if there doesn’t seem to be any linking precedent, there’s no harm in asking.

Why don’t we use this technique?

• Most of these techniques aren’t worth doing for link building alone, but are rather opportunities to gain links from affiliations you already have.

What Techniques do we Use?

After hearing all about the techniques we don’t use, you might be wondering what techniques we actually do use to gain links for our clients.

We focus on content based link building (CBLB) techniques where we build interesting and useful content to go on your site, then we promote that content to websites that have the means and motivation to link to you. One of those techniques is broken link building, which we’ve written about before. Some of the advantages of CBLB are;

• They are both effective and efficient which means there’s a relatively high links-effort ratio, unlike many of the techniques discussed on this page.
• We can start them at any time and go at our own pace.
• We can execute our campaigns with little to no input from the client. We find that most of our clients have too much on their plates already.

Conclusion

Links are a vital part of Search Engine Optimisation.

There’s many techniques you can use to get them, each of them have different costs, requirements, pros and cons.

The four techniques described here are not a good fit for our services which is why we don’t use them but they can still be effective for you to do in house.