Link Building Strategies

It is estimated there are roughly 200+ ranking factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking your website. These range from site load time, bounce rate, and dwell time.

However, the number of websites pointing links back to your site is one of the top, if not the #1 ranking factor in their algorithm. Essentially, the more links pointing to your website, the higher you can potentially rank in the SERPs.

So, it makes sense, as affiliate marketers, that we want to invest considerable time developing our link building strategies to improve our visibility for inbound marketing. It cannot be overstated; for link building to work, you must have a quality linkable asset in place.

People are unlikely to link back to content created to promote and sell products. Still, they are willing to link to informative data-driven content, or content providing a ‘how-to’ providing a solution for the user.

Because of this, creating informational content alongside your sales content should form a large part of your promotional strategy, as you will be using your informational content throughout your link building campaigns.

A single link from an authoritative source can work wonders for your website. With that being said, the opposite is also true.

Links from low powered websites that are entirely irrelevant can be seen by Google as an attempt to ‘game’ your backlink profile – and is a commonly used tactic in link building. PBN’s (personal blog networks) are commonplace in internet marketing. While they can be used successfully in some cases – it is also possible that Google will penalize any website caught leveraging PBNs.

That’s not to say that all links from lower-powered websites are bad, the real trick is creating a varied and natural backlink profile.

The basic premise is to curate a backlink profile that contains links from both high-power authority sites, along with links from smaller, less authoritative sites.

Sources should also be diversified, featuring a mixture of dofollow and nofollow links from social comments, forums, blog posts, news articles, and more. The more varied your link sources, the more natural your backlink profile appears to Google.

In the Upper Ranks article linked above, they mention that a quality backlink profile has an average of 40 DR between the spread of higher and lower authority links.

Conducting a successful link building campaign requires a high degree of organizational skills, as you may potentially be managing 100s of e-mail trails at one time.

Luckily for us, some geniuses have created and developed numerous tools designed to manage and streamline the link building process. We have a post listing some crucial link building tools you should be using that can be found here.

Yet, before you take your first steps towards crafting an enviable backlink profile, you should be aware of some key strategies employed by today’s affiliate marketers. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and each strategy could command a post of its own.

However, this will provide you with a solid foundation going forward in your link building efforts.

Linkable assets can take several forms, which include:

• Detailed, data-driven, informative blog posts.
• Infographics
• Custom images
• Video content

Infographics are a great way to win some quick links if they are concise and easy to digest many bloggers will be happy to place them into their content. Not only that, but great infographics can take on a life of their own – getting organic shares and links without you having to put in any extra work.

The same is true for video, and I believe that video is the future for affiliate marketing; anyone not using it as a content medium will be left behind in the future.

The tricky part is finding prospects to reach out to; although, most bloggers will let you know they are willing to accept guest posts right on their site.

This makes it very easy for us to prospect for guest post opportunities by utilizing Google search operators.

If you are unsure what a Google search operator is, they are a set of commands used within a search query to narrow your search parameters, bringing back highly relevant information.

Examples of some advanced search operators commonly used to prospect for guest posts include:

Keyword “guest post”

Keyword “submit a guest article”

Keyword inurl:guest*blogger

Keyword “guest blogger” + inanchor:contact

Etc.

Replace ‘Keyword’ with the keywords you are currently trying to target.

There are numerous lists available online containing masses of advanced search operators that can be used by affiliate marketers seeking guest post opportunities.

Using this method, it is possible to curate a relatively extensive list of guest opportunities to kickstart a guest post campaign. It can, however, be time-intensive.

Not only do you have to prospect and conduct outreach, but you will also need to create the content for their blog. Often this isn’t too strenuous as guest blogs are commonly limited to between 500-800 words. However, this can still be a significant time sink.

Using a freelance service on Fiverr or Upwork to create your guest post content can alleviate the time restraints while keeping costs down.

Occasionally, bloggers will reply stating that they will accept a post with backlinks in return for payment. These opportunities are known as sponsored posts and are just guest posts in exchange for money.

It is, more often than not, possible to haggle for the best price – and many bloggers offering guest posts will create the content for you.

You will need to decide on a case by case basis, considering the authority of the target site, how much they are charging, and whether or not they will create the content for you.

PROTIP: you don’t have to limit yourself to prospecting for guest post opportunities in this manner.

Many large authoritative sites might not advertise that they accept guest posts. Still, if you notice a content gap on their blog and approach them with some creatively written e-mail correspondence, they may accept your proposal.

Doing this can provide you with high authority links from opportunities your competition might have missed.

aHrefs is excellent for this application, and I am going to assume this is the tool we are using. However, most keyword research & competitor analysis tools have similar functionality – and the process remains the same.

Newer affiliate marketers should have already identified their main competitors during their initial niche research, yet, if you are an experienced affiliate marketer and have no idea who your main competition is, then you need to do some research.

Once you have identified your main competition, place their URL into aHrefs’ Site Explorer’ to bring up their domain overview. Next, select the option to view their pages as ‘best by links’ and sort by referring domains.

This will show you a list of their most linked-to pages, allowing you to extract a list of backlink sources that are now your prospects.

If you are confident that you have content that is not only relevant, but superior, you can then outreach to each prospect and offer your content as a preferred source of information for their readers, asking if they will swap out your competitor’s link for your own.

If you don’t currently have a relevant content asset, you can create one for this specific purpose.

When using aHrefs, you can also view by ‘top pages’ to see what pages are currently performing best for your competitor – potentially allowing you to get ahead of them when prospecting for new link sources.

This is an intermediate/advanced link building technique, and success levels very much rest on the level of your content and how well you come across during correspondence.

Again, we will be using aHrefs to detail how this technique works, but it is possible to conduct broken link building through Moz, SEMrush, and others.

Take your competitors URL and like link hi-jacking, place it into aHrefs site explorer. Again, we are going to view our competitors’ site through the ‘best by links’ tab.

At the top of the menu, there is a drop-down box for ‘HTTP Code,’ use this drop-down box to select ‘404 not found’. This will bring up a list of 404 pages on your competitors’ site, and all the referring domains that are currently linking to it.

You can then export a list of everyone linking to these broken pages and reach out to them.

During outreach, you should mention that you have come across their page and noticed a 404 error from one of their links. Then, offer up your own comparable content as an alternative solution for them to link to.

If you don’t currently have related content, you can create it just for this purpose.

Many bloggers and webmasters are happy to do this, as not only have you brought a problematic link to their attention but also offered a simple solution for them.

Not only can this lead to a good amount of backlink creation, but relationships can be built – leading to organic backlinks in the future.

Now, while links in social shares are generally regarded as non-entities, due to their low power, if you have a sudden spike in social signals, it can still help diversify your backlink profile.

Not only that, but you will have grown your social influence and, hopefully, increased your site traffic.

Vendor’s performing outreach on your behalf often have relationships with many large authority sites and can gain you some pretty powerful links – these can often be more than worth the money and are natural, safe links.

If you are buying links outright, however, remain cautious and only go with reputable vendors with good reviews and recommendations.

PROTIP: if you are going to use a PBN, instead of pointing them to your main site, you can point them to domains that link to you – increasing their authority and, in turn, yours.

This is called tiered linking and isn’t always advisable, but it can work in some cases.