Unleashing a Successful Link Building Campaign

The importance of building quality links to your content has been known for some time now. One of the single most important ranking factors for your site is the war chest of quality links you have amassed.  A successful link building campaign can be challenging depending on your industry, but it is very doable and essential to your site. This post will go over the basics on how to carry out an awesome link building campaign.

Basics: What is link building?

Link building is the process of acquiring quality links to your website in hopes of increasing your search engine ranking. Another added benefit of link building is getting the word out about your business or service you provide.  Take note of the emphasis placed on the word quality in the above statement. All links are not created equal. Links to authoritative sites with relevant content are miles ahead of lesser site links, and toxic links can actually hurt your rankings.  Link building is a very time consuming process that requires patience and a lot of effort.

The first order of business you need for a link building campaign is content that is worthy of a link. This could include blog posts, case studies, info graphics, products or other information resources relevant to your target site. Another good way to acquire a link is to do a guest post on a site relevant to your industry. Writing guest posts on high profile, high traffic sites is a surefire way of increasing visibility to your site and your own content and granting you a coveted high quality link.

So How Do You Find A Link Opportunity?

Research. Yes, it’s that simple. The first part of designing your link building strategy is to have an idea of who would actually want to read or view your content. When you can answer the question of who wants to consume your content, you can narrow down the target sites for your links. While keeping the target audience in mind, think of sites that are most likely to respond to you and accept your link outreach. Nothing is more frustrating than spending hours upon hours of researching link opportunities and tailoring your content for the site only to have them ignore and not even respond to you.

Make Contact!

So you’ve compiled a list of sites to reach out to for links. You have this amazing content to present or an idea for a guest post to suggest – What now? Now begins the outreach phase. Something to keep in mind is you’re going to be reaching out to actual people.  It is best to tailor your pitches based on who the person is or what their site is. The use of templates here can spell disaster. Create a great subject line, reference their work in the body of the email and finish off with an email signature. You don’t want to be thought of as a spammer, so make sure you get it right! Craft your emails to highlight the value of the content you have to offer and keep the conversation going. You need to show them why they should allow you to be linked on their site.

The final part of the link building campaign is the follow up. If you don’t receive a response from someone, that may just mean they are busy. Don’t be shy – send them a follow up email. This also shows that you’re a real person and not a spammer utilizing automation software to reach out. The final note is to respond to every email response, regardless of whether or not it is a positive response.

There you have it, just a rough idea on how to build a successful link building campaign. Now get out there and start building those links!