21 to 30 Link Building Strategies

Link Building Strategies

Become a Content Provider

If you aren't putting content out there for consumption, you stand little chance of acquiring links. People use the web to gather information, and if you aren't giving it to them, someone else (your competitor) definitely is.

I know that many people who are fantastic communicators and great thinkers often don't believe that they can write anything of value. However, as we'll point out to start off, practice is the key here.

21. Write something even if you're not yet very good at it. The more you practice, the better you'll be.

22. Write something really, really good, something that no one else has yet written. Put a new spin on what you want to say so that it will grab people's attention. For example, if you're writing about pest control (and for the record I do not work with any pest control clients), then maybe write a piece about how you're never more than a few feet away from a spider. Shivers.

22. Think about an ongoing content plan and write so that it's easy to write a follow-up piece. Series are great, regular guest post slots are great, and knowing what your "thing" is can definitely be great. For example, for my agency's blog, we've decided that we want to show how we think about links. We have a group of employees who are from extremely diverse backgrounds and we've had a lot of success with blog posts that do more than tell you how to contact a webmaster and get a link. Our "thing" is creative thinking about what we do for a living.

23. Produce something other than just textual content. Do an infographic or create a comic. Produce videos where you do things like interview people in your industry (hey, look how far it took Jonathan Allen!) Start a weekly online radio show. That kind of non-text-based content does get links.

24. Actively pursue new opportunities for contributing to your industry. Maybe you can moderate a forum or help curate a weekly newsletter. Maybe you can provide fantastic answers on Quora.

25. Find something that's missing and jump into giving it to us. No forum for your industry? Start one. Looking for a list of all the preschools in your town but can't find one? Do the research, write it, and put it out there for everyone to see and link to.

26. Do one major article that will become the definitive resource for something and that can be (and will be) updated on a semi-annual or annual basis. Think Rae Hoffman-Dolan's amazing series "Link Building With The Experts."

27. Create a curated list for something. Think about your industry and what you have trouble keeping up with.

28. Produce a monthly "best of" series to recap what's happened in your industry in case people missed something.

29. Reference your older articles when they're relevant. Michael Gray does a great job of this with his archived posts tweets.

30. Make sure that when you do promote your content, the right people are seeing it at the right time. If you're publishing an article about the best pizza delivery in New York, don't publish it when everyone on the East Coast is sound asleep. There are great scheduling tools out there, so use them if you can't promote content at the right time.