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( votes)For those of you who are not familiar with digital marketing terminology, link building refers to any form of marketing whose purpose is to increase links to a specific website (in this case, yours), which usually occurs in concordance with pre-existing set rules.
If you decided to increase traffic on your webpage and are concerned with the methodologies, here is your best chance to make it work according to your needs. Leading your first link building campaign will not be easy but not as challenging as you might think if your goals are set and your mindset crystal clear.
So why it is important that we promote link building?
Search engines work by using links; these links bring webpages closer or further from Google’s first page and thus generate traffic. If a page is of high quality, it will include more links and will be ranked higher. The theory behind it is that I someone is using your links, then your source is of high value and will, therefore, be ranked higher than other resources, making it more accessible to other individuals who might need that information available for them.
To build a strong link building campaign, you’ll need to follow these basic steps and, of course, add your personal input to it.
Set Your Goals Accordingly
The first step you must take is to set your goals accordingly if you want the best results possible. However, you must ensure that your link building campaign goals directly connect to your overall business objectives. The “get more links” mentality will bring you no real long time benefits so make sure you work on tactics to keep your aim straight and high. These are some of the goals that you could be looking into:
- Expanding or deepening your keyword portfolio
- Improving your rankings
- Increasing brand awareness on the market
- Turning to organic links, therefore, naturalizing your profile
- Moving to the first page from the second or third by using the right tools
- Getting new pages or sites indexed, etc.
In any case, make sure that your goals are S.M.A.R.T., meaning they are Significant, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. If one of these elements is missing, either correct your goal or make sure you change it accordingly.
Here are the most important things you should know:
Find Your Best Hooks Available
The first thing to do when developing a link building campaign is looking at the assets that you are going to utilize to attract links and earn them. That is also called a hook, or something that captures people’s attention and gives them the best of what you have to offer, making them interested in quoting you.
Some examples could be products, services, data, quality content, or even people. A less-ethical asset is money – try to stay away from paying people to help out with your linking campaign and stick to natural advertising with no money involved.
What Links Will You Be Looking Into?
There are four different types of links you could look into, which are links to your website’s homepage, links to your category/product/services page, links that engulf your brand or company name, and links that contain keywords that you are interested in.
These types of link-building campaigns can be combined and interconnected in such a way that one campaign might possess more than one of the above qualities. The first thing you should do is identify what type of package you need and come up with the reasons for that by analyzing your ranking and competition.
Thus, first, perform a thorough analysis and see how your profile looks like right now. This analysis will help you discover the things that you can improve and those that are working for you the best. Do some relevant link analysis as well and see where you have missing links. Then, identify the problem and solve it according to your needs!
Your Link Targets Are Also Important
Before starting up your campaign and going forward with it, think about the people that you are most able to contact. Depending on the type of content, you will be able to reach out to various individuals, each of them on his or her own path.
So, why would they care about you and what you have to sell? Here’s a question that you must answer perfectly well to get people to vouch for you and your brand. This is where the challenging part comes in – people can read and respond but when it comes to linking back to your website, they might have some doubts. That’s why your job is to convince them of the quality of your webpage and teach them to care enough to share your work.
But how can someone convince people to care? you might be wondering. Easy peasy! All you have to do is (a) find content that interests them and (b) find assets that they need. Some of the hooks that have worked well are news-related (as controversial as possible), funny-based, encourage data visualization, are baits forego, or expose long, detailed content (usually highly research-based).
How About Identifying Your Target Audience?
Once you have gone through the above process, identifying your target audience shouldn’t be that hard. A good exercise could be literally scrolling down on your favorite platforms and checking out shares and interests and then reaching out to those individuals who care about you care about.
Let’s take an example – let’s say you’d like to write a content entitled, 101 Days of Traveling: The Ultimate Trip. You are producing this type of content because you own a traveling company that wants to bring people to the United States. Let’s brainstorm: who would be interested in your content and why? Don’t read further, jot down your answers, and then come back to this page to compare the results.
So, who would be interested?
- Travel bloggers, obviously.
- Tourists and travelers (here I am referring to those who already own a business): they might share a link to this topic on their websites.
- Hotel and hostels websites: especially if the article mentions their host city.
- Party websites and even food websites: because party and food go hand in hand with traveling, right?!
Learn How to Outreach
Starting to tell people all the great things about your content will turn them into trustworthy customers or share buddies – thus, it is quite important that you do that. The only way you could turn strangers into friends and make them like your product at the same time is if you are good at outreach. Thus, you must understand that –
- You are actually contacting a real person and must offer them your time and experience. Offer every single person you talk to a little bit of yourself.
- Learn how to craft a powerful message and deliver what you must deliver without sounding corny. Teach them why they should care about you, your work, your actions, your business.
- Tell them what you would like them to do or what is required. People love to hear that as most of them love following instructions subconsciously.
- Show them why they should trust you and why you are not a spammer but a reliable individual. Be professional in your interactions and use their name, good subject lines, proper signature, and a genuine email address.
Conclusion
These are just the first steps to developing a powerful campaign but are also the pillars of becoming seen on the market. Thus, take into consideration the above steps and develop a plan that fits your brand’s needs. Good luck!
