Mastering the Art of Link Building (Part 3) Ep. 601

Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. This is the Best SEO Podcast. My name is Matt Bertram. Today is part three of Mastering the Art of Link Building. So for those of you that have not listened to the first two episodes, I'd encourage you to go back. This episode is about getting into some examples, try to get your juices flowing, and give you really that foundation of understanding of going out there and creating creative link building campaigns. Because the one thing I can tell you is organically earned links will provide link equity, link juice. When you're purchasing links, there's no guarantee they're going to work. For those of you that do coaching with me or have done consulting, no, I'm not a big fan of buying links. Not to say that it hasn't happened in the past. I would like to believe that I'm reformed in that regard, and I believe that the effort that you put into to generate links is going to produce X amount ROI more than going the short route. So I encourage you to put the effort into getting these links. There's a lot of technology, even like SEMrush, kind of shows you your link neighborhood. And if you're getting links from across the galaxy of the web, of a random link to you, it's very easy to see with machine learning and kind of pattern recognition that that's an unnatural link. Also I'll tell you if you're building links that are just junk, that you don't think have true value, or if you're SEO and you don't believe you can provide it to your client, there's probably not value in it. So really focusing on generating high quality, relevant, geographically local links is what we're talking about. So we're going to be going through some different examples of that. Also last episode I talked about this, the Entrepreneur Ultimate Guide to Link Building, one of the best books I've ever read to give you a lot of ideas on that. I will put

an affiliate link in the show notes if you'd like to pick up that book and support me at the same time. I picked up another copy of it for like five bucks. It's not like a huge investment, but I think the value far exceeds that. So I would certainly endorse that book. I have not read yet, but I also bought Entrepreneur Voices on Growth Hacking. So I do write for the entrepreneur. I think some of the content they put out has been absolutely fantastic. Not a huge fan of Forbes so much anymore. They do have some good podcasts and content, but I think they're lacking in their articles. That's my personal opinion. All right, let's move on. So the article we're going to get into today is by another SEO company called SEO Brainiac. Their article came up as I was searching. It's called The Most Creative Link Building Tactics, 33 Examples. This is a roundup page. This is a hub page. This is a link building strategy in itself because you're getting a bunch of links or you're linking out as a hub. If you're linking out, it's a hub. If you're linking to it, it's kind of a roundup. You want to kind of get reciprocal links in this regard and hopefully to get the people that you're rounding up to post it on social media and those are additional links. This is kind of a compilation of link building tactics. I would tell you the entrepreneur book is more of this style, who provided the link building tactics and then kind of going into what they're doing. What I want you to understand is the best link building campaigns are ones that are not overly obvious. They're completely organic and you truly do something to earn that link by providing some type of value to have people link to you, not just maybe having it be a link building scheme. I don't see a ton of value in it. I think the AI is getting better. Not to say that PBNs and

stuff like that don't work. I think if you're providing value or it's like a new site or something like that, I think I view that in a little bit different light. Link building is still a huge portion of the algorithm and certainly as you do a lot of the on page and technical work, which you can rank sites by doing that, when you want to get more juice out of that lemon or not say the website's lemon, but you know what I mean, you need more link equity and there's a couple of different strategies to go do that and getting high quality links in your industry or in your geographic area, preferably both where you're doing business is ideal. If you're e-commerce, a little bit different, but I will tell you that all these strategies, hopefully you'll start to get ideas on what might speak to you and you could try to implement. This is by Ollie Bayes, founder of Ollie Bayes Digital, one creative link building strategy that I employ for clients with local businesses involved providing a video for their find us page in return for a link. This video shows the walk that customers will need to take from the nearest public transport stop or park to their premises. Make these videos for other local brick and mortar businesses who then host the video on their find us page. The text that accompanies the video contains a backlink to the client. Usually with text, this video was created by XYZ. This is something I haven't heard before. I think it's really unique. Now I would tell you the anchor text of the link makes a difference too on how much link equity it pushes. If you are a photographer and you're providing this video, you want it to say photography or something along those lines, local photographer. If you're a marketing agency, you want to say maybe video marketing done, but know that you're going to be sending the signals of video marketing. If that's not something you do, maybe it's just

a video provided by maybe marketing agency, so Ollie Bayes Digital Marketing Agency, getting that in the anchor text I think is quite important. All right, here are the steps to do it. Build a list of local companies that have a find us page or exact location using Google search operations or operators, the Boolean search. Get the contact details. There's about 20% acceptance rate, so build your list assuming a 10% acceptance rate. Email them explaining, hey, we have this video. I think I had kind of explained. It's pretty self-explanatory, but this is saying you can easily do it with your iPhone and iMovie. Film the video, add a time lapse, and then go back down into iMovie and add instructions. Get the local businesses to post the video. Add the link. Send links. Increase your search. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Other businesses improve their website or their content. This is by Erico Franco, Inbound Marketing Manager at Agencia de la Marketing Digital. This is I think probably caters to Spanish speaking if it's Agencia de la Marketing Digital. We have a very interesting case about link building. Once we were desperate to get backlinks for a client who was a cryptocurrency wallet. I have a cryptocurrency wallet client, so this is interesting. At the time, the only domains that had a good domain authority were precisely the biggest company competitors, so we came up with an interesting plan to try to discover security flaws in the competitors and ask for backlinks as a reward, which was very difficult since we were experts in digital marketing and not digital security. So we did the following. We started to scan the cryptocurrency sites we knew for malware. We used a variety of APIs. In the end, we scanned thousands of sites, found eight that contained some relevant marijuana, immediately notified them by email and phone, and then asked for a backlink to get an average of six good backlinks that increased our client's traffic by 30%. Now I don't think that this has to be applied

specifically to like cryptocurrency space or cryptocurrency wallet and also going after competitors. I think that this could be a broader strategy. You can use even tools like BuiltWith to find different tech stacks and what maybe software they're using that might have a common security flaw that might have been upgraded. I can tell you there's a lot more security hacks going on. I am also, side note, very excited about a number of the interviews that I have coming up that I'm going to be publishing. We are going to be interviewing a cybersecurity specialist. There's been a lot of cybersecurity attacks on phone companies. I think there's additional probing going on from potentially foreign actors. We've had our servers attacked. We've had our websites probed and attacked constantly. And I think that it's just ticking up and increasing. What that means, I don't know, but I would tell you cybersecurity is on the rise and a lot more companies are spending money on it. Even like United Healthcare, which I'm actually getting affected by that. I have kids that have surgery and the site's not working properly. I think it came from a bunch of mergers and they didn't link everything, block everything, patch everything properly. But causing a big issue, causing a lot of economic issues. All right, let's keep going. I can't say this guy's name right, B-U-R-A-K-O-Z-D-E-M-I-R. He's a web developer. All right, so if you're a web developer, I know there's a lot of web developers that listen to this. Lately, many developers created COVID-19 trackers, so this is a little bit dated, reporting live statistics about Corona. However, some of those websites are harmful and contain malware. A week ago, the Turkish government banned some of those scammy sites. After seeing the government has blocked those sites, we found a report published by a government agency and listed those scammy websites. Then I reached out to people who were linking to those sites and told them that they are linking to sites that contain malware. Moreover, I offered my dashboard as a

replacement. Finally, I received a backlink out of my five outreach emails. I think that this is fantastic, seeing an opportunity in the market. Certainly, I believe somebody else shares this later, and this is something that we have done for clients. If there's a competitor, let's go back to the crypto space. There's a bunch of stuff that blew up, and they did a lot of marketing. There's a lot of people linking to sites that are no longer functional. To any stretch of the imagination, you can reach out to them, let them know that, and swap that out. There's a number of companies in multiple industries that have gone bust. Maybe there's companies you know in your local area. That would be a great strategy. Go scrape the site for those links, and then reach out to the people and say, hey, you're linking to a company that's no longer in business. I think that's a fantastic way to get links. I think that I would say that that is probably a little bit more thoughtful, but way better than just broken backlink building, because you'll get a treasure trove of links. The effort to find the site might take more work, but I think your hit rate, once you find that, you're going to get a lot of conversions. Next one, Jean Mao, and this is from Statistic Jobs. One link that we got from an old open source library that Google knows really well about, because we're software developers, we love the program. We emailed the project maintainer, offering to write a sample program that would demonstrate a certain feature of that library. We implemented the simple program in less than a day, and after about a week and several emails, our source code appeared on the library's website, along with the link to our own website as a token appreciation. This source code, too, contained our company name, tagline, and website. That's pretty much it. That's pretty fantastic. I would tell you, if you do have programming capabilities, another thing that I see is

getting stuff listed in Google or Apple stores, and that app produces a link. I know a lot of people create apps just to get the link. I would encourage you to create something of value that people actually use, but that is a way to get a diversified link. This is the next one from Adam Carbon, and then A-N-A-A-U, Managing Director at Take the Stairs LLC. The most creative backlink strategy that I've ever used was trading podcast transcriptions. I know you do if you're listening to this one. Trading podcast transcriptions for a link. In today's world, there's a lot of people podcasting. There's endless opportunities. Some people, I'm paraphrasing this, are not posting podcast transcriptions or show notes about what was said. There's a lot of easy tools that create that. You could create that form, offer that to them for a link. For this strategy, you need to look up podcasts that are related to your industry or related industry links that are important to your backlink portfolio, and determine if they embedded a player for their podcast on their website. Finally, you need to make sure that they aren't currently posting the transcripts of their podcast. When you have developed your campaign list for a month, you need to start finding contacts information in these companies through either calling or asking the best person to talk to via LinkedIn. When you have the POC that can help, let them know that you would provide a free transcription of a popular episode so they can increase their online traffic by naturally adding relevant keywords to their page. For those who agree, all you need to do is upload their transcription to Rev.com for $1 per minute. On the high end, you'll pay $80, 80 minutes for an industry-related link. I would tell you there are other tools that are out there. I know this article is a little bit dated. Even Google does a great job transcribing stuff. There might be some independent podcasters that might just not have the bandwidth to do this, but

I rather think it's an interesting strategy. Again, you're providing something specifically of value. Within the transcript, make sure to add at the bottom, transcript provided by name of your company. When you send the podcast in question in this way, you're adding value to a growing industry with minimal cost and work. This is from Nathan Rodriguez, account manager at Liftoff Digital. The most creative thing I've ever done in order to get a backlink was installing a webcam overlooking the beach. It was for a hotel. Once we had the webcam feed up on the page on the site, we started doing link building and got so many links. It was great. All right. That's interesting. Quincy Smith, VP of SEO and analytics at AmpJar. We once found a competitor being acquired for their technology. Yep. Okay. We already talked about that. This wasn't a big company, maybe only 50 opportunities, but we landed two or three links, but that was quite easy to do. It was only possible because we were monitoring online mentions of our competitors. Good. All right. Scholarships. Scholarship strategies. This is something that's been used for a long time. I've actually seen people charge crazy amounts for this. We had a client we had just picked up this couple of years ago. Prior to that, he had spent $15,000 to pay for a scholarship link bonus strategy. All right. I think you can really do this yourself. This is from Joseph, P-I-N-E-I-R-O, SEO manager at 360 Training. The most creative link bonus strategy we've ever implemented is the scholarship link building. We're currently in the process of it. This is a white hat link bonus strategy where we're creating a legitimate biannual scholarship and marketing it to high schools and colleges around the country via marketing email campaigns. We simply email, notify them our scholarship, include the link to the scholarship page and request that it be added to Alex Guide Scholarships. Earn 50 default links for each. Okay. This absolutely does work. We do have a couple of clients that have asked

us to do this for them. It's something that we've done successfully. You basically build a page talking about your scholarship. You have maybe people that will apply for it and maybe it's $500, $1,000, something like that a year. Then you get a list of a bunch of career counselors out of school, maybe in your state, in your city, and email them about it. Then they'll start to pass it around internally. Then all of a sudden, you have a bunch of links that are EDU links that diversify your link portfolio. You have additional web traffic. I think that this makes a lot of sense if you even build it into more of a resource page or your sites more. You do a lot of blog posts or in the news, pressure releases, where it's part of your current strategy. It's not a specific strategy on its own to get EDU backlinks and that's it. I think even speaking at schools and getting links that way and getting mentions and pressure releases and all that is a great add-on to this strategy. Creating interesting contracts with rich statistics and resources. This is from Freda KUKI, owner of a personal finance blog, Collecting Sense. I love the double survey technique by Kyle Bears, which it comes to creating posts that are backlink magnets. The double strategy technique includes two of the best post formats, round up posts, which we talked about previously, and original research. You select the top that is lacking in the original research or statistic, create one of the most detailed posts possible for it. The first step is to conduct a survey with relevant questions. Once you get a reasonable number of participants to take a look, you move to the second part, creating quotes from industry experts to include in your article. This is backlink gold. Who doesn't link to original statistics within their article? You research. It will be used by tons of writers who need the classic start line to start up their article and get a backlink in return. I

would tell you this is one of the most highest value link building opportunities I've read so far. It adds true value. It generates real links. It engages real people, builds real relationships. It checks a lot of boxes for me, so I really like that one. Good job, Freya, sorry, F-R-E-Y-A. I really like that one, and that was by Collecting Sense, personal finance blog. I like that one a lot. Bernice Q-U-E-K, SEO writer at Pet Lovers Central, featuring quotes and tips from industry experts. Yeah, so I think that that's great, quotes from bloggers, linking after I quote these experts in my article, I reach out to them, let them know about it, and then hopefully they'll link to you or share it on social media, Mason C-U-L-L-I-G-A-N, so Mason, C-U-L-L-I-G-A-N, founder and CEO of Mattress Battle Inc. One of my strategies in gaining backlinks is through infographics, and I think a lot of you heard that. Any infographic is easy to address visual content. Resharing an infographic is easy to share. It makes it ideal, focus on trending keywords. Infographics can easily be incorporated in an article, visually appealing. Yeah, I think also what I would tell you is these infographics added to blogs or page hopefully will get you, well, one, the page to rank if it doesn't currently rank because you're adding unique content to the page, so if you're creating for yourself, the infographic part is great. I would tell you you could post it on SlideShare on, well, it used to be owned by LinkedIn. I don't know if it still is, but SlideShare is a great way to post it where people can find it. Ultimately, what you want to do, in my opinion, is to get it indexed. If you can get it indexed, Google will push you link equity from that, and then if you get any additional links to it, that's just absolute bonus gold, right? All right, Christian Anton Off, A-N-T-O-N Off, content writer at, oh my gosh, ExcelTemplate.net. There's no space or hyphen in between there,

so kind of hard to read, but ExcelTemplate.net. At my previous company, we came up with the idea to round up all the popular articles in a selected industry every month. My task was to find the most relevant and shared articles and write a short resume about each of them. Roundup had five to 10 linked articles with a bit of description and the links to a social media account of the respective offers. After that, I outreached to the roundup and all mentioned the companies and professionals. This result was pretty much all involved for Carb-A's liked and shared my roundup. Some of them even included in their website or a link to our site. Best of all, they started contacting me with suggestions for future editions of the roundup. This was a clear win-win situation because I not only got backlinks, but free content as well. This tactic works quite well for me in the past. I think this is one of the best strategies right now that takes some effort. I would even put this as number two of the best strategies I heard. I see a lot of people doing it. I should probably do it more myself. If you would like to include me in a roundup or have a roundup idea for me, just email me. You can reach me at matt at EWRdigital.com. Please do not spam me. I don't like responding to spam and hopefully my email doesn't get out there, but we'll see when this podcast gets transcribed, right? The tactic works quite well from the past. This is Matt Sattel, S-A-T-T-E-L-L. This is an SEO growth manager at Mechanism. I ran a campaign at a drone photography company where we took aerial photos of 50 local golf courses, showed them all in an article on Philadelphia's 50 most beautiful golf courses. We then reached out to each golf course that was featured to let them know that a number of them were more than happy to provide a link to the article. It took a fair amount of work

to capture the aerial pictures, but it was worth it in the end as we attracted links from 12 domains. Yeah, you're adding value. I think it's great. Here's another one. This is from Mo Macha. I can't even say this. I'm so sorry. M-O-M-C-H-I-L, last name K-A-Y-C-H-E-V, marketing manager at CodeGiant. Here's how I managed to generate quite an impressive amount of backlinks. Study one of your direct competitors. Go through your competitor articles. Use the tool, check my links, love that tool, in order to find if there are any broken links in their articles. Once you find a section where there are broken links positioned, you craft a whole new section about your website and include about links, this message, broken link building, and going specifically after a competitor, convert the link. I think that this is a great strategy. All right. I think we're getting down to the end of them here. The next section is talking about build relationships and partnerships. Okay. This is from Ron Rotto, CMO and content director at Ron Repeat. I have two thoughts on this topic. First, the most creative tactic I've utilized is to generate unique data by running surveys on our site. It's not that crazy of a tactic, but almost no one does it because it takes work. Instead of many SEOs rely on roundups, guides, how-to articles, and HARO to get backlinks from top tier apps. I agree. It requires fresh insight and data on topics that readers are finding interesting. Most likely we find we have enough traffic to gather data quickly, but I find collecting our own data is a creative avenue that content creators should consider. I think creating your own unique content or using your own unique content makes you a thought leader. It provides absolute new content into Google. That's what Google's hungry for. It's not looking for rehashed AI generated content. Even Google just came out with a new update saying they're going after sites that are doing that. They want to feed the system unique content. I think that's

a lot of why Elon Musk bought Twitter, too, to get rid of all the bots, and he's using it to train his general artificial intelligence, his AI, and he needs to train it with real human data and new inputs. Humans can create unique content, so I think this is great. Second, this is maybe more of what you are looking for, but I sign up for industry trade shows and fly across the country to network and meet people within our industry. I'm not our company sales representative, I'm the CMO, so I don't conduct normal business at the trade shows, but getting face-to-face with people within my industry helps build relationships that can eventually lead to working together on content and building quality backlinks. It's a lot of money to fly somewhere for three days, but I think it's 100% worth it, and the relationships you build are real, which in the end is one of the key tactics to link spawning. Okay, so my opinion, side note real quick on conferences, is they're absolutely critical. I was so sad to miss South by Southwest this year. There was a lot of fun things. There were some of my friends that did the AI house. I really wish I could have been there. I think it was a missed opportunity. I think that also going to conferences, it puts you on a trajectory to run into people you would never run into before. It gets people out from behind their desk. You're connecting with them. You make real relationships. I go to a lot of oil and gas conferences, easy, here in Houston, especially right now with young kids, but I super encourage it if you can go to conferences. There's a lot of free conferences out there. There's a lot of specific industry conferences. I actually like smaller conferences. I actually like going to, like being there absolutely before it starts, maybe sticking around after it ends. I just went to an innovation conference in Denver. Every year, they do a ski retreat at the end,

so a lot of people stay. That's where you really meet people and connect over the long term. One of the goals of podcasting, of writing content, of blogging, of sales, is to get people to know, like, and trust you. I know I have content and books out there about this sort of thing, but what you're trying to do is build a connection with somebody where you're engaging with them on some level or they're consuming your content for an average of seven hours. From the data that I've seen, I also support it. What we have, if people engage with your content or get to know you for seven hours, you kind of cross that threshold with them, and they're more likely to do business with you. Think about that. At a conference, that's one of the absolute best ways to tick towards that timeframe, to build those relationships. They might not do business with you right now because only roughly 3% of people are looking to do something right now. You can do business with them in the future. There could be partnerships. There could be all sorts of things. Also, I would encourage you all to listen to this podcast, Mastering the Art of Link Building, part one, part two. That'll get you maybe close to three hours. The rest of the content that we have, if there's any topics you like, binge listen to it. We've been doing this for 13 years. Set up a free consultation, if you like what we're saying. Also have some paid consultation, doing a lot more of those these days. Back to it. There's a little plug in there, so thank you for listening and sticking around. This is by Eli Wilson, Digital Marketing Manager at Trends with a Z. We look for brand mentions from our competitors and influencers and bloggers on social media, especially LinkedIn and Twitter. You can use Google Alerts. There's other tools out there that you can use, Buzzsumo. We can reach out to these influencers, bloggers on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and sometimes

get a link from their website. Now this comes the tedious part. We keep them suggesting about topics and ideas, new ideas, suggesting to write new content on their old articles, help them out on Quora. We try to create a good rapport with them and finally when it has been established, we do write for them and get backlinks on our site. So all about building relationships. But this is not the end of the story. We don't do link exchanges. Google has started identifying such link exchanges and have been putting them in their spam list. I would tell you if you do exact link exchange on G and B, so you're like, Hey, I'll post on yours. You post on mine. If you do that in the same window or time period before any other reviews, Google sees it and immediately deletes both of them. I have seen that. We simply cross them. We have happened to know that blogger A, B, and C, we get a backlink from A, A gets a backlink from B, B gets a backlink from C. So a round robin, not a round robin, but kind of a circle, I guess. We write the articles and post on Quora articles and other social media. This is important. So you're crafting your backlink profile. What is it called? Link sculpting. Because Google might in a few months understand the trick as well. So it's just saying mix it up, but just do whatever is natural. I think Google doesn't come after you for link exchanges if they're natural, if they make sense. Google has gotten really good at identifying this stuff. Estimated time to get backlinks, 30, 45 days. I would even tell you a pro tip, every link you get, it takes about 60 days from the data I've seen to come to full fruition. That's why SEO takes long time. I would tell you also the Google database turns over about every two months. All right, main robin, or sorry, Brian robin, I don't know, SEO at robin, R-O-B-B-E-N, media.

Imagine this. I shut off my computer, got in my car, met a guy at a restaurant. We had a few beers, soft pretzels, burgers. We talked about business and straight up asked him for a backlink to which he said, no problem. Of course, I'm happy to do that. That's the strangest way I've received a backlink. The week before dinner, I messaged him saying how it'd be good for us to both share what we're seeing in the industry and the different opportunities to partner. Then I made the ask. The worst he can do is say no, and it worked out, and we received 61 authority backlinks. This isn't a recommended strategy if you're going for quality, quantity, quantity, though If you want to secure high domain authority backlinks, spending time and making the ask for an individual each week will do wonders. Never eat alone. What is that book? Meeting people in person, I think since COVID, absolutely. It's suggesting you can do video hangouts, having a portion of your time each week or each month to build your personal knowledge like listening to podcasts or outreaching to people. I think it's absolutely good. He's also talking about 61 backlinks. 61 authority backlinks, if it's a good backlink, it could be 100 low quality links, like one authority backlink, depending on how you define that. So I think that's great. All right. Helping Charities, next section. We're almost done. Gabrielle Bertolo, B-E-R-T-O-L-O, owner of Radiant Elephant. I did a very simple free website for a local charity. Once completed, I created a press release that introduced the charity and added that I designed their website. We ended up creating 30 great backlinks using the power of your brand and social media influences for Matt Smith, CEO of Diabetes Life Solutions. The most creative technique that we used is a pretty simple one. We reached out to a website for a guest post with the same audience as us. We dangled a little carrot in front of them. I offered to write a guest post on your

site, give us a backlink in my author section of the post in exchange for promoting this to our monthly newsletter that goes over to 100,000 people by offering something that was beneficial to the others. We have great success in tainting a blog post with a backlink. It's a true, true win for everyone. I think this is really, really common. I would put this in my category as top three so far as one of the most effective ways to do that. Google has kind of looked down upon guest posts, but if you're getting author by link, so they have to make the extra effort to creating an author profile for you, it does build your authorship, which is starting to come back and it qualifies that you're writing. So I think that's the best way to absolutely do it. Syed Hassan, H-A-S-S-H-A-N, Digital Content Head at Film Jackets, I'd like to share a tip on how we create and receive backlinks through subscribers. Getting backlinks is the tricky part of SEO and it's the only way to boost your website ranking if other strategies don't work. You don't have enough link equity, you've optimized your site as much as you can, you moved off page. What I do was contacting influencers on our subscriber list and asking them if any one of them is a blogger or a YouTuber. After receiving so many responses, I send a second email to ask if they'd be interested in reviewing or promoting one of our jackets. I received many responses and also a few of them gave backlinks to our website. This is Nikola Roza, owner of Nikola Roza SEO for Poor and Determined. I got a backlink from a very recent expert roundup. So when I first saw it on social media, the roundup was promoted as 14 experts explain how to do X in SEO. This is something I know a lot about, so I reached out to the author and asked to be included. So yeah, getting yourself added to stuff, I agree with this. In

return, I promised to tweet my 1,000 strong engaged Twitter audience backlinks for the post from my future guest post and finally a tip that none other 14 experts talk about. I think this is great. I think this is a really great one. So there's already a roundup post, you want to get added in it, you want to be included shoulder to shoulder with some of the other experts. Say hey, if you'll add me to this, I'll do this and promote it. I'll tell you a lot of these algorithms, if you start sharing them again on social media, they'll start to get a lot more visibility. So if you're saying hey, if you'll add me to this, here's what you can add and then this is what I'll do for you, I think that's fantastic. You need to be creative and convincing. You get the idea. All right. Let's see. Creative outreach methods. This is helping reporters out and journalists. Okay. Where are we on time here? All right. I'm going to skim these and I'm going to give the best one because I think you're starting to get the idea and get the juices flowing. This is just saying emailing hundreds of emails to get backlinks. So started picking up the phone, cold call in. Let's see. This guy's talking about cracking a joke, being real with people, connecting with people. Let's see. I research and follow specific tactics offered by experts, but the problem is with this type of approach is everyone who follows the experts is doing the same thing. I would tell you very few people take action, but same email template, same tools. So being genuine is basically what they're saying. Being creative. Let's see. What else? Yeah. So this is a lot of like email outreach and kind of how to use the templates. Suggesting using Hunter.io. I agree. I've used that in the past. What else? So last section here, promise. Offer help to reporters, journalists, and bloggers. So of course Haro is something where we've acquired some high

quality backlinks ourself. I would tell you that the problem with Haro is that it's the first person that responds. So you've got to have somebody active on it all times and you can get articles placed, but it's not always about your specific narrow niche. You have to broaden the niche a little bit, but it does work very, very well. And so the rest of these are basically talking about how to use Haro. I will link to the article in the show notes if you want to check it out, but that's basically the gist of Haro. And then last one, create useful online tools. So little widgets and stuff like that. So really the goal of this was to get your juices flowing, to think about what you can do, what capabilities you have, what speaks to you to start generating high quality backlinks. Creating low spammy backlinks is just a waste of energy. Use that energy to do something better. Paying for links is not good. I would tell you if Google identifies a site that is selling links or buying links and you have a link from that website, I think it's one or two jumps away, your site can get tainted too and what it will do is it will dampen the effect of the link so it might not provide any value and even worse, it could lead to algorithmic penalties, probably not a manual penalty. But again, if you're dealing in a bad neighborhood and you're doing something that Google tells you specifically not to do and you do it anyway, it's a cat and mouse game. You're going to get caught. I don't think that there's enough time or energy to do that. I think all these examples are ways that you can legitimately generate links and again, the best strategies are, well, the ones that produce the most value, the best high quality links but are following all the guidelines but are really the most creative. I would tell you the most creative ways to generate links that not

everybody's doing or not everybody's seen is fantastic. Links also are the icing on the cake. I don't think it should be your primary focus. I think it should be something additionally that you do and those were my top four I think I listed in there that I like the best and I would encourage you to do them. Even though maybe a lot of people are doing them, very few people actually take action so I would just challenge you to take action. If you would like to grow your business or have a third party, someone like my team do it. We're great at outreach. We're great at learning your business, getting very creative and helping you grow. We're looking for long-time partners. Reach out to us on our website. That's the best way to do it. Set up a free consultation and talk to one of our strategy representatives to see if the discovery call, see if we're the right fit and we'd love to connect with you. If you like this podcast, please leave us a review where you're listening it to. Please share it. I'll also leave you places to leave a review. We're trying to get reviews on Yelp right now and Trustpilot. So EWRdigital, Trustpilot or Yelp, really would appreciate it. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.