Why You Should Be Using Linkable Assets by Joshua Hardwick Part 1 #419

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. My name is Matt Berksham. You're a Topgolf pro. Topgolf pro. We had a team-building event yesterday. It was at Topgolf, and we had an absolute blast. Who won the second round? Aaron Weathers, right there. He's actually standing in as the photographer today. And I think I won the first round, actually. I think I won. You think you won both? Oh, I believe you. Well, good job. Punch in the face to Aaron for winning both rounds of Topgolf, and the whole team for coming out and participating full force. Listen, this is the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. This is podcast number 419. As always, we have a tip from our previous podcast, and that tip is down there. The tip is on your product title tags on your Google Merchant. Make sure that those are different than on your website. So Google Merchant actually uses those title tags to really drive, in a very powerful way, where your products actually show up. So you want to make sure to spend extra time when you're loading those feeds into Google Merchant. Sometimes they need to be different often on your website. So subscribe, follow, boom! All right, back to the show. Remember, we are filmed live here in Houston, Texas. And Matt and I, we are your Results Rebels! Hey, I want to jump into this review. You know, last time I read a pretty, it was a sad review. It was tough. Taking a shit. It hurt, it hurt in a couple different places. Even one of our listeners texted me and was like, I got that, are you okay? And I was like, I'm surviving, I've scheduled some therapy sessions, I'm going to survive. So I want to jump into this review. And this review is five stars! It says, great show, highly recommend. This is by Dave Soul. I've been listening to the show for a couple years and they put out

some great information. Just need to hit my 30-second advance button seven or eight times to get straight to the meat. But still, the best SEO show out there. Punch in the face to you, Dave. No problem with you skipping. But you probably just skipped that we read your review on air and gave you a punch in the face. Oh, no. So that's the... Well, this is the article you're in for a special treat. This is one of the best articles I've ever... It's a pretty phenomenal article. Excellent. So if you're returning to this podcast, it's probably because you like the information you're getting, just like Dave does. And you might be interested in, I don't know, say five online marketing mistakes that can take your business and how to avoid them. You can... I think we changed it. Did we? No, actually, I know it was underway. Not yet. It's about to be changed. I heard a bunch of ideas flying around about like how desperately we need to change it. We're going to put my book funnel on there. Oh, yes. The book, Build Your Brand Mania. That's coming soon. Don't go check out the domain yet. If you want those tips, right? Five online marketing mistakes that can take your business, just go to ewebresults.com slash... Tip or tips. SEO tip or SEO tips. Or tips. Or tips. Everything. Just get there. Because you keep getting different stuff. So good. Hey, we've got a good article today. Listen, I'm thinking like Muhammad Ali on a pound for pound basis. This is a heavy hitting article. This is like a book. This could easily be like a $30 ebook. Yeah, no. I mean, Joshua is the head of, yeah, AHREFs and just killing it. He's the head of content. Head of content. Yeah, really. So this is six linkable asset types and exactly how to earn links with them. We're only going to do two today. That's how good this article is. We're just going to cover two. This is going to become a

three-part series. Yeah. So interestingly enough, I was on, what was I, on Quora. Okay, yeah. And I was commenting on a few things. And Mariam Ellis was... Commenting also? Yeah, yeah. I was talking to her. We ended up doing five on her article, on our local SEO article. And I still bump into her as I'm doing research for the podcast regularly. So punch in the face to you, Mariam. Yeah, she's counting it out there. She's awesome. All right. So if this is your first time visiting the podcast, howdy and welcome to the podcast. If you've listened to this podcast before, then you know what we're going to skip. Yes. We're going to skip it. We got... We have a contest. Do we talk about the contest now or we talk about the contest later? Let's just wait. People are... People... I want them to rewind. Yeah. Yeah. If you've pressed fast forward seven or eight times, you're going to now rewind this time. What we will say is that if you would like a free website analysis, we will actually give that free website analysis to you. All you need to do is go to ewebresults.com and there's a free website analysis button right there. And interestingly enough, we're going to maybe do some throwback days because we were going through the website on Wayback Machine and we saw all the different... Versions. Iterations. ...since 1999 and all of them had a free website analysis. All of them. It's been a consistent thing from the beginning. Love giving back just like in this podcast. I do have a little bit of news and it's just something kind of cool. Avengers, the Infinity War breaks the box office record. I'm looking forward to that. You know, Adam was going to watch Black Panthers and so I... Is that what Black Panther is? Yeah. He watched Black Panther yesterday and so Adam is our PR guy. So he's the one who kind of keeps us up to date around the office about what's going on because normally

we're just head down in like internet marketing stuff. Oh, I'm getting pulled every which way. Every which way. So yeah, he watched Black Panther yesterday and then I think he's got kind of a newish baby and has figured out where the newish baby is going on Monday so he can watch the Avengers on Monday. Yeah, no, I want to watch all that. I want to catch up. So it's fall in the comic books. Punch in the face to you, Adam. All right. That's really the potatoes of the podcast. It's time to get into the meat. And actually, if you're... Oh, no. We've got a question. We've got a... We need like a question sound. Huh? Huh? Huh? It's time for our favorite segment. Huh? Huh? Not sure I can do that every time. So this was Alan Hauser. He said, at eWebResults, howdy. When you were talking about ratios in your last episode, you mentioned naked. What are you referring to? And that was naked links, right? Yeah. Yeah. You want to... You're the one who mentioned it. Well, your domain link. Yeah. Just the domain name. Just your... Yeah. Your domain name. That's all it is. Yeah. The interesting thing, too, is the comment before was, you know, trying to get links. Okay? Right. That's why we're doing this article, is to help you get links. But also, okay, you can do a lot of on-page stuff yourself. Yeah. And you can control it. Yeah. Make sure that your on-page link infrastructure is maximized. Like when you're looking at your ratio, make sure you're looking at your on-page stuff because you can control that. Yeah. And you can break it up and cross-link and really look at your sitemap. So, that's just a tip. Yep. Absolutely. And we're going to be talking about linking, right? This entire article is about building assets that can help generate backlinks for you. So, six linkable asset types and exactly how to earn links with them. If you're in a position to, you can tweet or you can

do something like that, we'd ask you to do that now. Hashtag SEO podcast. This is podcast number 419. We have something special planned for 420. Tag us in it at bestSEOPodcast, at eWebResults, and at MattBertramLive. Boom. And tag us. Also tag Joshua here. And it's at JoshuaChardwick. And at Chris Burris. And at Chris Burris. Yeah. It's apparently a Twitter thing that I'm doing now. All right. First off, absolute punch in the face. Joshua put this great article together. He's the head of content over at AHRefs. And he's talking about linkable assets. Yeah. For some reason, I highlighted linkable assets, the phrase three separate times. I'm like, this is important. I don't know what I'm going to do with it. So he does give an example of the backlink profile of a linkable asset, right? And this particular one that he has, 21,000 backlinks on 1,000 different domains, right? So imagine, just to make this simple, if you're on one domain and you have a bunch of comments and each of those comments are linking back to you, that could be multiple backlinks on the same domain. But that's pretty substantial. How many of you would like to have 21,000 backlinks to a particular page on 1,000 referring domains? Yeah. Our hands are up and we're taking notes and making assignments. So stuff like this happens. So he says, a linkable asset is a piece of content purposely crafted. I like his good wordsmith. With the intention of tracking links, usually from other websites in your niche, right? So he's going to jump into all six of these. They almost never product pages. So don't really think about taking one of your shopping cart product pages and going, I'm going to turn this into a linkable asset. Here are some other benefits of attracting links, right? Well, I mean, do we want to give any kind of like a little history on why links are important? Like the value of different links? Well, that's a good idea. I mean, we could go back to like page

rank and the origin of Google and why links are valuable. Domain authority. Domain authority, yeah. Those really kind of came about when Google stopped publishing their Google page rank. In the beginning, there was just the web and people would have content out there and search engines would just kind of search it and try and make information available to you. By the way, that was back in the time when you could tweak your page, refresh it, and then go see the search result and see what changed immediately. And that would happen immediately. So what Google did, the difference that Google really brought to the industry is how it identified that, okay, great, there may be two pages, three pages that are talking about the same thing, but which one of those pages is more relevant, more valuable to the reader? And so they decided to use the backlinks. How many pages are linking back to these particular pages? So if one has a lot of votes, right, backing as a vote, if one's got a lot of votes, then it's clearly got the best information, so clearly I need to show it. Speaking of votes. Yes. Oh, yes. Ahrefs, speaking of Ahrefs. Hey, we are covering their article today. We're covering their article. Right. If you go to Ahrefs or search Ahrefs 12 Best Podcasts or something like that, SEO Podcasts, you can vote for us at eWebResults Podcast. Yep. We appreciate it. We're in second place right now. We're 20 away from first place, so please, if you're on a mobile device or on your laptop and you can, please go to Ahrefs 12 Podcast, SEO Podcasts, vote for eWebResults. We'd really appreciate it. Yep. Get us over the top where we belong. And so that was the difference. That's why link building is important. There's been shifts, and link building used to have a lot more value than it does now, and at one point it didn't matter whether they were crappy websites or really good websites. I mean, it was always better to

have good websites, and Google's done a lot, made a lot of adjustments to kind of rein in the value of the links and make sure that they're really quality. It was the Wild West. It was the Wild West. And so here are some of the reasons that Joshua talks about why you want to attract links. You can increase your organic search traffic, right? Yes. So it's not only, he makes a very valid point, right? So if it's not product pages, and really you're trying to sell something, then you might say, well, why am I going to build a linkable asset if all I can do is drive traffic to that linkable asset? But the value is if that linkable asset talks about a particular product, you can link that page over to your product page, and that can have two benefits. The first one is people are there looking at your linkable asset, and they're like, oh, well, let me click here and go look at that product. The other is that page, when it's got a lot of links to it, ends up with a lot of what we call link juice. And then by linking that page to your product page, you're giving some of that link juice over to your product page, and then boosting its relevancy. Well, yeah, overall, the main authority, it goes up. Increases, yep. And trust, and really where the links come from. Like if you're trying to rank locally, you need local companies or local links. If you need something based upon whatever your particular industry is, you need links like that. So you need those kind of two categories when you're looking at links, and also the more trust, the more authority they have, the better links you shall get. Yep. The better you're going to place. Okay. So that was like one of the reasons, benefits of attracting links. Next is increased referral traffic. Yes. Right? So people just link to your website, and from their website, they come to your website because they're on

their website, and there's a link to your website. Yeah. It's pretty straightforward. Next, increased brand exposure and affinity. So now you're out there, somebody's looking on some other website, and there's a high quality, a linkable asset piece of content. You get linked to it, and now they start to associate you as, I don't know, the trusted advisor kind of thing. Yeah. That's maybe something to add. All right. So, and they gave it, he gives some really cool examples. Like one of them is like, what happens when you drink a Coke? You know, first 10 minutes down to 60 minutes, and then talks about, you know, not the good things of drinking a Coke, but unhealthy. And how much traffic that particular and linkable asset gets. Well, isn't he talking about infographics? Is that where we're at? Yeah. Is that what he's kind of talking about? So we haven't even got there yet. Yeah. We haven't even got to number one yet. Number one is, yes. You are skipping your head. We are in the summary section. Yes. The introductory section. The introductory section. See how long so cool this guy. So what he says is, you've got to ask your question, what makes a linkable asset something that people want to link to? And he gave a couple reasons. It provides a solution for a specific problem, and we'll talk about that through the course of this article. It offers a unique angle towards a particular topic. It backs up a point that they're trying to make in an existing article. It is something that audiences would find interesting. So I look at linkable access or generating back leases. Why would someone want to link to you? Right. Right? And the reason is, it's all about them. Yeah. No, you're right. It's all about them. Figure out why they would want to link back to you. Why it would be valuable. Is it something they want to share? We got a number of linkable assets, which we can maybe hit letter, but it's all about

you. It's all about them. And so you got to think not in terms of you, but in terms of them and how does it benefit them? Yep. He says linkable assets don't attract links out of thin air, right? So great. Let's just assume you've got a linkable asset we talk about. And really, this is the linkable asset is the equivalent to content is king. And you always say content is king, but distribution is queen. And she wears the pants. You need to promote them to make them happy. The question is, you might be asking yourself, why should I create a linkable asset? I can just promote my regular content instead, right? Linkable assets have a much higher ROI on promotion efforts because they're created with attracting backlinks in mind, not just conversions. And remember, backlinks are vote. They adjust your SEO. They drive traffic. So yes, you should be spending money on getting people to that particular page, that product page. And yes, you should be spending time, money, and effort on making linkable assets because that's going to increase the value across the board. All right, let's dump into this. After all of this, now we're getting to number one, right? So this is the number one of six linkable asset types, infographics, gifographics, or mappographics. And it's easy to see why they can attract a lot of links. Everybody has looked at an infographic, right? I almost feel like we don't need to spend too much time delving into this. But when you see really good information laid out in a nice graphical representation, you're like, oh, that makes sense. And a Coke has sugar that fits into a shot glass, right? And you see these things. Is that really? Is that true? It's probably more. It's probably a lot more. It's like 34 grams or 38 grams or something. Yes, and so it's more than a shot glass. Oh my gosh, that's crazy. Imagine just drink the shot glass and some water. That's a good visual representation. Yeah, yep. You should only

use infographics when the content benefits from being presented in a highly visual format, of course. And he gave a bunch of examples. One of them, if you're in the SEO industry, you've probably seen this. It's the periodic chart of SEO success factors, right? It's phenomenal. It's a phenomenal infographic. It has 8,000 backlinks from 2,000 unique domain names. So the other one he says is, 13 reasons why your brain craves infographics is actually an infographic. And it's got 21,000 links from 1,000 distinct domains. Well, our minds remember in pictures. Yep. Right? So that increases recognition. You get to long-term memory faster. Yeah, long-term memory and the recall. Yep. Absolutely. So how do you build links using these types of assets? So as he talks about each asset, he also talks about how to build links for those assets. So the last thing that I'll say in kind of this section is really if you analyze your backlink profile, you'll notice you have probably a lot more word links or domain links or text links, I guess. And you want to have a good mix. Like you want your backlink profile to have a good mix. So from images. So images and videos and that sort of thing, not just different domains. So a lot of people just focus on like word links. Right. And you really want to focus on images as well as videos. So he goes into some good detail. So you need to pitch your infographic on sites in your niche that actively publish infographics. That makes sense. Yeah. And then he does something which is really smart if you're creating linkable assets. He goes into the details of how to actually do that. So he says, go into Google and search for SEO plus in brackets infographic. And then he says, while you're doing that search, search not in everywhere. It's one of the options. Search only in the title. And then you also want to search for results that were published in the last 12 months. He says you could come

up with something that's a little more recent. Right. But you also, that limits the number of people. So people may not be investing in infographics in your industry more than every 12 months or so. It's something worthwhile to do or easy to get made. There's a lot of different places to get it made. And you want to have a campaign to do it. But I think it's really worth it because anything that nobody else is doing or not a lot of people are doing is going to have more impact. Absolutely. Absolutely. So he really, in his particular example, he had 130 websites that were an example. And guess what? You take your infographic and you reach out to them and you say, hey, would you like to have another infographic? And Boolean searches, too, for Google are super powerful. Like you can even get tools that you can put in the terms and it will create the Boolean search string for you. But, man, you can find so much on Google if you know how to look correctly, like using the different symbols. So he also says, don't limit yourself, right? So in this particular example, he was saying, hey, people in your industry. But also think of people outside of your industry who might benefit from the particular infographic or might find interest in the infographic that you put together. Also, find proven infographic concepts in other niches and then use them in your niche, right? So this is really smart. One of the infographics he pulls up was Reddit's. So it's an infographic called Reddit's Guide to Fitness. And this is just where somebody's gone into Reddit and they've like, I think it's like the top 50 pieces or something like that. And so basically, it's pulling Reddit articles and listing them so that you've got in one place all these Reddit articles for fitness. Yeah, no, no. That works really well for... So he gives some examples. Reddit's Guide to SEO, Reddit's Guide to Entrepreneurship, Reddit's Guide to Photography. So that's another

way where you might look for, again, the same kind of search where we originally just searched SEO and then in brackets infographic. Choose some other subject and see what's out there and mimic it. Well, yeah. Like looking at other industries and applying it to an industry that's currently not using that concept is really where I've seen like those exponential increases. Yep. Yeah. And also remember, it'd be better to be a little contentious, right? So no great conversation starts with agreement. It starts with like... Polarization. Polarization. Polarization. Polarization. Polarization. All right. Next, he also says, you can also get a few extra links from infographic directories, although they tend to be nofollow and they don't tend to have as much value. But it doesn't mean you shouldn't do them. You should still do those. There's definitely a couple of directories out there, more than a couple of directories that have huge domain authority. Yeah. And you can go in and you can create a listing in multiple categories. Right. Okay. And you can get that link just now, the first one, and there's the diminishing point of return. Right. But directories still are really powerful for whatever reason. Google still likes them. Yeah. Yep. All right. Number two. Again, this is six linkable asset types and exactly how to earn links with them. Number two, online tools and calculators. And we've been talking about these for a while. I'll actually have one for some of our clients and working on some others. Just know that- What about us? You've got to just always do stuff for clients? Yeah, that's true. Cobbler's kids have no shoes, huh? Man, man. This is just slowly but surely, cobbler's shoes have no shoes is becoming intolerable in this office. And I have to thank you for that. Or I have to thank you. Kicking the shins for that. All right. So know this about calculators and online tools. The barrier to entry can be quite high because you typically need to have a coder, not just somebody who can lay

out HTML, but somebody who can actually write some JavaScript or some PHP script or whatever it may be in the back. He gives some examples of some tool calculators. I didn't like any one of these. I mean, why don't you talk about some that you built for some of our clients? There's a good idea. All right. So there's one company that we're working with that I'm involved with actually called SES Research. And they sell a product, which is C60 in olive oil. And it's kind of a new product. And it's a great antioxidant. But people are wondering exactly what dose should you take, right? Because it's brand new in the industry, in the market. And so there is a dosage calculator. So if you search C60 olive oil dosage calculator, you will find our calculator and know how much you should take if you were to order it. Yeah. Another example that... Loans. Loans, yeah. Loans or real estate or... Yeah. So one, it was if you're going to flip a house, right? How much do you pay for the house? How much do you need to put in in terms of repairing the house, like improving the house? What does that turn out to be? And then what's your profit going to be, right? So then you take those types of calculators. And then when they're done and they press go and they're done, you're like, okay, great. You want to make that much money? Just get started by filling out our loan application. Easy, rock it. Now, once you have your tool calculator, how do you promote it, right? This is important. Pitch your tool calculator to webpages that already talk about the problem your tool solves. So he gave a really... I think I just said gave's. He gave a really good example of if you're like a home brewer, right? And you want to know the actual alcohol content of your beer, there's an equation for that. And somebody wrote a calculator. Like if you give two numbers, like I think

it's the density before you create your beer and the density after you create your beer, then there's a calculation to give you the alcohol content. And lots of websites are talking about the equation, like, oh, here's the equation. You can use this equation. There's that equation. Somebody wrote a calculator. So they reached out to all the people who have the equation on their site. Perfect. And then says, hey, here's the equation. Make it easier on your visitors. Make a good experience to the Google user. It will be of value to you. Have them click to my calculator. So there you go. Textbook example. Also paid promotion, right? So you'll probably talk a little bit more than I will about paid promotion. But there are low-cost PPC strategies. Facebook ads is one of those strategies. If nobody knows your tool or calculator exists, you aren't going to track any links whatsoever. That's just not going to happen. Paid promotion via PPC ads, such as Facebook ads, can indirectly result in a ton of links. Yes. Well, yeah, you can run Facebook ads to anybody that follows a particular area or run it. You know, you're reaching out directly to somebody that maybe you list and something. But you could run Facebook to a blog post, which that doesn't really relevant as far as infographics go or lists or something like that. But you can run that traffic to a follower. Right. Right. So, like, people's followers, people that like this page are like that, and you can kind of cross-pollinate the audiences with Facebook because organically it might not happen. Yep. And that brings us to the conclusion of this meat of this podcast. Again, we're only covering two of the six linkable assets. We're going to cover two more next time, and then you do the math. How many we do on the last one? All right. So, such a tease. So complicated. Okay, you're driving. There's two more in the last one. We don't need you crashing because you're doing math. All right. So,

that does bring us to the end of the podcast. If you like this podcast, we're going to ask that you share it with three people. That would be really nice. I would ask that you go vote for us. Oh, yes. On the Ahrefs 12 hit. So, search AHREF SEO podcast. That should be enough. That'll show their article. I think you've got to put 12 in. You don't need it. It'll probably come up. And then, I'm guessing, right? Probably right. If it doesn't come up, add 12. And then, send an email giving Matt a hard time. Or me a hard time if you have to add the 12. And then, you'll find the eWebResults podcast. EWebResults podcast. It's like right in the middle. They put ours right in the middle. It's very... You've got to really... Find it. Click it. Hit submit. And we appreciate that. That would be really good. If you are looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet... The internet. The internet. That's the tool. You should give us a call. We can help you increase revenue in your business. 713-592-6724. If you have a referral that somebody is interested in kind of any aspect of internet marketing... So, we're talking about link building. Do we do link building? Yes. Oh, yeah. We do do link building. We do. If we were talking about Facebook, do we do Facebook ads? Yes, we do. We do. Okay. If we're talking about PPC, do we... Oh, yeah. Do we make websites? Yeah. Do we do search engine... Yeah. All of it. Yeah. You send them to us. We do the work for them. Provide them great results. EWebResults, if you will. When they pay their bill, we pay you. So, we're going to add to the... We added a job section. Okay. Because we need more salespeople. Yeah. We need more account managers. We're growing. Yeah. So, if you know anybody out there, you're in Houston. Let's Talk. Please reach out. But on that page... Right. So, on

the... Careers page. The careers page. That's where we're going to be able to submit, like, leads. So, we're going to go, like, a little affiliate program. Affiliate. Okay. Cool. So, you could submit where we can track your referrals. Excellent. Please remember, we're filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas. 77092. If you want audio, video, or a transcript of this podcast, you can get that. At eWebResults.com. They're all available on our website. You're going to just go under the podcast menu structure. Yeah. Or download podcasts and then archives. Archive. Podcasts. Yeah. And we are the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of you. So, a big thanks, a big punch in the face to all of you. We really appreciate you. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burricks. My name is Matt Burricks. Bye-bye. Bye-bye for now. Set me free. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.