How to Create Links Using Content Marketing?

Ah, this topic just caught the attention of all link builders and content marketers 😉

Well, why not? Link building has long been one of the toughest tasks in SEO and digital marketing.

For someone like me who has spent around 8+ years in SEO; link building (or rather link earning) has remained and still continues to be the most challenging.

Research suggests that content marketing is on a boom with 85% of online marketers directly involved with content marketing.

Companies are hitting nail on their head to produce all sorts of content but the success ratio in terms of getting backlinks or exposure from their content is still low.

As per the recent survey conducted by Moz and Buzzsumo, around 757,000 articles were analyzed for their effectiveness to be served as link baits and the results were shocking.

Around 50% of the posts had zero external links. The survey also suggested that there is no correlation between social shares and links.

Related: Content Marketing ROI Stats

“CONTENT SHOCK” – You Are Producing Content But It’s Of No Use!

Believe it! Majority of the companies are generating content that’s all CRAP. It is hard to digest but content that fails to drive shares or attention from the readers is nothing but crap.

Backlinks – The Gold of SEO – How Deep Can You Dig?

The most difficult content to produce is the one that generates backlinks. In fact, the more effort you put into producing quality and purposeful content, the better results it can produce in the long run. We are all living in the age of modern digital marketing where link building ROI is important as it signifies whether your marketing efforts are working or not. Today, I will share with you a step by step guide to producing content that is able to generate backlinks almost instantly.

Related: Use These 4 Techniques To Build Links

Formula Revealed! How to Effortlessly Create Content That Can Get You Lots of Backlinks

Backlink building depends on the content. The more effective content you produce, the better are the chances of producing a backlink. Here goes the formula: “Awesome Content + Catchy Title + Mind-Blowing Images or Videos + Superb Outreach + Influencer Addon = Lots of Backlinks” The below steps defines exactly how you need to proceed in order to generate content that gets backlinks.

Related: Will You Use A PBN To Build Links? See The Pros and Cons

1- Length of the Content

The Moz survey revealed that long-form content consistently received higher backlinks. Content pieces that were between 3,000 – 10,000 words long received the maximum links.

Related: What is Content Writing?

The study proved that there is a direct correlation between content length and links. The below table presents the impact of content length on total shares and domain links: Hence, if you are looking to generate backlinks from your content then keep it in the range of 2000 -3000 words.

2- The Title (Headline) of the Post

The Headline is the most neglected part of your article. As per the study published in Quicksprout 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy but only 2 out of 10 people will read the rest. If the title of the post is not good, you are actually losing 80% of potential link prospects.

Having a creative and engaging title that persuades the audience to open it up and read the entire piece is not that difficult. Here are some really useful guidelines to get started:

• Keep the headlines between 5-7 words.
• Use numbers. Sometimes obscure number like 13 or 39 can catch the attention of the reader.
• Make use of the words “what”, “why”, “how”, or “when”.
• Use negative words like “No”, “Without” and “Stop”.
• Try the formula (Number of trigger word + Adjective + Keyword + Promise) to create really awesome titles. For example , the title “Why You Should Buy an iPhone” can be changed to “7 Valid Reasons to Ditch Your Old Phone and Get a New iPhone”.

Related: B2B Content Marketing Ideas

If you are looking to ease up your burden then there are some awesome FREE tools that can help you create stunning titles.

Here are some tools to get started:

• The Coschedule Headline Analyzer – It provides a score to your overall headline quality and rates its ability to result in social shares, increased traffic and SEO value. The best part of this tool is that it provides an emotional score to judge the overall effectiveness of your title.
• Portent Content Idea Generator – Just enter the subject of your content and it will provide a set of ideas to get you started.
• TweakYourBiz Title Generator – It provides a list of titles based on nouns, verbs, lists, questions, HOW to, secrets etc. If you are looking for lots of readymade ideas to choose from then this is the tool you should use.
• Content Row Link Bait Title Generator – Simply enter the topic and this tool will provide you with some really cool link bait title ideas.

3- List, Why and How to Styled Post

List-based and How to styled posts are the ones that receive the maximum backlinks.

For example, this post of “13 Evidence-Based Medicinal Properties of Coconut Oil” has received links from around 143 referring domains.

Similarly, a search for “Pets” on the Ahrefs content explorer reveals most of the posts are list-based and have numbers in them. This clearly explains the reason why you should get your next post list based (have numbers in them) in order to generate backlinks.

Related: Ahrefs vs SEMrush vs Ubersuggest: Which is a Better SEO Tool?

4- Implement the “Skyscraper Technique”

The Skyscraper technique if implemented properly can make your link count climb up like a rocket!

This technique can be easily implemented using the following 3 steps:

1. Find content that’s performed well in your industry. Use the Ahrefs content explorer tool. Just enter your main industry keyword in the search bar and click on search. Ahrefs will automatically find the most shared and most linked to content based on that topic. Moreover, you can refine your search by filtering the results by date, domain name or language.

2. Identify gaps in that content and find ways to fill those. Remember, the content that you will produce should be more valuable and useful than other websites. If you write about how to train a dog, make sure your article provides more value or a different perspective than the numerous articles on the web on dog training. Follow the 5 rules for creating valuable content provided by Google.

Related: Best Content Writing Tools For Content Writers

Your content should be:

A- Useful and informative: Your website should have original information that is not available elsewhere on the web. Make the information more useful by adding the following factors:

Is the information provided simple and easy to read? Are you providing an innovative way to browse and find products that you are selling? Is your site speed good? Are your pages mobile friendly? Are you having original photos and descriptions? Is the information clear and accurate?

B- More valuable and useful than other sites: If you write about how to prepare a chocolate ice cream, you can make it more valuable and useful by mentioning the preparation time, including original videos, including rich snippets etc

C- Credible: Always use original research, citations, links, reviews and testimonials. Original testimonials from real customers can help boost your site’s trustworthiness and reputation.

D- High quality: Is your content focussed on giving visitors a good user experience and not just to rank well in search engines.

E- Engaging: Update your content regularly as Wikipedia does. Avoid mistakes of content writing and prepare content that is truly engaging. Do not provide incorrect information or have grammar errors. Do not distract your audiences by displaying too many ads. Engage visitors by including comment boxes and social media widgets.

3. Amplify the Reach of Your Content

Once you have the piece ready then promote it spam-free on every possible website on the web. More information on how you can amplify the reach of your content is mentioned later in this article.

5- Add Videos to Your Content

Visitors spend 88% more time on a website that includes video. Moreover, 3x as many monthly visitors are added to a website having video content.

If the visitors spend more time then this directly means that the chances of linking are more.

Prior to adding video to your content, make sure to follow the 5 golden rules of adding value to your video content:

1- Prepare content that your audience will love to watch. Focus on your target demographic and make it informative, entertaining and succinct.

2- Align your video content with your brand goals.

3- Videos allows you to be more creative. Make sure to “tell a story” to drive high levels of user engagement.

4- Make it easy for users to share your videos.

5- Measure the ROI from videos. Analyze and understand.

For instance, have a look at this video by CNN that has more than 50 linking root domains. This is what typically an eye-grabbing video should be.

Similarly, health.com has an amazing link bait video about “work your abs without crunches” that has around 47 domains linking to it.

For E-commerce sites, product videos can be great link bait. Users are most willing to share videos that are sharing the steps telling them exactly how to use a product. Product pages which are one of the hardest to link content can eventually raise their chances of getting linked to simply by adding videos in them.

Related: 

6- Use Guestographics

Brian Dean is an awesome guy who built a method of building backlinks through a technique called guestographics. You can also create content and amplify it with the help of guestographic technique in order to generate backlinks.

In order to build links using guestographics, you need to follow the 4 steps given below as suggested by Brain Dean (some of the examples provided here are my own):

Step 1: Post an infographic on your site based on a freshly relevant topic

You can make use of Google trends to find topics that are relevant to your purpose.

For example, I am a food site owner who wants to prepare an infographic based on any sweet food. Obviously, the search query should be such that is getting popular.

Step 2: Find sites that write about your infographic’s topic

You can easily find relevant sites by doing a Google search like “sweet potato pie”, “sweet foods”, “sweet food recipes” etc.

You can also make use of the Ahrefs content explorer to find sites where this sort of content is gaining popularity.

Step 3: Show them your infographic

The next step is to mail them and show them your infographic. A short, simple and personalized mail like the one below can do the trick:

Hi,

Hope you are doing great!

I really like the recipes posted on your site:

Recently, I tried this one (recipe link here) myself and received a lot of compliments.

Since then my experiments with food started and last Friday I prepared the very special “Sweet potato pie” recipe. You won’t believe this but I had prepared this dish 3 times in the last week alone because it was way too delicious.

I thought of sharing this recipe with fellow sweet tooth loving people and prepared an infographic on this. The infographic visually explains how to prepare the recipe in an easy way.

Let me know if you want to check it out!

Cheers, Your Name

Step 4: Offer them unique content (“the bribe”)

All the positive replies received from the above email should be accompanied by another short email like this one:

Hi,

Great! Here’s the link to the infographic: (your link goes here)

Also, let me know if you need a short piece of content along with this infographic. I would be happy to write this for you.

Cheers, Your Name

That’s all! Write a post and link back to your site in any relevant manner you wish to, send the post to the interested recipients and you will get a contextual backlink in return.

Related: The Ultimate Guide to B2B Content Marketing Strategy

5- The Broken link Building Method

The strategy is absolutely simple. Before creating any content, find out authoritative websites that have broken links.

First of all, install a Chrome plugin called Checkmylinks.

Now, find out potential websites by a simple search query like: “Free Softwares” inurl: links or “Free Softwares” inurl: resources.

Just click on the Checkmylinks icon displayed on the browser and this will highlight any broken links that it finds on the page.

Identify an opportunity where you can create an interesting piece that can easily replace the broken link.

Email the webmaster and notify them about the problem. Nobody likes 404 pages, and it’s also considered an SEO problem to link to pages that don’t exist.

In the email approach, suggest the webmaster replace the broken link with your website.

That was easy, isn’t it?

Related: Free Backlink Checker SEO Tools

6- Break The Content Into Points

Nobody likes to read content that has long paragraphs.

Organize your content smartly. Here are some guidelines to follow:

A- Break long para into short sentences. Make predictable, scannable pages to improve readability.

B- The content should serve as an inverted pyramid where the conclusion is presented first. Obviously, some suspense should be kept for the end but the crux is to generate curiosity.

Have a look at how Neil Patel uses this strategy to capture user attention almost instantly (notice short 1 line sentences that are easy to read):

C- Add Compelling headings and subheadings.

D- Use bullet points.

This technique works like a charm and readers will be spending more time on your site.

Related: Ridiculously Easy Ways To Improve Content Marketing

7- Implement The QUAP-TED-LUV Factor

To make any content work as a link magnet, make sure it follows the “QUAP-TED-LUV” factor.

By producing content that caters to the needs of your users and has the 10 essential factors mentioned in the table above, you can increase your chances of getting backlinks.

8- Amplify the Content by Reaching Out to Influencers

You have produced great content but it is still only half done. Unless you take pains in amplifying it and reaching out to influencers you are not going to gain backlinks.

An influencer is a content amplifier. He/She should drive action. Platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn as well as use PR sources such as HARO and Cision are great to find influencers.

Related: What is Influencer Marketing?

Here is a step by step guide to reaching out to influencers once your content is published:

1- Define your target audience and derive KPI’s.

2- Find the right influencers using tools such as BuzzSumo, Traackr, Klout, PeerIndex, Twitonomy etc.

3- Monitor their activity on social networks and find out the content that they share and like the most.

4- Reach out to them personally using email marketing software like GetResponse that offers easy to use A/B testing features that will help you to find which of your mails works best with your influencers.

Related: Best Free Tools For Email Marketing

5- Adapt the Social Media 4-1-1 sharing system. Under this system, for every six pieces of content shared via social media:

4 content pieces should be shared with the influencer group that does not belong to you.

1 shared piece should be original, educational content that you have created.

1 piece should be completely sales-oriented like discount coupons or daily deal that is less likely to get noticed.

6- Participate in conferences and webinars where they regularly take part and connect with them. Tools like Clickmeeting are really effective in promoting your brand in the eyes of influencers because of their really useful meeting room rebranding features where you can customize the design and leave a lasting impression in the minds of the influencers.

If nothing else is working then offer them a glass of wine, yes, that’s a part of your strategy…he..he 😉

That’s all folks! Hope you enjoyed this post.

As a roundup of things, if you really need to increase the flow of backlinks to your site then make sure to have content over 2K words, have a great title, use relevant images and videos, reach out to influencers to amplify the published content.

Awesome! Now, sit back, relax and see the links growing.