If you want to get good at link building, you need to practice.
And one of the best reachable goals you can set for yourself is to build your first 100
quality backlinks.
Why 100?
To be honest, it's a bit of an arbitrary number.
But for a lot of low and mid competition niches, it's enough to get a meaningful amount of
organic traffic.
For example, this golf site gets around 4,500 monthly search visits with around 150 linking
domains across their site.
This low authority travel site has around 175 referring domains and gets over 4,000
monthly search visits.
And this parenting blog with around 70 referring domains gets over 5,000 monthly search visits.
Most importantly, building 100 quality backlinks will give you the practical experience you need
as a link builder because you'll have to communicate with a lot of different people.
So in this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to get your first 100 backlinks using
tried and tested tactics.
Stay tuned.
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Backlinks are undeniably the lifeblood of higher Google rankings.
And once you start getting them, organic traffic often climbs in tandem.
But not all backlinks are created equal.
I often see new sites that start by building low quality backlinks with comment spam,
forum links, PBNs, and links from coupon sites.
And sometimes, these backlinks are enough to move the needle initially.
But building low-quality links can be a dangerous game to play because they can literally wipe
your site off of Google.
Now, while link building can vary from niche to niche and even from page to page, there
are a few tried and tested tactics that can work for anyone with minimal experience.
So let's start with the easiest method and that's to start with organizations, communities
or clubs that you're already part of.
Whether it be personal or pleasure, in everyday life, we integrate ourselves in communities.
That can be anything from a law association to a non-profit organization to a school's
parent advisory board.
If you're a part of one of these organizations and it's relevant to your site, ask for a link.
Oftentimes, they'll have team or advisory board pages where it actually makes sense
to link to your site.
Start here because it's about as easy as it gets.
But that's only one link.
So let's get into our second tactic.
And that's to use HARO to build authoritative links to your homepage.
HARO stands for Help a reporter out.
It's a service that connects journalists with sources and sources with journalists.
After you've signed up as a "source," you'll get emails with a list of queries from journalists
at various publications.
And these include Business Insider, The New York Times, and USA Today to name a few.
Now, there are tons of requests that come in on a daily basis and the majority won't
be relevant to you.
So you can set up a simple Gmail filter to sort through the noise.
Just go to your Inbox and click on the caret to bring down Gmail's search options.
Next, set the "From" field to haro@helpareporter.com.
Then, you'll want to set the subject to HARO within square brackets since all of their
emails include that in the subject line.
Finally, set the "Has the words" field to any keywords you want to monitor.
And you can also use the OR search operator to include multiple keywords or phrases.
Click Search to see the results your search filters would include and check out some of
the emails to ensure you're getting relevant results.
If everything looks good, click on the caret again and then click Create filter.
Now, even though we've filtered down the results to relevant ones, it doesn't mean journalists
are going to cite you just because you responded.
And while you should go the extra mile to provide unique and insightful information,
half the battle is in responding to the right questions.
So to increase your chances of getting mentioned, look for queries where they're likely looking for
multiple experts on the topic.
For example, in this query, Bustle is looking for relationship therapists as in the plural
of therapist.
And they want to know more about boredom in relationships.
Now, the description is even more clear that they want multiple experts.
She says: "I'm working on an article called "13 common mistakes that lead to boredom
in a relationship."
So more likely than not, she's looking for multiple experts that can fill in the blanks
in her outline.
So if you happen to be a relationship expert, provide your best answer and then move on
to the next query or carry on with the rest of your day.
Bottomline, HARO is a super-easy way to get high quality backlinks because the journalists
are the ones that are soliciting sources and not the other way around.
I'd recommend using HARO without an end date in mind.
The quality of links are just that good for the amount of effort it takes to respond.
Alright, the next tactic is to do some guest posting.
Guest posting is when you create content to be posted on another website.
And generally speaking, that post comes with attribution and a link back to your site.
Now, while some sites won't allow you to link to yourself within the content, most will,
as long as it makes sense and adds value to your guest article.
So the first thing you need to do is find websites that are likely to accept guest posts.
To get started, you can use Ahrefs Content Explorer, which lets you search through billions
of pages and get SEO metrics for all of them.
Just search for a topic related to your niche and run the search.
Next, let's set a Domain Rating filter to weed out both very low and very high
authority websites.
So I'll choose a range like 30 to 60.
I'll also check the "One page per domain" box since we don't need to pitch the same
website multiple times.
Finally, I'll set the "Published" filter to the past 90 days, which will help us
narrow in on websites that have published or republished content in the last 3 months.
Now, we still have around 90,000 websites to pitch, which is just way too many.
So let's head on over to the Websites tab, which will show you the top 100 websites
from your results.
And to get a better idea of which sites would more likely accept guest posts, let's sort
the table by Authors, because if there are multiple authors on that site, then there's
a higher chance that they have guest contributors.
Now, it's just a matter of looking at the domain names, visiting ones that look relevant, and
pitching your guest posts.
Now, it's important to note that while guest posting can be a great way to build links,
what often gets overlooked is that when you write for reputable sites, you have the opportunity
to demonstrate your expertise to an audience that someone else has built.
That means you can get exposure backed by trust.
And since time is finite, it's worth prioritizing websites that will likely provide the best
overall value for your time and expertise.
Alright, the next tactic works great for experts in their field and that's to do podcast interviews.
Much like guest posting, being interviewed on a podcast puts you in the spotlight as
an expert in front of someone else's audience.
Now, the thing I love about podcasts as a link building strategy is that it only takes around
an hour of your time and links are almost a given if you choose your podcasts appropriately.
A lot of podcasts have "Episodes" pages on their websites.
And these pages almost always include a link back to the guest's website.
So to find podcast prospects, you can simply reverse engineer a podcast interviewee's
homepage backlinks.
So assuming you were in the SEO niche, you might look at Ahrefs' backlinks because a few
of us have been on some podcasts.
So just go to Ahrefs' Site Explorer and search for ahrefs.com and set the search mode to
URL since again, podcast links usually point to the guest's homepage.
Next, go to the backlinks report.
Now, since Ahrefs is a pretty established brand, you'll see links from various sources.
So to narrow in on just links from podcasts, just search for "podcast" in the Include box,
and set the filter mode to search in the URLs and titles of referring pages.
From here, you can sift through the results, visit relevant pages, and pitch yourself as
a guest when appropriate.
Another great thing about podcast interviews is that oftentimes, hosts will also link to
other resources that are mentioned in the interview.
So it's actually possible to get links to other pages across your site if it comes up
naturally in your conversation.
The benefits to being on podcasts goes way beyond links.
You get the chance to meet like-minded people in your industry and building your network
can go a long way even from an SEO perspective.
Alright, the final thing I recommend you do is email outreach for your best content.
Now, don't get me wrong, getting links to all pages on your site is a great thing.
But chances are, you won't have time to do outreach for every single page on your site.
Plus, it's a lot easier to promote something that's unique or insightful versus something
that's informative, but generic.
For example, let's say you have a personal finance site and you have some unique data
on how the pandemic affected credit scores across the nation.
That's interesting and it's probably something that people in your niche will actually want
to be contacted about.
And if they're impressed by your content, they'd probably link to you in existing or
future content.
Whereas a post on let's say, "What are credit cards," could be well-written and informative,
but you probably won't have anything to say that's much better than what's already out there.
At least enough to motivate someone to link to you.
Now, there are so many ways to do outreach for links and your approach will vary depending
on the topic and angle you'll be taking.
So instead of going through a hypothetical example, I strongly suggest watching our link
building module in our SEO for beginners course or if you've already had some exposure to
email outreach for links, then check out some of our more advanced tutorials in our link
building playlist.
I'll link up both in the description.
Now, you might be wondering, how long will it take to get my first 100 backlinks?
There really isn't a definitive answer and I don't think speed should be your goal
especially when you're just starting out.
Think of link building like eating steamed broccoli everyday.
It may not be the most exciting or delicious, but just as broccoli delivers essential nutrients
to your body, links deliver trust and authority to your website, which results in higher
Google rankings.
So what's important is that you stay the course, implement these tactics and iterate on them
as you get hands-on experience.
Getting high quality backlinks isn't easy.
And that's probably why it's still a ranking factor.
So go and try these tactics out for your site, and if you enjoyed this tutorial, make sure
to like, share and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
I'll see you in the next one.