- What's up guys in this video
I'm going to teach you exactly how to build backlinks
with the skyscraper technique.
And with this technique
you'll be able to land free high quality backlinks.
They're actually going to increase your website's rankings
and help you gain more traffic with SEO.
So if you want better results with SEO and a tried
and tested way to get high quality links to your site
then make sure you keep watching.
So what is the skyscraper technique?
Well, this is essentially a way of building backlinks
to your website with cold email outreach
and it works in four separate steps
which I'm going to run through in more detail in this video
but essentially the four separate steps are
number one to do competitor analysis
and look at how you can better this
again backwards to the site.
And then step number two is prospecting.
So you're going to reverse engineer,
which sites are linking to your competitors
and then approach those websites with a piece of content
that they may want to link to on your site too.
After you've done the prospecting
and the competitor analysis, you're then going to
create a piece of content on your website.
There's a lot you can bet to this article
but it's going to be more comprehensive,
more up to date and just a better overall guide.
And then step number four is the outreach.
So you're gonna reach out
to everyone who you prospected earlier
via cold email and say something like, Hey
I noticed you're linking to my competitor.
Maybe you want to link to us too.
Here's the reasons why.
So now I'm going to run through each
of these stages in more detail and teach you exactly
how you can start using the skyscraper technique to attract
more high quality backlinks to your website for free.
So the skyscraper technique is really
about reverse engineering
how your competitors getting backlinks
and then producing a similar piece
of content that can get links to your site too.
So that brings me on to stage one, which is the analysis.
Okay? So essentially you want to look
at all your competitors,
see how are they getting backlinks,
which pieces of content are attracting the most backlinks,
and then how can you produce a similar piece
of content that's better than your competitor's
and therefore likely to attract more links.
And you can do this
by going on to Ahrefs, clicking content explorer,
and then exploring all
of the topics relevant to your industry
that you could potentially write about as well.
And here you want to filter out
the topics that are attracting the most links
because when you do that, you have a tried and tested way
of finding what's already working for your competitors,
and then how you can produce a similar piece of content.
Now, when I do this research
I actually create what's called a content calendar.
And this breaks down the topics I could potentially write
about the number of prospects, so potential websites
I could get a link from for each topic,
and then I'll also break down which websites I'm competing
against to get backlinks to my site.
And when you do this analysis,
it's really going to help you and give you a kickstart
in terms of understanding the best pieces of content
that's going to attract the most links
because what most people do is they go out there
and they just write about anything
and they expect links to come in.
And suddenly six months or 12 months later
they realize their content isn't getting backlinks
and it's not suitable for link building.
So therefore you want to start by reverse engineering
the process first, doing the research upfront.
And when you do this
you're going to have a much more effective way
of attracting links to your site with content.
Next it's time to start prospecting.
So this is stage two of the process.
I'll be honest it's not the most glamorous part of the job
but it needs to be done and it needs to be done properly.
Okay. So really what you want to do here is build up a list
of websites that you could potentially contact for a link.
So how are you going to do that?
Well you're going to look at all the websites that link
to your competitors articles in stage one, prospect
all of them, and then create a list of URLs
and email addresses that you could potentially
contact for a link.
Now, when you're doing this
you really have to filter out the low quality trash
from the high quality websites that are actually
going to help increase your rankings.
So you really kind of have to look through the list,
filter out, and find the best potential websites
to get links from because not every link is equal, right?
And you're going to get some really low quality websites
that you don't want to link from.
And some really high quality websites that will
help you gain more authority from your site.
So what's the best way to do this?
So first of all, I would go into Ahrefs.com and I would put
in all the websites that I'm competing with to get a link.
Okay. So essentially here,
you're going to look at who's linked your competitors,
download a long Excel spreadsheet of all these websites,
and then put them into
another sheet that you can filter out.
Then you're going to go
through the list and you can look at right,
which websites do I actually want to link from?
And here I would filter out by domain rating,
by organic traffic, by the look and feel of the site.
And whether that URL is actually relevant to you.
So you can see in the URL of the website
that you may approach for a backlink
whether it's relevant to you or not.
And if it's not relevant, just delete it
out the sheet and, you know, save yourself some time there.
Because if you keep approaching low-quality sites
then not only are you going to get a bad backlink profile
but also you're kind of wasting your time
and you're not being efficient with the process.
Now, once you have created a list
of URLs that you could potentially contact for a link,
you want to put them through a tool like Hunter.
So you can basically copy and paste the whole list,
pop it into Hunter's verification tool,
and find a list of all the email addresses for each website.
Now you're not always going to find an email address
for every website, but the ones that you do,
you just download them, put them into another spreadsheet.
And from here, you've got a list of URLs and email addresses
but the only problem is, not every email address you find
on the internet is going to actually work.
Some are going to bounce.
Some are going to be old.
Some people will have moved on from their job.
And therefore, a decent percentage
of these email addresses you've found won't actually
work when you send them an email.
So what do you do?
Well, the best thing to do is to verify each
of these email addresses.
So you can use a tool like NeverBounce or Clearout
or even Hunter's got a tool for email verification.
And from here, you can quickly verify which email
addresses are actually going to work before you send them.
And I would recommend doing that because
if you start sending out loads of emails
and they all start bouncing, or most of them don't work
then that's a big problem with your email deliverability.
Email servers are going to see that
you're sending less email addresses,
then they're bouncing, they're not working correctly,
and therefore mark your overall deliverability lower.
So to avoid this problem,
make sure that you verify all the email addresses
before you start sending them.
And once that's out of the way
you can start creating your content.
And this is where things get more interesting
with the skyscraper technique.
So you're gonna look at your competitor's piece
of content from stage one and look
at all the ways that you could beat them.
So could you write more words?
Could you create something that's more comprehensive?
Could you improve the design
of your content versus your competitors?
Maybe you want to add some pictures and videos.
Also make sure you don't have any pop-ups
or affiliate links or links to sales products
or pages on this particular piece of content.
Because if webmasters see that and they see
that you're promoting something on your skyscraper content
they're less likely to link to you, because if they see
that you're making money from your content, chances are
they're not going to link to you
unless you pay them simply because, you know
they don't like linking to commercial content.
So when you're creating this content
you basically want it to be the best it can possibly be.
You know, don't take any shortcuts here.
Make sure that your content is well written.
There's no grammatical mistakes.
That the content itself is very interesting.
And when you do this, you're much more likely to
have more success with the skyscraper technique
because essentially what you're going to be doing
in the next stage is pitching webmasters
and asking them to link to your content.
And if your content is no good,
chances are most of the time they're going to say no.
And so we come onto the final stage
of the skyscraper technique
which is the cold email outreach.
Sea of prospects, easy competitors.
You've got a list of websites you could contact.
You've also created your content.
And now it's finally time to pitch your content
and start getting links to your site.
And this is where things get really interesting
because if you've followed each stage
of this process and you've done it correctly
then you're going to see links starting to come in.
So how do you set this campaign up?
Well, usually what I do is I write a piece
of email copy that looks something like this.
Then I send one follow up seven days later,
and another follow-up after that
seven days later again, why?
Because most webmasters won't reply to your first email.
Chances are they're going to miss your email
or they're going to be busy
or they just don't have time to read it.
And therefore you need to send two or three followups
before you get any response.
Now, when you're writing the copy,
you really want to make sure
that it's short, concise, easy to read, engaging
and actually compelling for the webmaster to link to you.
So usually what I'll do is I'll say, Hey
if you link to me, you know, maybe I could promote you
on social media or offer you a link back
from another partner site,
or even maybe I can promote you
on my next email newsletter.
Try and make it win-win for you and the webmaster
so they're more likely to link to you.
Now when it to actually sending the email addresses,
make sure you send your emails
from a separate URL to your main domain
because if you're sending hundreds of cold emails
from your main domain,
that could hurt your overall email deliverability.
You may look like a spammer,
especially if you're doing this longterm.
So try and send your emails from a separate URL.
For example, if your URL is example.com
you could send you an email from example.info,
or example.io.
And when you do this, you're going to protect your main URL
from any email deliverability problems in the future.
And then also what you can do is
either send the emails manually, which, you know
if you only send in 50
to a hundred emails, that's not a problem.
Or if you're sending hundreds of emails,
you can actually automate the process
by using tools like lemlist.com or mailshake.
And when you do this,
you can pretty much scale your email campaign,
scale your skyscraper technique, and make sure
that you gain more links at scale.
Now, one thing I will say when it comes
to the skyscraper technique is
that when you start pitching websites,
chances are you're going to get a lot of "no's".
You're going to get a lot of rejections.
Don't let that put you off okay?
I've actually created a video on how I got thousands of
rejections from other webmasters
when I was trying to pitch my content
because essentially this is like a iterative process.
And every time you run a skyscraper campaign,
you're going to learn ways to improve your campaign,
how to get better results,
how to increase the number of links you get to your pages.
So essentially don't be put off
if your first campaign doesn't perform that well.
Every time you run this campaign, it's like anything,
you're going to get better with practice.
So thanks for watching guys, hope you enjoyed this video.
If you did, please smash your thumbs up on it.
And by the way, I do run a link building agency.
So if you're interested in getting more high quality links
to your website and increasing your rankings with SEO
then make sure you get in touch.
And that's by juliangoldie.com.
So I'll leave the link in the description.
And if you're interested in more link building,
then feel free to get in touch or booking a call.
And I'll be happy to help.
All right thanks for watching.