Let’s be honest. Proper link building is the where most businesses and even SEOs fail. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. And as a small business owner, if you have to reach out to websites one by one to get a backlink from them, or come up with a way to exchange value, it can quickly turn into something you dread and give up on SEO altogether.
But here’s the thing, without link building, the chances of your website ranking on the first page of Google are close to zero. Link building is one of the MOST important things you have to do, if not THE most important thing out there.
This article is all about how I can help you get rid of the stuff that you dread and try to automate as many things as possible. This will get you to a point where you are only doing stuff that is bearable for you if you absolutely hate link building. Or at the very least, it is as efficient as possible.
And remember, as an SEO expert working with Nabil Ansari SEO company, I very much enjoy this and I do this everyday. So all this advice is coming from someone who does this for a living and has made the whole process so efficient that it’s just plug and play after a certain point.
Let’s jump into it.
1. Always Research Your Prospects
This goes without saying, but this is the manual stuff that you have to do. And you can’t outsource this to someone either, at least in the beginning.
Because if you outsource it, you won’t know how to differentiate the good websites from the bad ones. You have to go through the process yourself to know that.
When researching, you need to make sure you have access to all the right tools. I only use Ahrefs and sometimes Moz, depending on what my competitor’s backlinks look like. If all of their backlinks have a high Moz DA, then I’ll use Moz and try to get links only from high DA websites and vice versa.
But in most cases it usually is a mix of both – high Moz DA and high Ahrefs DR. That’s why I use both.
When you’re looking at the metrics of your prospect websites, you want to look for their DR/DA, how many keywords they are ranking for and how many referring domains they have going to their website.
This will give you a good idea of whether the website is of good quality or not. Ideally, you want all of those things to be as high as possible. But in real-world cases, you’ll see that if the DR is sufficiently high, the backlinks are usually of good quality as well. Which means the website is safe to get a link from.
Once you get a hang of it, give it a week or 10 days and you’ll start noticing good websites pretty quickly without having to stop and look at each metric separately.
2. Automate the Outreach, But Personalize It
Once you have a list of about 50-100 websites that you think are of good quality, you’ll then need to start collecting their contact details such as their email id’s, contact form page links, or their social media accounts.
Ideally, you want to get their email ids because that’s the only thing you can automate without making it look like it was automated.
What do I mean by that?
I mean you can customize your automated to such a degree that:
- The email spam filters won’t be able to detect that you are cold emailing these people
- Even the person you are emailing to will think that you sat down and wrote this email yourself and you didn’t have a software do it for you.
I use lemlist for this, but you can also use Saleshandy. There are several other cold email softwares out there but I haven’t tried them yet, so I can’t vouch for them.
In my opinion, lemlist is the best tool because you can customize almost every aspect of your email. I have gotten to a point where 80% of my cold emails are opened and at least 40-50% of them reply to me which is crazy because those stats are unheard of, especially when it comes to cold emailing.
3. Negotiate and Discuss Article Topics
This is the good part which I think you will like.
Once your campaign is up and running in lemlist, give it a week or so and you’ll have replies coming in. This is when you’ll have to decide how much money you are going to spend on link building.
If you can spend a couple grand each month, then you can skip negotiating and go straight to suggesting them article topics and going from there.
If you have a lower budget, maybe $500-600 per month, then you should negotiate the price per guest post and see if they are open to reducing it a bit.
How do you negotiate?
Just be honest with them. Tell them that you have a small budget and that their fee is too expensive for you and if they’d be open to reducing the price a bit. Most people are willing to do that. So you just have to ask.
After that, you just come up with 3-4 article topics that you can suggest them and let them pick one from them. Once they do, then you’re off to the races.
4. Outsource Writing Or Write Yourself
Once you decide on a topic you can either outsource the writing on textbroker or iwriter, or you can write the articles yourself. Again, it all depends on your budget and the timeframe you’re working with.
If you want to spend as little time as possible, just order the article, run it through copyscape and Grammarly to make sure that the article is unique and there are no grammar mistakes. Add your links to it and forward it to the website owner for publishing.
If you have more time and don’t want to spend a lot of money, then you can write the articles yourself and send it over.
It all depends on what kind of resources you have available to you.