This chapter is a continuation of the previous chapter: Link Building Secrets -Part 1

5. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is an effective but time consuming strategy. There are several guest blogging communities you could join to get opportunities for guest blogging. Two of the most popular ones are My Blog Guest and Blogger Link Up.

Find relevant blogs and post contents on blogs that will give you a dofollow link.

Guest blogging gives you traffic, but only 5%-10% of those traffic will be interested in what you say and will subscribe to your list.

Tips For Great Guest Blogging

a. Write For Your Customer Not Theirs
Guest bloggers often forget this. The real aim for guest blogging is to increase the size of your list. If you would like to get “your type” of customer, then you have to write content that your customer wants. If the guest blogging site decides the theme of the content, then gracefully decline the offer.

b. Write Only On Sites With Good SEO Reputation
Don’t waste your time and effort by writing for sites which has no direction and no ultra targeted user base. This helps in SEO and gets you quality links. It’s easy to find worthy sites, usually they have a good SEO standing.

c. Use Persuasive But Informative Style
Always use persuasion when writing a guest post. Remember, assuming the site is a good match for your target customers, you get one chance to impress them with your content. Let the readers find the post irresistible so that they are looking for more.

d. Write An Amazing Bio With Your Link
Have a short elevator pitch style bio ready that immediately conveys why they should check you out. Link it to your Google Plus profile, facebook page and to your main web page that has a compelling CTA on it. Use structured data and “rel=author” markup to ensure your bio will show up in Google search results.

e. Include A Call To Action & Collect Leads
Always forgotten when writing guest post, CTAs are definite list builders. Don’t try to sell anything in a guest post. But rather, encourage readers to join your community if they like what you wrote.

f. Monitor Links & Posts For An Extended Period
Measure the results periodically, check the links as often as once a month. See it the pages are growing in pagerank or if nothing’s happening. It could be worse like the post disappearing or the link turning into a no-follow link. Also keep track of how many facebook shares or comments your post generated.

6. Link Bait

Link baits are packaged content that you create which specifically contains a solutions to problems or reveals some new information. These can be in the form of PDF reports, whitepapers or it can be a tool or a resource you have created.

Link baits can be based on recent news or developments, a contrary view of a popular belief, a direct attack of an authority, a newly discovered/created resource or just plain funny take on a rather serious topic.

Design a good compelling cover for your link bait making it irresistible to not download/share that content. Now, offer it freely around the web, ask sites in your industry to give it away and promote it on all social media channels.

7. Broken Link Building

Broken links are links pointing to expired domains or referring to pages that have been moved. This can be an excellent opportunity to get your foot inside the door and ask for links.

Use a tool like Raven Tools to find websites in your niche and examine their broken links. And follow the strategies mentioned below for each site that’s worth getting links from (basically high PR sites).

a. Secondary Link Building.
Secondary links are links you obtain for other authority pages that are already linking to you. For example, if you have guest post up on copyblogger.com or any the highly authoritative sites, you could use that post for broken link building.

Simply tell the other website with the broken link that you have very similar content that they have a broken link for which is up there in copyblogger.com and you would like them to link to it in place of the broken link. This gets easily accepted because you are referring them to a useful information from a highly authoritative site.

b. Content Replication.
This technique can be quite fun. Let’s say you have found a broken link on a really good site that is referencing to an equally good but expired page. Now, use the wayback machine to find what was on that particular page before and recreate the content on your site.

Now, once you have recreated the content, ask the webmaster with the broken link to give you the link instead of the broken page.

Most often, this strategy works very well.

c. Blogroll Links.
Most often blogroll links, once set, are not updated by the bloggers. This can happen to famous bloggers even authoritative ones. If any of the blogroll links go bust, these are not fixed by the site owners. Your job then is to find high ranking sites that have blogroll and has broken links on them. Shoot an email informing the webmaster about the broken link and ask him/her to replace that with your site link. Works well, most of the time.

d. Expired domains.
You would also want to buy expired domains that are still getting some backlink juices. The way you find these are the same as above, but you go directly to expired domain auction sites and grab the domains you want. Some sites are always available cheap and easy.

Once you get these domains you can re-create it by using data from the wayback machine. And stuff all sorts of links to its content including links to your sites. Make sure you add variety to the link mixture.

The other option is to redirect the url to your website thereby channeling the traffic to your site. Can be a good strategy as well, but if you would want to build online assets, certainly re-creating the site is a very good option.

8. Online PR

Good old press releases are still worth every penny. Especially the premium ones that offer a dofollow link to your site. A good properly researched and written press release can be a double whammy. You stand a chance to get picked up by a journalist and people in your industry will start sharing the release everywhere.

When submitting press releases always consider using several press release services simultaneously to get maximum exposure and links. A rising star in this field of digital press release is MarketersMedia and they have reasonable packages that go well with all kinds of link building requirements.

Write For SEO, Not For The Press: There, I said it. Many SEO gurus suggest writing good press-releases that will get picked up by journalists. I beg to differ. Hundreds of thousands of press-releases are generated every month and we have seen it over and over again, none of them gets picked up by any journalists. The reason is the mind boggling number of releases. It’s hard for them to sort it out. These journalists have their few trusted sources and they will only accept news from these sources.

The bottom line is this. Ultimately what you get with Press Releases are a few good links. And that’s totally worth it. But make sure, your article is properly SEO optimized so you make the best out of what you get.

Create SEO optimized Press Release: Writing press release for SEO is slightly different. You need to make sure to include keywords with typical density of 2%-3%. Include a variety of short tail and long tail keywords. If anchor links are permitted, use these keywords for linking to different pages like Homepage, inner pages and the About page.

Do not use non-optimized keywords for the hyperlinks like “click here” or “this awesome stuff”.

To Chapter 12: Link Building Secrets – Part 3