Table of Contents
What do I mean by link asset creation?
It is a piece of content with the sole purpose of driving backlinks to your website.
Some content is written with the sole purpose of earning money and may not gain many backlinks but with a few strong pages with a good amount of backlinks pointing at them and strong internal linking it can help to boost your site up the rankings.
An example of a money page is a review page on an affiliate, typically you will struggle to get authoritative sites to link back to this page directly (unless you are using niche edits or paying good money) but with the following types of content you can pick up high quality backlinks, often without a large amount of money spent.
Infographics
Are pieces of content which may look like this:
When looking for inspiration for infographic design there are a few places that I recommend:
But you can also look for more niche relevant infographics but searching “keyword infographic” on google.
Once you have a basic idea of what you want to cover it is time to find the information for your infographic, in some cases this can be using the ones that you have found but using more up to date data but sometimes you will want to come up with a completely new twist.
You ideally want to have a reputable source for all the information that you are using in the infographic that you will reference at the bottom of the design.
As I’ve previously mentioned the headline is a vital part of the process as it massively influences click through rate (CTR) so therefore it is worth taking the time to learn what headlines draw clicks and ultimately shares and backlinks.
Here are a few blog posts to start off with:
- Headline writing masterclass
- 5 Headline Hacks to increase CTR
- 5 Data Insights into the Headlines Readers Click
A key example of this in real life is Tim Ferris’ book the 4 hour work week, he split tested 6 different headlines before deciding on the name.
He did this by targeting his main keywords in a google adwords campaign with the 6 different titles and comparing the data. The 4 hour work week came back with a far higher CTR which indicated it was the most suitable name for his book.
^
While this isn’t usually possible for infographics it shows how important the headline is.
So now you have your data and your headline what’s next?
Well if you are a good designer you could design your own infographic but typically most people will get far better results using a full time designer as they can do it better and quicker in most cases. You can look for recommendations in our facebook group. A good quality infographic can range from anywhere from $200 to $1000+ depending on your requirements, but if done right they can attract 50+ backlinks from strong reputable sites.
Remember when designing or working with a designer to look at what has worked well before. For this you can use tools such as http://buzzsumo.com/ to see what has recently attracted shares and backlinks.
This method of infographic publishing is also outlined by James Gregory in his video with Charles Floate and also covered in a bit more detail on the proper PBN facebook group here.
So essentially once your infographic has been designed and is ready to be published what you do is use ahrefs to find out who has linked to a popular infographic in your niche and who has linked to those links (you can repeat this as many times as you wish).
Then you scrape their contact emails and use these emails to outreach to them saying that you saw they had linked to this infographic and that they may like your one and you would love for them to share to their site using the embed code in the email.
James takes this one step further by randomising the embed code to link to other pages of the website so that your internal pages get link juice from these backlinks.
So in his example he starts with a list of 6,000 emails then lets say every 200 emails he changes the embed code to another internal page of his website.
As he mentions one of his more successful campaigns had gained 60+ backlinks initially including authoritative sites such as .gov.
The amount of backlinks gained could possibly be increased by reaching out to those sites that didn’t place the infographic again maybe with a different subject line and contents a few weeks later.
Supposedly in sales most buyers purchase at their 8th to 12th time coming into contact with an item. So there is no harm in reaching out again, although if you do do this don’t make it spammy and if they say no generally accept the answer and move on.
Once you have gained these initial backlinks you could also use the social proof of the fact that your infographic has been shared / posted to various websites.
Over time depending on how much traffic the sites you post on receive you may receive backlinks to the site where it was posted and you could reach out to them asking if they would post the infographic as an embed opposed to linking to that site, although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing in the first place.
Interactive Web Pages
If you or your client has the budget there has been some discussion about how interactive web pages can gain more links but this isn’t something that I have used extensively.
I did have another page bookmarked which was far more successful (with regards to the amount of backlinks) but unfortunately I cannot find it but here is an example of an interactive web page.
An interactive web page could also be anything as simple as a calculator for quitting cigarettes and the money saved like Gareth speaks about in this podcast.
Tutorials
Tutorials can be a great way to drive traffic to your site as well as backlinks. These can be a lot more time consuming and labour intensive depending on your niche. For example if you are showing people how to make something by yourself they are either going to need a photo rich article or a video showing them in most cases (or both).
With tutorials you can use the skyscraper technique as explained by Brian Dean with great effect. Again tools such as Ahrefs’ content explorer or BuzzSumo are fantastic if you have access to them.
But essentially again find what is working best for your niche but improve upon it and reach out to those who have already linked to the original (now worse) piece of content asking if they will link back.
With tutorials look at niche relevant blogs as well as niche relevant forums / subreddits and see which are getting the most views and engagement.
Search for terms such as; how to, x tutorial, how do you do x, what is the best way to do x. To look for example of tutorials.
Also if you want to really dive deep you can look for a common pain point in tutorials.
So let’s say you want to do a video on how to make slime (it was my top suggestion for some reason) often people will complain about the need for activators or glue. So you could make a tutorial on how to make slime without any activators.
If you create a really high quality tutorial you can post the tutorial on niche relevant forums, Q&A pages such as quora and subreddits which if you backlink to your own site may drive traffic on its own. Reddit especially if you can get a lot of upvotes on there can drive thousands of people to your site in house, but reddit is typically short lived and may only last for a day.
Another traffic source you can use successfully with tutorials is pinterest, although this isn’t something I have used before I know members of blackhat.community have used it with great success in certain niches.
Typically pinterest attracts females (81% of users) with a median age of 40. The people I know who have used it successfully have been driving traffic to sites like cooking sites (where they will post recipes but also link to the products they are using), DIY home projects and fashion websites.
Although this isn’t to say other niches couldn’t drive traffic from here successfully.
But as I mentioned earlier the main goal is to gain backlinks in order to move you up the organic rankings so again find people who have shared similar content and reach out to them via email.
History posts
For some niches you may struggle to do tutorial style posts but you can normally do history posts where you discuss the history of the niche or product.
This data can also often be turned into an infographic to gain more backlinks further down the line, but history posts are generally a lot lower investment as you don’t have to pay for a designer.
In some ways history posts can be a lot harder to gain traction than the other two and you probably will have some that you think will do great that may not gain any backlinks but it will take some tweaking to get working.
But it all depends on your niche and your audience. Which is why it is important to know your niche otherwise you can waste a lot of time and or money on content which won’t gain you any backlinks.
But again the premise is the same as the others, gather the data and outreach to those who have linked to similar content and attempt to gain the backlinks via email.
Passing the link juice through the site
When using all of these content strategies you want to ensure that you are using internal linking, as the majority of the links will tend to go to that one page. Therefore if you can link out to you money pages from that page it will allow the link juice to pass down somewhat to those pages. For more on internal linking check out chapter 3 lesson 3.
In the next lesson we are going to cover the basics of outreach vs PBNs, the pros and cons of each.
The SEO Institute Newsletter
Get Email List Exclusives Such As Our Latest Updates From Our Expert Powered Blog, Q&As And SEO Tips Direct To Your Inbox.
-
The User does not have any posts