Content ideas for link building campaign [with examples]
Link building is vital if you want to increase your website’s trust and authority score that can boost your search engine result page ranking, thereby amplifying the ranking of all the content hosted on your website. As you might have guessed, it doesn’t matter how good your onpage search engine optimization (SEO) is, your website will not start seeing organic traffic unless you actively start in link building campaign.
Typically you want to create content that specifically is great for others to link to, thereby getting you more backlinks and hence boosting your domain authority and ranking.
Free Tools: you can tons of traffic and links to your website if you start offering a free tool or app on your site. Almost all companies active in content marketing arena spend significant resources in supporting such apps. Top examples include:
Extract emails from webpages: there are lots of free tools out there such as Specrom’s extract email from url tool that extracts email addresses out of webpages by simply spexifying a url.
Wordcounter: checking wordcounts of text documents is a simple enough problem that almost anyone writing a term paper or trying to submit a document with a word limit runs into at one point or another. One of the first results that come up on Google for that search query is https://wordcounter.net/ and you will be surprised to know that it’s Alexa domain ranking is ~2300 which is amazing for such as simple tool. The take home message ofcourse is that you dont need a complicated free tool, even something as simple as a wordcounter can boost domain ranking.
Free widgets: This is a variant on free tools we discussed earlier. Widgets are simple applications that people can host on their own websites. They usually are embeddable javascript so that its easy enough for anyone with even basic web knowledge to put on their sites. A very popular widget is a free online chat application that we are using on our website called tawk.to. You can see it to your right bottom hand (says “chat now”); the reason we are using this instead of others is that this one is absolutely free to use. The way Tawk benefits from this arrangement is not only an opportunity to upsell us on select services, but with every chat widget that is installed on a site, they are getting an automatic backlink (the js code does it automatically). This results direct increase in domain ranking, with their Alexa ranking being 3000 which is insanely high for a small company with handful of employees and a free product!
Infographics: Easy to create, share, embed infographics are becoming top linkable assets. You get a two fold advantage with them; frequently not only can you tons of backlinks from the url of the free infographics creator tool itself; but you can also get links whenever people create infographics and share the image itself especially if the image URL is also hosted on the same website as the free tool. Examples of free infographics tools include Specrom wordcloud creator from news URLs.
Giveaways, product donations etc: You can give away your services or products and earn the links back from thank you pages of your recipients or as product reviews or links from the resources page.
Job openings: You can create backlinks by simply sharing your job openings to local universities, tech bootcamps etc. More often than not, they will share those on their website giving you a link back.
Events and coupons: You can get some links from the local newspapers by publicising your events and making them open to general public. similarly, creating coupons and sharing it broadly also gives you some links.
Sponsorship: If everything else fails than you can always “buy” your backlinks. You should do this very carefully though; its perfectly fine if you donate money to the local high school sports team and get a link back through their website’s sponsorship page. However, if you are buying backlinks from some random freelancer on Fiverr than be very careful since most likely he/she wouldve used some black hat methods of generate that and your site may eventually get penalized and see an acute drop in domain authority.
In depth subject matter expert article: Most companies have a subject matter expert on their payroll. How about deploying their expertise and writing an in-depth article providing a detailed overview of the field with minimum biases and provide a future outlook. This of this article as one with minimum marketing spin but rather something that looks like what you see in academic research journals. Such articles have been known to not only generate lot of interest from journalists but they are frequently also great linkable assets and you can transform it into free ebooks further boosting its linking potential.