Building a website is a fairly simple and straightforward process. Assuming you have the right people working on the project, you can control every phase and detail. But the same can’t be said with establishing authority and generating traffic. Whereas a website can be published to the internet with a simple click of a button, getting your website to rank requires a steady and long-term commitment to SEO and digital marketing.
In particular, you’ll need to think about link building and how it can be leveraged to enhance your site’s prominence and drive traffic. But even within this particular niche, you have to be careful to implement the appropriate strategies.
What is Link Earning?
There are a couple of different link building techniques. Manual link building is the classic way of handling things. Unfortunately, a lot of these tactics are now considered spammy and no longer yield the same results that they once did. Then there’s link attraction, which requires more work but delivers a stronger return on investment.
Link attraction, also known as link earning, is a strategy by which you develop pieces of sticky content and publish them on your website. The goal is to entice people to link to these resources based on the value they provide.
This latter method is about creating quality content that magnetizes your audience and encourages merit-based linking.
5 Tips for Attracting Links to Your Website
Naturally earning links requires some hard work and advanced preparation. Hopefully the following tips will help you get started:
1. Create Visual Content
Visual content is far more effective than written content – especially in today’s crowded online landscape where users are over stimulated by marketing, branding, and advertising.
The human brain processes visual content much faster and more efficiently than text-based content. You can take advantage of this by producing infographics, memes, charts, graphs, original images, and video content.
2. Offer a Free Tool or Resource
You need to give people a reason to link back to your website. One of the best ways to quickly earn links is to offer a free tool or resource that’s useful to your target audience.
For example, a personal finance website could produce an onsite tool that helps readers figure out how much they need to save each month to get out of debt. A home construction site could have a feature that provides a quick price estimate for building a home based on the specs the user provides. Both of these are sticky resources that encourage natural backlinks.
3. Sponsor an Event or Cause
Many organizations find that they can generate lots of backlinks by sponsoring an event or cause. Law firms, for example, will often use educational scholarships.
“With this tactic, a law firm launches a scholarship program where monetary awards are developed for students. These scholarships are then marketed to educational organizations that have valuable .edu domains,” AudienceBloom explains.
Because the .edu domains exist to serve students, they’ll naturally want to share the information about the scholarships – linking to the law firm in the process.
4. Guest Blog
Develop some guest blogging relationships with key websites in your industry or niche. While you’ll have to take the time to develop content, you can almost always work out an agreement where you’re able to slip in a relevant link or two back to your site. Do this with enough blogs and you can pick up dozens of authoritative links every year.
5. Take a Controversial Stance
This latter tip should be embraced with caution, but it’s been proven to work for many years. By adopting a controversial stance on a viral topic, newsworthy issue, or timely event, you can encourage people to link back to your opinion and give you natural exposure and – in some cases – authoritative backlinks. However, you’ll have to buy into the notion that any publicity is good publicity.
Employ Sustainable Strategies
When it comes to link building, you have options. Some options are quick and easy, but offer diminishing returns over time. Other methods require a larger upfront investment of time and money, yet deliver sustainable dividends over many years.
You have to decide what sort of business you’re trying to build. Are you focused on short-term gain at the expense of future growth? Or are you willing to sacrifice immediate gains for the promise of sustainable profitability over many years? In the moment, the former approach is tempting. However, it’s the latter approach that will work out best for you.
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