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5 Honest Link Building Methods

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5 Honest Link Building Methods

Links remain key to search engine rankings.

Without other sites linking to your page, it has 0 chance to rank.

But there’s more to that.

Links generate referral traffic and build your brand.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that links are essential for all digital marketing tactics.

But with that, it is also the most challenging one.

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How are you earning backlinks for your website?

I hope you’re not still submitting your site to hundreds of article sites or lame directories. You’re not spamming blog comments are you?

You shouldn’t rely on one single tactic to get links to your site. You’re so much better off building a diverse link profile by getting links from various legitimate sources.

Here are four honest ways you can earn high quality inbound links for your site–the types of links that Honest Abe would be proud of.

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1. Create Content That Is Highly Shareworthy (Here’s How)

One of the best ways to earn inbound links is by creating content that is highly shareworthy. This tactic outranks the others because with one piece of content you can earn hundreds or thousands of backlinks.

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This is also an audience research tactic, so much so as a link building tactic. You get to understand what goes well in your niche and what your target audience seems to relate to.

So, how do you create content that is highly shareworthy?

We tend to think about share-worthy content in the context of viral content, like infographics or videos that have generated thousands of views and shares.

In reality, it doesn’t have to be that huge.

You don’t need to create expensive infographics or videos to earn inbound links. You can write a blog post, publish a guide or create any other kind of content you want.

The important thing to remember is that you should have some kind of hook in the content. Something that grabs the reader, applies to a wide audience and makes viewers want to pass it on.

Remember that the best way to create such content is by including:

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  • A hero
  • A villain
  • An emotional story arc
  • A super inspiring meaningful message
  • A downloadable asset like a lead magnet
  • The right time and the right place (seasonality)

Use Visuaping to be alerted of something relevant being discussed on Reddit or a bif media outlet, like Mashable. This way you will instantly know when your topic is going hot, and you can join that trend by creating your content. That’s a good way to keep those links coming.

5 Honest Link Building Methods

When you create content that includes one or more of these elements, not only do you increase the likelihood that people will share it via social networks, but also that media outlets will want to publish it earning you high quality backlinks.

This could also be longer-term projects, like hosting a podcast or a Youtube series.

2. Respond to Press Inquiries

One really simple way to obtain new inbound links is to respond to press inquiries.

You can sign up for a free service like Help a Reporter Out (HARO) that will send you a list of inquiries from reporters/bloggers looking for sources.

Once you receive your first HARO email scan it for any topics that fit your industry and/or your (brand’s) story. Make sure to provide answers right away.

If I wanted to obtain an inbound link for my site I would reply to the email address listed and provide my credentials + a quick quote that can be used in the article.

Reporters are often working on tight deadlines and may not have the time to reply to your email if it only says, “Hi, I’m a XX expert, let me know what questions you have.”

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You need to make it easier for them to include your quote after just one email. Be factual, detailed, yet concise.

You may not be selected for each inquiry you respond to, but in my experience if you include a well thought out quote in your response to the inquiry you will have a high acceptance rate.

Remember to start your reply with a credibility statement, then write a short but detailed quote that could be easily used in an article (no one likes generic, fluff quotes), and make yourself available for a follow up.

Oh, and of course include your URL if you hope to get a link!

Twitter is another great place to look for link opportunities. Reporters and bloggers are posting their story requests on Twitter using hashtags like #journorequest, #PRrequests, #writingcommunity and #bloggerrequest.

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Keep an eye on those hashtags and tweet back when you have something to say! 

3. Leverage Already Popular Content

Someone has already found something that has gone viral. You can take advantage of that success in two ways:

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  • Learn from it
  • Curate it to create your own sharable content

You can search Facebook, Reddit and Tumblr for content (related to your industry) that is getting a lot of likes/comments/shares. Then find a way to make your own content based on what you have found:

  • Create a listicle (Think Buzzfeed for a format)
  • Write a “reaction” article and embed third-party content in there

I would add that if you don’t want to copy/paste directly from other people’s updates, then you should look for viral videos, infographics or images related to your industry.

You can then embed the video/image into your blog post and write up your own story to go around it.

Just make sure that you receive the author’s permission to cross-publish this content.

When using content to build links, focus on community building for long-term success.

4. Create Educational Content

You’d be surprised how high the demand is for truly helpful educational content.

There is a huge community of teachers and homeschooling parents who will gladly link to your content if it provides a good instruction that’s helpful to their users.

Think about content on teaching students to create their own PDF files (ebooks) or to organize their reading lists. Educators are still hungry for useful tutorials teaching their kids something new.

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And those links are priceless because educators would never give you links unless it’s well deserved, and Google knows that.

To make this tactic work you need two steps though:

  • Create content that’s truly useful
  • Reach out to your target educators to invite them to check it out and link

Text Optimizer is the tool that will help you create content that really solves problems. It determines niche questions that need to be addressed on a site:

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For outreach, make sure to create tools like Pitchbox which will find those prospects, organize them by status (whether you got in touch and whether they responded), and automate follow-ups.

You may want to set up a dedicated email address to run your outreach and I think using your primary email address or a free email address (like Gmail or Yahoo) – these both are not good strategies in the long run.

You can grab a cheap domain using tools like Namify to have a well-branded email address for your outreach. And here’s a good guide on setting up your branded email address for free.

5. Check out the Competition

One easy way to identify some websites you can get a link from is by checking out who is linking to your competitors.

You can quickly and easily conduct this spy work using SE Ranking’s competitor research tool.

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Simply type in the URL for your competitor’s website and the tool will show you a list of sites that link to them along with the pagerank for those inbound links.

Once you have a list of inbound links you can filter down the list to the sites that you would love to also get a link from and then reach out to each site to start that discussion.

You can repeat this same process for all of your competitors thus increasing your chances to not only gain some visibility on sites that had previously only written about the competition – but also to earn those all-important backlinks.

Buzzsumo is another great way to analyze your competitors’ links. A great thing about using this tool is that it combines link building research and social media research, i.e. for every linking page it would show you social media numbers like Facebook likes and Reddit Engagement:

1663536005 934 5 Honest Link Building Methods

Monitor and Organize Your Links

Good links are hard to get! It’s only natural that you’d want to keep a close eye on the best on those you earn. Link Checker is a cool tool that will monitor your links and alert you if there’s any red flag, like an error status. You can also label your links to organize them better.

1663536005 924 5 Honest Link Building Methods

How Are You Building Links?

Hopefully this list of link-building strategies gave you some new ideas for earning inbound links in an honest, sustainable way.

Build a solid foundation with these honest link building strategies rooted in best practice.


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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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