Everybody has a favorite method for link building – article marketing, guest blogging, blog carnivals, and lots of other methods that involve publishing your work on someone else’s site. Yes, you get a backlink out of it, and some of them might even be valuable. But what else do you get? Maybe a trickling percentage of the traffic from that other blog? I just don’t see the pay-off. Here is my favorite, most effective way to build organic links to your blog. And I’ll explain why as I go along.
Write content that begs to be shared
This is the best way to build organic links to your blog: Write a killer blog post that makes your readers sit up and say, “Wow! I have got to share this with my friends!” Now it never hurts to have a blog post go viral and have thousands of visitors coming into your blog from Twitter or Facebook or wherever. But chances are, once people start sharing that post, some other blogger or website is going to pick it up and link back to you in one of their own articles.
And that’s the link you want. It’s an organic link that someone created because they like your content and they think it provides value to readers. Generally, these links are created with a variety of anchor text, too, which gives you an even bigger boost with the search engines.
Why is this better than guest blogging? Because with guest blogging you’re still working your tail off to produce sharable content – because you have to if you want that other blog to accept it. You’re going to get one, possibly two links in a bio box and maybe a trickle of traffic.
But remember, this is a KILLER blog post. When it goes viral – who gets the traffic? Not you. That other blogger gets it. If you’re going to go to that much effort, better to post it on your own blog so you get the benefit of the organic links, the shares and the traffic.
Publish content on 2.0 properties
Once you publish a guest blog post on another blog it’s no longer yours and rarely will that other blogger let you monetize that post. You’re basically going to a lot of trouble for one little link. That’s cool if all you’re after is one little link and your name in a byline somewhere. Personally, my time is worth more than that.
You can generate the same quality backlinks by publishing your content on Hubpages, Squidoo or Weebly – and you can monetize those pages, too. Squidoo and Hubpages even have revenue sharing programs where you earn money, even if you don’t have any kind of monetization on the page. And, you own and control your content. Change the links any time you want, add more links if you want, add an affiliate product – whatever you want to do. It’s content you had to work to produce. It only makes sense to get as much value out of it as you can.
Find a blog where you can be a permanent guest blogger
Instead of killing yourself writing for a different blog every day of the week and hoping your posts will be accepted, find a relevant blog in your niche and set up a permanent guest blogging arrangement between the two. This way, you have the opportunity to really get to know the needs of that other audience and develop a relationship that will result in some genuine traffic numbers back to your blog instead of the trickle you’ve been seeing from all those other blogs.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!