Link Building Tutorial

Author Bio

Ryan Jackson

SEO and Growth Marketing Expert

I am a growth marketer focusing on search engine optimization, paid social/search/display, and affiliate marketing. For the last five years, I have held jobs or had entrepreneurial ventures in freelance and consulting. I am a firm believer in an intense side hustle outside of 9 to 5’s. I have worked with companies like GoDaddy, Ace Hardware, StatusToday, SmartLabs Inc, and many more.

“Just prepare to put in hard work, sweat, and an entire jar of elbow grease when going through this link building tutorial. You will learn how to outrank the largest companies.”

What is Link Building

Link Buidling is the process of earning links from authoritative sites. These sites increase the rankings of keywords in Google search. The process is separated into three core phases.

Prospecting
Searching for niche websites on Google to find contact information of webmasters, editors, or business owners. Prospecting can also mean finding their social media profiles and gathering information to begin the relationship-building phase.
Relationship Building
Using the information gathered in the prospecting phase to slowly build relations. Liking, commenting, and sharing social media posts to show how their topic gages interests.
Pitching
Asking these individuals you have built a relationship for a backlink.

The Prospecting Phase

The reason why link building seperates itself among the phases is to shorten out the prospecting phase. All you have to do is to find new prospects. Think of the niche you are in, if you are selling baseball cards, then links from a plumbing website don’t make sense.

Step 1: Finding the Right Websites

When searching for sites, use the example below:

Niche + “Submit a guest post”
Niche + “become a contributor”
Niche + “Guest authorship”
Niche + “sponsored posts”
Niche + “become a writer”

Go ahead and plop these queries directly into Google

When you land on these websites, take a look to make sure it’s a decent website at the least. You don’t want to be that website with a ton of backlinks from bad sites. Ideally, website traffic should always be over backlink count. That is my rule of thumb, there will be other “SEOs” that disagree. When you’re on the website follow this checklist.

Step 2: Link Building Prospect Checklist

Does the website look sketchy?
Are there any red flags or gut feelings?
Check the spam score using a spam score checker
Use Ubersuggest of another tool to check the organic traffic and backlinks

Step 3: Find the Right Person

If all ducks are in a row, it’s time to hunt for the contact information. Some websites make obvious and provide a “Become A Contributor” page. Most of the other sites, don’t. Check them out on LinkedIn.

Step 4: Arm Yourself With The Proper Information

Check LinkedIn to see what college they went to. Do they like sports? People won’t link to you if they don’t like you. Your sole job as a link builder is to get the other person to like you. To give more ideas about what posts they share. Gather all of this information for the relationship-building phase of building links.

Building Relationships

It’s like dating someone. Unless you’re super bold and that works for you. Then that’s just like all the other “link builders”. Get to know the prospect.

Do's

Follow them on social media profiles
Interact with their brand
Share their content
Comment on SOME things
Read their stuff
Build a process and spread out days of interacting

Dont’s

DON’T follow all their social media profiles at once
DON’T send a ton of messages in one day
DON’T be obnoxious

Slowly follow up and connect with them on LinkedIn one week then the next comment on a post. Retweet them.

The goal for this relationship-building phase is to get the prospect to know who you are but DO NOT spam them.

Conducting Outreach

The third phase is equally as important. I really try to separate this into three sections. If you share this blog on social media and email me the link, I will give you these templates and a conversation for free.

The first I call content sharing.

You put in all the work to build this link. Do you think they know who you are yet?

I send out a pitch letting them know I shared their content across multiple platforms. I tell them how engaged I am with their content. My goal is to get them to rememeber, I am the one who liked their content.

Then…

I pitch my topic. I share my content with them and ask for their opinions on it. Then ask if I can contribute to theri site or ask for a backlink. It is that simple. Make sure you personalize everything and the secret to link building is the relationship.