This is a guest post by Cory Collins from PageOnePower.com
Anyone who’s spent anytime blogging can readily relate to tales of bad SEO. Blog comments that hardly seem to be English, guest post request spam, and a constant stream of content solely designed to build backlinks.
And it’s unfortunate. Because I believe link building, done properly, is more about personal human interaction than anything to do with a search engine—crazy, right? Let me explain.
First you need to understand the reason most people start a blog, is because they’re passionate about something. They want to share their passion with the world. But, maintaining a blog is a lot of work. Often for little or no money.
So, some blogs start looking for content contribution from outside sources, such as guest posts. Or maybe they are just looking to build more of a community. Either way, they want their blog to stay passionate, on point, and high quality. Generically written, bland, vanilla posts written only for a backlink is the last thing they want.
But link building is a difficult process. Because of this, people are tempted to cut corners continually. Many hope that it’s a number game, thinking that if they send out enough emails, write enough articles, or comment on enough blogs they’ll be able to get a link somewhere. But this isn’t how quality backlinks are made.
But how do you build quality backlinks then? Is it worth the time? My answer is yes, it is definitely worth the time, but the only way to build quality backlinks is through hard work and personalizing the process, in order to build relationships with blog owners.
Outreach Success
The first—and most obvious—way in which personalizing your link building strategies will help is in your outreach success. Believe me when I say blog owners, especially of highly successful blogs, receive an overwhelming amount of emails per day pertaining to SEO and link building. So it’s only natural that they end up ignoring a large percentage of those, especially if they lack any kind of personalization or professionalism.
So, when reaching out to a potential blog owner for link building opportunities—including guest posting, product review/giveaway, or general contacting—make sure to:
- Introduce yourself
- Remark upon their blog – they’ve worked hard on it, so show them you’ve actually looked at it!
- Explain why you’re contacting them, succinctly
- Thank them for their time and include a call to action (hope to hear from you soon, please let me know if you’d be interested in a product giveaway, etc.)
- Proof read for any possible grammar/spelling mistakes
But most of all, don’t use this to create a new template! Every email you send out should be personalized. After reading a hundred template emails blog owners quickly get a sense for which emails were actually written and which ones are just generic outreach. And believe me, it makes a difference.
Guest Posting – More Views
Making your article personalized to the blog improves it in the following ways:
- It better matches the blog’s tone, content, and overall theme and is therefore more likely to get promoted and viewed.
- Makes the post a lot more readable. Think about the difference between including a personal touch—such as previous experience, a sense of humor, or even just your personality— compared to just another generic one off link building article.
- Makes the article easier to write—no one enjoys a generic article, including the writer, since writing it is often boring and mundane. So spice it up and include a little personalization!
- Increases the likelihood of being asked to post again by the blog owner, making it easier to build links in the future.
There’s simply no comparison when it comes to writing a generic post solely for the link at the end as opposed to writing an enjoyable, educational, fun piece that is custom tailored for a specific blog. You can’t build great links without first building relationships.
Increased Link Building Opportunities
At the end of the day, the real reason all link building exercises should be a personalized, human to human interaction, is because it increases your further link building opportunities. How you say? Well, by helping you build real relationships with blog owners!
When you reach out to a blog owner, looking to have an actual conversation and truly contribute to their blog, they’re often grateful. And this gratefulness leads to:
- Another chance to contribute in the future
- Increased network within the blogging community
- Possible increased social presence – the blogger shows their gratitude by going above and beyond in promoting your article
- Possible new link building opportunities—maybe they recommend you to another blog owner, have another blog themselves, or invite you to contribute in different ways (sponsored post, giveaway, etc.)
Even if you don’t get anything extra out of it, the feeling of actually contributing should be enough. And, if you continually practice solid, honest, personalized link building activities, blog owners will notice, and appreciate.
So quit with the template mass emails.
Because let’s be honest: even if you get links out of it, it’s a losing strategy.
Off course for SEO link building is foundation but it is incomplete without passion with patience. I think it is rewarding in long run. First it build the relation among the online community then search engines enlist them in their database,
Hi people keep going mad about googles updates. I know innocent sites are being hit but is this because of past link building strategies? Surely with everyone now on a more even keel. This will be better in the long run. As anyone not willing to put in the time and effort is not going to get the results they seek. So then surely the quality of the web should go up. Or am I just Nieve??
Great post thanks lee
As Charles above me states, link building is sleepy time. I definitely find myself putting it off more than anything else I do online, but it’s necessary. I don’t do nearly as much as I used to but it’s effective.
The only thing I have personally found to be more effective is guest blogging.
Great post, Cory!
I’m also passionate about whitehat SEO and have been working hard for a while on some of my niche sites to keep things clean and relevant to Google. At least in the years before Penguin I knew I could get away with all sorts of grey and black methods but in my mind I was always thinking of the future. Even if I can get away with those methods now, won’t Google improve their algorithm and eventually nail my site as junk?
So luckily I managed to do well with Penguin and had some sites jump in rankings, but I still feel I can do better link-building while staying white. For example, guest posting is something I have NEVER done. I don’t even know why, I just haven’t even tried it. Perhaps now it’s time for me to get out there with some of my websites and start spreading some good content around.
Hello Corycollin,
Great.. I strongly feel the linkbuilding is boring and time consuming. Instead what i do is to develop a unique content on my main site and entice the search engines to rank my pages. This is the way i win the favor of search engines. So i would suggest you all concentrate on the onpage issues rather than doing link building.
What I feel about the link building thing is, its extremely important to create High PR do follow links.Even the no follow links wont do any harm.It actually should be a good blend of nofollow and dofollow high PR links to make a blog a huge success.
And about SEO, On page SEO is equally important,though unique content is absolutely necesarry
I strongly agree with you that using templates for sending email is totally waste of time. I, as what you said, ignored majority of emails except email with nice and personal subject 🙂
No doubt SEO is very important when it comes to generating traffic back to your site. what i like must from the traffic coming from seo is that, they need something and that’s way they search before come across your site…they are unique traffic and they can be easily be converted to subscribers if you are doing the right thing, thanks for sharing
Link build can be a part time job and if you are trying to rule the world it is a FULL TIME job. I really didn’t know what i was getting myself into when I started blogging, but I know for a short time i spent every free minute I had commenting n blogs trying to get to know people. The long hours have paid off and getting link juice from articles on friends of mine’s blogs is now a simple task. The things you point out will really work if people are willing to try them out.
Thanks!
Guest blogging is best way to get quality dofollow links for your site but don’t expect anything like traffic. for dofollow backlinks guest blogging is best way to go. Internal linking your blog posts keep the link juice pass on internal pages of your site and it is one of the bsic in on page seo