Whether you like it or not, Google can be a little finicky and prejudiced when ranking sites.

Before you hit the first page, it thoroughly inspects your website’s backlink profile for traces of shady link building tactics.

It could be something from a spammy domain, an unusually high concentration of exact-match anchor texts, or thousands of blog comments.

If these links are present, you’ll most likely be in for a bad time — backlink cleanups are nasty business, not fun to do at all.

However, if you’ve poured your resources into white hat link building from day one, then you’re not only in Google’s good graces, but you also get the opportunity to build relationships with other influential authorities in your niche.

You will become an authority in your niche (no matter how small or commercial it is) and people in your niche will want to hear from you.

Of course, your audience will also be more open to buying whatever product you have to offer.

We’re going to share how you can build high-quality whitehat links to your site in a few steps.

Sounds awesome?

Let’s get onto it.

Imagine opening up your inbox to several bloggers excited to share your content on their blog? Creating the types of connections and links that Google LOVES. The Ranking Formula program teaches you the best outreach strategies and what to say to bloggers to make them want to share your fantastic content.

Here’s our 5 Steps to Link Building Success

If you’re going to be successful at getting backlinks, you have to follow a process. The process for getting backlinks starts well before the first outreach email.

Here’s the highly successful process the Ranking Formula team teaches for getting top quality backlinks. You can duplicate this process to get high quality links on your own site.

Here’s how to build quality backlinks in 2018:

Step One: Choose Your Method

Decide first what backlinking method you will use. This is important because your research is guided by the method you choose.

It’s good to use a variety of link building strategies to diversify your link profile, but doing them all at once without a plan will almost always guarantee your failure.

You’ll want to develop a process for one link building method at a time, and then after a while, you’ll be able to confidently using several methods at once.

Here are the highly effective methods we teach and use during a 6 week period in the Ranking Formula Course:

Infographic Development & Promotion

If there’s one thing that authoritative bloggers want, it’s outstanding content.

Having a lot to offer in terms of data and useful information is a good start. However, they also care about the way you present your content.

That’s why converting your content into infographics to highlight the key takeaways and simplify in-depth data is so effective for link building.

Here’s an infographic our team developed for one of our websites. It received a 7% conversion rate, when the industry average is 2-3%.  

 

Why It Works:

With the ever-decreasing attention span of the online audience, content marketers must make sure they can capture and retain the interest of their audience upon opening an article.

Injecting visual content, like infographics is a great way to do this.

And if you have a good process to track your outreach and scale this process, it can be a very lucrative link building strategy.

Guest Posting & Contributor Accounts

How do you make sure that your content gets backlinks?

Go out there and create them yourself!

Guest posting or publishing content through contributor accounts on others sites is a reliable way to earn backlinks from authoritative sources.

The premise is as simple as it gets: You look for authoritative sites that accept guest posts, request for authorship, and then submit high-quality posts that contain links to your site.

You can either write the posts yourself OR hire a writer to do it for you!

Why It Works:

Building backlinks through your own guest posts have numerous advantages. Not only can you be assured of the link’s quality, but you also have control over the content’s topic and the backlink’s anchor text (the anchor text signals to Google what the relevancy of the article you are linking back to).

This method is a two-fer because when you choose the right blogs, you can leverage the blog’s audience to increase your reach. You just have to have a bang up offer at the end of your post. Most bloggers don’t mind you doing this as long as it makes sense.

Top Lists

Creating listicles (lists + articles) for link building involves putting together a blog post that lists the content of top bloggers in your niche, then reaching out to them telling them that you added them to your listicle.

You just need to come up with a topic that makes sense for your target influencers.

Anything creative and eye-catching could work, like:

Once the content is ready, you’ll share it with the influencers you’ve mentioned and let the magic happen.

Why It Works:

As a blogger, nothing compares to the euphoria of finding your brand mentioned in a “top” list.

What’s your initial reaction?

Find and smash that “Share” button, of course!

Most other bloggers will also do the same. You just need to ensure the post’s quality and that each blogger is represented in a positive way.  

Aside from the backlinks, you can also receive dozens of warm comments from these popular bloggers. Nothing feels better than being recognized!

Want to scale these methods? Download the High Performance Link Building Cheat Sheet!

Step Two: Choose Your Outreach Targets

Before doing any content development, you must first identify the type of blogs you want to reach out to.

Plenty of newbie marketers do this the other way around, which is why they end up wasting money on content that no one wants to link to.

For example, if you have a dog food blog, here are some types of blogs you may want to outreach to:

• Niches that directly correlate — other dog food blogs
• Niching Up (reaching a broader audience) — dog lovers blogs
• Side niching  — pet nutrition

The most straightforward solution to finding outreach targets is to run your keywords through Google:

If you want the process to be a bit more seamless, you may also go for content research and outreach tools like BuzzSumo.

Just bear in mind that these tools are not completely free — plus, they don’t necessarily produce better results when it comes to finding outreach targets.

Step Three: Choose How You Will Develop Content

Now that you know the types of blogs you will outreach to, you’ll need to choose how you’ll develop content.

This usually boils down to a decision of whether you’ll develop content yourself or hire someone else to do the heavy lifting.

To help you make the right choice, here’s a closer look at your options:

Create Content Yourself

Before you decide to develop the content yourself, you need to consider the following:

1. Your Writing Skills
   Sure, a lot of bloggers get a pass for using conversational tone in their posts, but it also requires a keen eye for grammatical consistency, flow, and the overall engagement value.
2. Your Design Skills
   While modern tools like Photoshop have a low skill floor, it’s nigh impossible to be competent with them overnight.
3. Your Research Skills
   To accomplish your objectives proficiently, you need to know the tools and proper research techniques to ensure your content’s value.
4. Your Time
   Most websites that accept contributor posts require no less than 1,000 words each, which could take up to five hours depending on the topic (and how fast you are at writing).

Hire Someone Else

Put simply, hiring a freelancer is the most reasonable course of action if you lack the skills or resources needed to get the job done. The good news is, they can be easily found in freelancing marketplaces like Fiverr, Upwork, and Freelancer.com.

Step 4: Develop Your Message

Now that you have your link targets and content ready, it’s time to develop an email message that you will use for outreach.

Instead of creating a generic template, create one that has room for customization.

For example: If you are pitching a guest post, you can write a standard intro but leave a space to include a personalization factor or factors. Here are a few personalization factors you may want to start out with:

• 2-3 topics that you’re interested in writing about, based on a quick review of the bloggers latest posts.
• The blogger’s name
• The blogger’s website
• Favorite post

Imagine being able to send countless personalized outreach emails in minutes. With the use of highly customizable templates, you can do just that. Ranking Formula uses processes and templates to send hundreds of personalized emails to the right types of bloggers.

Step 5: Do Your Research

Finding influencers to target may sound simple, but if you’re oblivious about how to do your research, it can lead to frustration and hours of head-scratching.

To get the ball rolling for you, here are three powerful tips for your research:

1. Plug in “Write for Us” Or Something Similar in Your Keyword

The quickest way to look for outreach targets is to perform a Google search with keywords that pertain to guest posting. For example:

• Write for Us
• Guest Post
• Contributing Writer
• Guest Columns

You just need to plug them into your seed keyword, like:

2. Use Google Operators

To scan websites on a deeper level for guest posting keywords, you can use Google operators. For this, one of the best choices would be the “niche + inurl:” operator.

It’s simple: just fill in your niche and add the guest posting keyword at the end:

3. Check Other Bloggers’ Profiles

Finally, you can inspect the profile of other bloggers in your niche to discover where they guest post.

The good news is, most bloggers try to flaunt where they’ve been featured, no matter how discreetly. It can be snuck into their author boxes or displayed in full splendor:

Putting It All Together

In link building, a huge slice of your work consists of content development, outreach, and tracking.

Just remember to:

• Pick the link building methods that fit your needs
• Select the right outreach targets for your campaign
• Develop authoritative content
• Develop your outreach message
• Scale your link building efforts with data

The Ranking Formula Course can help you grease these busy areas to accelerate your progress and maximize success.

We offer several templates in our course like spreadsheets, outreach emails, and written content. To top it all off, we’re willing to help you every step of the way with our 6-week link building program.

Taking It To The Next Level

Knowing the processes of link building is a vital step in developing the types of links you want, but being able to scale those processes is what will make you successful at getting links to your blog.

It’s time consuming to work through all the 5 steps EVERY time you want to do a new outreach campaign and if you don’t have a system in place – your first time doing it will be exhausting enough to make you want to hang up your gloves.

But Ranking Formula has put together a cheat sheet to show you exactly how to scale this process, so you can send out to 100 sites instead of 10.

Click here to download Ranking Formula’s High Performance Link Building Cheat Sheet! You’ll learn exactly how to scale your link building processes in order to get the most bang for your buck.