Earning links via content that you published on your website is the best way to compete in your industry. This does not only give your website more authority but it also helps you drive more traffic organically. We also know that the power of earned links in digital marketing and how it can help a website rank perfectly well in SERP especially if the links that you have earned are from reputable websites in your industry.

Now that artificial links are widely used by many SEO practitioners, it is important that you know when to stop and focus on creating a top-notch strategy to help your website earn links as quality as possible. The key here is to disregard the process of link building in your vocabulary and focus on creating an outstanding content which will serve as your shovel to dig into the radar of influencers within your industry.

Phase 1: Focus on content development

Now that content has become a king in internet marketing and has become a vital ingredient to win in online marketing, it is important that you know how to create one that exactly will benefit you in the long run. Also, the competition in digital marketing is not about creating high quality links, it is a competition about creating a high quality content for your website to make it stand out in your market competition.

Image Credit: http://content.adjustyourset.tv/

So to help you get started build a comprehensive content ideas that will surely help you earn links, just follow these steps.

Act as an audience

For creating a content, you need to act as an audience, lost, looking for information that can give exactly what you are looking for. Just how search engine works (you search for something and they give you exactly what you need) I am not saying that you should think the way search engines think, I am just simply saying that you should think how your audience think.

So to do that, you need to ask yourself some questions on what sort of information that needs to be included in your content such as:

• Are advanced guidelines helpful to beginners?
• Are professional basketball players interested in step by step basic dribbling methods?

With these questions you have in mind, you can easily target the right audience for your content. Once you get the right audience and traffic to your website, you can lesson your bounce rate.

Gather all the information you need

Once you have identified the needs of your audience, it is your job as a content creator to provide all necessary information that your audience will need to be satisfied when they visit your website. You can start by looking at some recent existing articles related to your content and identify what kind of information it lacks of such as: helpful images in content, hyperlinked resources websites that add up information to your article. Then target those missing information and include it to your content that will make your content much more comprehensive than others.

Link out to other resources

One of the easiest ways to help you earn links for your website is to let other influencers in your niche to be featured in your article. Don’t just insert their link to your content. It would be great to mention their name or include their twitter account before you cite their remarkable contents. This method cannot only help you build connection but it can also help you build reputation especially if your referring links really add value to your readers.

Phase 2: Social Outreach

Social outreach is the best way to let the world know about your upcoming or newly published campaign. It is also an effective way to drive your audience back to your website by publishing your newly published post through social media. But it would be great to use this method for link earning (social and editorial link)

Social outreach

The power of social platform is tremendously useful to business owners nowadays. They can perfectly use the social channels to reach out to their existing and prospect customers, get new leads or meet potential business investors.

They can also:

• Build more connections
• Generate more leads
• Drive massive traffic

There is only one simple trick to do social outreach and it is to tag all featured reference in your content to let them know that you published a content featuring them as your resources.

To do this, first you need to follow or like their pages in order to tag them in your social outreach campaign. This is also the first step to get into their radar and notice your existence in your industry. How to do it? Let’s look at two examples below:

The first one is from  Search Engine Land

SEL includes Matt Cutts into their Google Plus update

SEL on Twitter 

and the second one is from Robert Scoble

How Robert Scoble does with his Facebook update 

How Robert Scoble’s Twitter update looks like

This can also enhance the potential audience of your content by having them share to their own social pages to be seen by their audience. Now, your post has potential to go viral especially the people you tag in your social post update have decent amount of active followers that likely to share, like and comment on their posts.

Phase 3: Email outreach

To really reach out to your references, you can then email them saying that you published a content featuring them as your reference. I am sure, they all would be happy to cite your content to their future publication especially if your written content really adds up value and provides remarkable fresh information that their readers would love.

Email format:

Hi Name,

I would like to inform you that I used one of your informative articles in my recent publication as a reference. I just thought you might want to take a look at it share to your social channels if you find it useful to them.

Note: This method does not always succeed 100% as there are people that don’t have all the time to check their email and social accounts so a follow up email might be helpful.

After a week of publication of your article, check out the page views of your article and identify how many people read your post, commented, shared in social media and let the people featured in your content know about the good feedback from your audience’s end. Once they figured out that your content has been well received by your audience, they will also likely reference your other contents, follow you on social and visit your website regularly.

You can also read my post on how to make use of email marketing to drive traffic to your website