Recently I’ve become increasingly interested in Taoism, an ancient Chinese philosophy that sometimes gets treated as a religion. Indeed Zen Buddhism partly relies on earlier teachings from Taoism.
The problem with link building is often that is it very strictly goal focused.
You do not act naturally but obsess too much about the outcome. In Taoism in contrast you “act without expectation”- that is you focus on the path to achieve the goal. Relationship oriented link building can thus work effortlessly as you “go with the flow”.
The goal vs the path
In Western culture (which the US, UK, EU etc. are part of) people are very much goal oriented. You want to lose 10 pounds in a month, or build 10 links in a month, etc.
When working for SEO clients, I often face rigid expectations. Building a fixed number of links in a particular time-frame or for a specific budget, for example, is a common request even with educated clients. In the meantime, I never actively built links for my own sites. Of course I got many links built for my clients and my actions resulted in those expected number of links, but I didn’t start the day with the thought “I will build a link today”. Instead I focused on an organic approach of
- content creation
- social networking
- audience building
You will often notice how much goal-oriented link builders are by their sheer wording of outreach emails.
Bloggers and influencers get turned off by the hidden agenda every SEOs seems to be following. Their actions are considered to be just geared towards getting a link and thus deemed dishonest. Nobody in their right mind wants to get used as a tool to build a link. So in a way low-level SEO practitioners are just tricking people to link to their or their clients’ online properties.
The Eastern (Asian) way of action is to follow the path and to look where it leads to or as Bruce Lee once said in a movie to “be like water”. Instead of ignoring your whereabouts and solely focusing on the outcome of your actions, you adapt to the path you are on and take advantage of opportunities along the way even if they lead you somewhere else.
Ironically, not obsessing about the goal often leads to reaching it faster by discovering a shortcut.
How link building really works these days
Let me tell you a story to exemplify this difference. At the end of 2012, I was pretty frustrated after a disappointing link building gig for a client of mine. The client, an in-house SEO who represented an international tourism brand, had a small budget yet wanted to optimize for highly competitive terms in German. At that time I was in for a challenge so I didn’t care for the fact that I had only three months to rank for three key phrases while others might have had a decade to optimize their sites for.
After three months and several roadblocks getting in the way, some of them from the client itself, who not only paid late (including the promised mini-budget) but also didn’t allow me to publish content on their site or a group of influencers who instead of helping me out with publicity as expected literally backstabbed me; I wound up with one of the three key phrases in the top 10 as promised while the other outreach efforts haven’t yet shown the results we hoped for. He spent a few thousand Euros on that campaign. At the same time their competition spent millions on print, TV and billboard ads so that I felt pretty lost.
Out of frustration, I wrote a bland article called “How Link Building Really Works These Days” summarising my own way of earning links the organic way. The post went live shortly before New Year. Among fewer competing content items due to the holidays , my article got significant attention on Inbound.org and ultimately got also shared on Twitter by Rand Fishkin himself , resulting in a huge wave of retweets and attention. Later on, this post that is made of frustration ended up on a few best of the year lists, too.
I link at the first date
Yoda quote image via The Hangar.
So what’s the Tao of link building? Some translate Tao with path. This is already the answer. You have to forget the goal of link building when you are following the path of link building. Stop thinking about how many addresses you need to scrape in order to contact that 50 bloggers so that you get the 10 links at the end. Stop wearing that awful “I f**k on the first date” t-shirt most link builders still wear. Just be yourself. Be friendly, forthcoming, and generous. Also stop over-analyzing every aspect of your action.
Whenever your mind does all the work, you lose your infinite potential, the inner wisdom that shows you the way you can go effortlessly. Some call it intuition. In Taoism you also refer to the concept of “wu wei” or the way of non-striving. When you let go of expectations (like get 10 links in a month) and intuitively follow the path appearing in front of you instead, step by step you start interacting with the world naturally.
The hidden agenda of “building a link” disappears and miraculously people start embracing you
and ultimately sharing your content and linking your site. It sounds like magic and it often feels like it but in reality it’s just that you don’t obstruct yourself. Obsessive goal-oriented action makes you blind for the moment and its opportunities. My example above has proven it to me.
The months of hard work on outreach were easily outdone by writing and sharing a single post. So here I was trying hard to build those links for weeks and weeks while I simply did it on one day. It’s like Yoda said in Star Wars. Do. Or do not. There is no try.
That’s the Tao of link building. You build links effortlessly when you let go of your narrow focus and actually see the best possible path to get on.
In fact it’s totally doable to get links once you behave like human being. People are social creatures. They want to make friends. You have to be perfectly yourself so that people befriend you and spread the word about your content.
