Complete Blogging Course to Grow Your Business

Hi there, I'm Tim, head of marketing at Ahrefs. And I'm excited to present to you Blogging for Business. It is a very detailed cut-to-the-chase video course that will teach you how to grow traffic to your blog and turn it into a customer acquisition channel to your business. Three things. First: this entire course is based on a true story of how we took our own blog from a resource that hardly anyone knew about to one of the most popular and reputable blogs in our industry. In terms of traffic, we went from less than 15,000 visitors per month back on when I just joined Ahrefs, to over 150,000 visitors per month when I started working on this course. As of today, the search traffic to our blog looks almost like a hockey stick. And I'm going to show you exactly how we achieved that. It took me six years and eight different blogs to figure out the tactics and strategies that actually work. So in this course you'll be getting six years of blood sweat and tears condensed into 10 video lessons packed with actionable content marketing and SEO strategies. I honestly wish this course existed back when I was just starting out, it would have saved me a lot of wasted time and money. Second: seeing your blog traffic grow is obviously both exciting and satisfying. But you're running a business, right? The last time I checked, they didn't accept traffic in the banks. So you have to make sure that you're attracting the kind of traffic that will convert into paying customers for your business. Trust me, I'm a huge advocate of content marketing that brings customers and sales, not just arbitrary traffic numbers. And that's why I named this video course "Blogging for business." And finally, number three: it took me almost a year to carefully outline and record all 10 video lessons of this course. And judging by the feedback from the people who took it already, I was able to impress even seasoned marketing professionals, not just newbie bloggers. But after creating this course, I decided to go even further, and interviewed three awesome people asking them all sorts of challenging questions. I interviewed Noah Kagan about growing an audience. I interviewed Bryan Harris about list building. And I interviewed Ramsay Taplin about starting a blog from scratch. These three bonus interviews are a real icing on the cake, trust me. So, what are you even waiting for! Grab the course, and I'll see you inside! Welcome to the lesson #1: "The compound effect of content marketing" As I promised in the introduction video, this lesson is going to set the stage for the entire course and help you better understand why I'm advocating certain tactics and angles over everything else. Here's the agenda for this lesson. We'll start off with what should be your primary goal if you're blogging for business, not as a hobbyist. Then I'm going to break down three main customer acquisition channels and explain how blogging expands them. And finally, I'm going to showcase one very simple, but immensely important realization that keeps people away from rapid blog growth. So here we go. Part 1: The primary goal of blogging for business. In about two years we managed to grow Ahrefs blog from nearly 15,000 visits per month to 150,000 visits per month. Do you think this result is good or bad, considering that it took us nearly two years to achieve? Well, if you ask me, I don't really care about raw traffic numbers that much. Traffic is a vanity metric. We never had a goal of growing traffic to our blog. Our primary goal has always been acquiring new customers and growing our business. What's the point of going viral and bringing hundreds of thousands of visitors to a blog if none of them will buy from you? It may be good for your ego, but not for the bank account. So instead of trying to generate as much blog traffic as we could, we focused our efforts on bringing highly targeted visitors, who would convert into customers and bring money to our business. I know that content marketing teams love to set themselves all sorts of nonsensical KPI's: Number of published articles per week; Number of blog visitors per month; Number of email subscribers per month. Well, if you ask me, these are all bad KPIs. They do make certain sense of course, but they're secondary. Number of orders or sales per month, this is the primary KPI that you should care about in the first place. You should treat your blog as a customer acquisition channel, not a traffic acquisition channel. Unless of course you make  money out of raw traffic. Like selling banner ads for example. In that case more traffic will obviously bring more money. But this course won't teach you how to create a media empire and make money with advertising. I don't have any experience with that, so I'm not qualified to create a course about it. This course is about creating the blog that will drive customers to your business. This is what we have succeeded at with Ahrefs Blog and I'll be happy to share all our tactics and strategies with you. Part 2: Three main customer acquisition channels. Let's take a moment to step back and look at the big picture. How do people discover products and services to buy online? First of all, nothing beats a recommendation from a friend or someone you respect. Great products generate a lot of buzz on social networks and this drives sales like a charm. That's called word of mouth. Then there's search. Whenever you're facing a problem or have any kind of question, the first place you go to is Google. And if there's a product or service that can solve your problem, it is very likely that it will pop up in Google's search results. And finally, advertising is  a very old and proven way to get a product in front  of prospective customers. We see hundreds, if not thousands of ads every single day. Which actually dilutes their ROI quite a bit. But this channel is still  quite effective nevertheless. OK, so do you even need a blog in order to tap into these three main customer acquisition channels? Well, Not really. Let me explain it with a real example. Let's say you own an e-commerce store that sells shoe-laces like lacesout.net. Once someone buys new laces from them, the chances are, this person is going to brag about this to his friends and recommend lacesout.net website. That is, if that customer had a positive experience with that online shop. Pleasing your customers is all you need in order to generate the word of mouth. Now, let's talk about search. If I plug lacesout.net website into Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool, I will see that they rank in organic search results for quite a few keywords, related to their products. They rank at position #3 for the keyword "sneaker laces," at position #7 for the keyword "laces," and at position #5 for "sneaker shoe laces." And a ton of other relevant keywords, of course. In other words, people who search in Google for shoe laces will inevitably discover lacesout.net because it ranks quite well. And these people are the best customers you may hope for, because they express their direct intent when searching in Google for these things. So search as a customer acquisition channel seems to work very well for lacesout.net. And finally, advertising. Looks like Ahrefs doesn't see any ads for lacesout.net in Google's search results. PPC keywords says 0. But there's another great tool called Similarweb,  where you can check for other forms of advertising besides Google pay-per-click. But it looks like lacesout.net is not doing any advertising even according to Similarweb. So they must be quite happy with how the other two customer acquisition channels work. But still they can pour some money into advertising anytime they want. So let's check this customer acquisition channel for them anyways. Now, given that this online store can successfully leverage all three major customer acquisition channel why are they running a blog then? Well, let's take a look at this article from their blog that teaches different lacing styles. According to Ahrefs, this single article ranks in Google for over 600 related search queries. Here are some of them: "how to lace nikes," "how to lace nike shoes," "how to lace air max 90," etc, etc, etc. So people search for these kinds of things in Google, they find this article at Lacesout blog, they enjoy it, they dig deeper into lacesout.net website, and eventually they buy laces from it. This is a nearly perfect example of how content marketing can drive customers to your business from Google. So let's put blog next to "Search" customer acquisition channel. What about the word of mouth? Well, this article teaches you some cool and unique ways to tie your sneakers. Guess what people will do once they learna new way to tie their laces? Post it on social media, of course. There's even a hashtag #shoelaceart on Instagram for that. And once their friends and followers ask them for a tutorial where they learned to tie laces like that, they will give them a link to this article. See where I'm going with this? It's not just the positive experience with your company and your product that can generate the word of mouth. You can also generate a lot  of buzz with your content. So let's put blog next to word of mouth too. And finally, you can spend money to promote the content, that talks about your product instead of promoting the actual product directly. It may sound counterintuitive, but quite often the content that promotes your product will have a much higher conversion rate than a sales page for that product. But we'll talk more about it later in this course. For now, let's just put blog next to advertising. So all-in-all, as you can see, creating a blog can massively expand your reach on all three major customer acquisition channels. This is why the interest in content marketing only keeps growing. Just look at the Google Trends for the keyword "content marketing," it goes up! Part 3: The main reason why most blogs fail. Like I just said, there's a lot of hype around content marketing these days. Every online business wants  to have a successful blog, but the problem is, most companies have absolutely no clue how to run a blog. And this is why it is so common that you stumble upon a company blog that is regularly updated with new articles every single month. But the number of comments and shares on these articles are in single digits at best. Which means that no one is actually reading these articles. Which means that these articles aren't bringing new customers. Which means that all the work invested in these articles is wasted. And I've totally been there. Just a few years ago I had absolutely no clue how to run a successful blog. So I just copied what other successful bloggers were doing and tried to follow their advice. Other bloggers said that I should publish more often in order to get more traffic, so I published every day; They said list posts are the best, so I published list posts; Then everyone started writing expert roundups and I followed; Then they said that posting your content to niche communities was a key to success, so let's do it; Then they said that the actual key to success is to regularly submit your content to Facebook, Twitter, and every other social network there is, no problem; I was doing everything that "guru" bloggers were teaching. And I did indeed see some results. But did I get traction with my blog? No, I didn't. Actually, each individual  tactic worked like a charm. My listicles generated quite  a buzz on social media; My detailed guides got tons of engagement in comments; My guest articles were published at the most popular blogs in my niche. But all of that didn't translate into any traction with the blogs that I was trying to grow at that time. The traffic was plateauing,  the sales weren't coming in. I even purchased a bunch of quite expensive blogging courses, thinking that I was missing something important that bloggers were unwilling to share for free. And these courses were quite good actually, they taught me some new exciting strategies. But they didn't help me to get that traction that I was looking for. I was getting better and better in executing different content marketing tactics, but I couldn't figure out how all these tactics come together into a single strategy that would grow my blog and drive customers to our business. This is how traffic to every article that I published on my blog looked like: Shortly after publishing an article you see the so-called "spike of hope." This spike happens because you send this new article to your email list and share it with your Twitter followers. You may also post this article on Reddit and share it with a bunch of relevant communities on Facebook or Slack. Other than that, you may send a bunch of outreach  emails to famous people in your industry so that they would share your article with their audience. And if your article is truly worthy, the word of mouth will multiply the outcome of all your efforts. So at times that "spike of hope" might get rather big, making you feel happy and accomplished. But then all this traffic quickly fades to nothing as soon as you pull the plug on your content promotion machine. And what you get as a result is the so-called "flatline of nope." By the way, the credit for these funny terms goes to Rand Fishkin. So if you rely on such spikes of hope, here's how the total traffic to your blog will look like: As long as you invest your time and effort into publishing new articles and promoting them in every way you can, your  traffic seems to be growing. This is where the popular "you should publish new content regularly" advice comes from. But as soon as you stop publishing new content, the results that you have achieved so far will start fading almost instantly. But it shouldn't be this way. Because this is not how growth looks like. I can only call this kind  of performance "survival." Here's something very important that I want you to take away from this first lesson: If your content marketing efforts don't add up over time, you're doing it wrong. So here is how this graph should look, if you make your efforts add up. As you can see, the traffic to each newly published article doesn't fade to nothing. Even the opposite, it slowly grows over time, till it reaches a certain point. This way every single article that you publish adds up to the total traffic of your blog. So even if you stop publishing new articles for a while, all your progress won't immediately fade to nothing. It will stay exactly where you left it. Or maybe even grow a bit on it's own. This is called "the compound effect of content marketing." It may sound super-simple, and in fact it is, but somehow I was overlooking that simple principle for quite a few years. And I see way too many  bloggers overlooking it today. This is why I wanted to make sure that you understand this general concept, before we go deep into the actual blogging tactics and strategies. Because all of them will be focused on driving passive consistent traffic to every article that you have on your blog. As opposed to teaching you how to get an immediate spike of traffic to your newly published article, which will soon fade to nothing. So let's go back to the Ahrefs Blog, which I will often use as an example for many tactics and strategies in this course. Two years ago, when I joined the team, they were publishing 2-3 articles per week, and the traffic didn't show any signs of growth. It was basically a flatline  despite all the effort. Today we publish 2-3 new articles per month and our traffic is growing steadily and consistently, as you can tell. But most importantly, our blog is driving thousands of customers to our platform every single month, and the more we grow our blog traffic, the more customers we get from it. But we'll talk more about customer acquisition with content later in this course. For now I just want to stress on the importance of making every article that you publish bring you consistent traffic every single month. Because growth happens when the traffic to your articles doesn't fade over time. Here's an example of such an article from the Ahrefs Blog. This article was published back in 2016, and as you can see from our Google Analytics, there was a "spike of hope" right after publishing, but then the traffic didn't fade to nothing. It was actually growing slowly from month to month. And near the end you can see that we have re-launched this article and generated an even bigger "spike of hope." But relaunching is something, that I'm going to cover later in this course. So the main strategy behind growing Ahrefs blog from 15,000 to 150,000 visitors per month, is in making every single article we publish perform exactly like this one. Passive consistent traffic that doesn't fade over time is the key. Again, it may sound super simple and super obvious, but somehow most people only focus on making their spike of hope bigger and wonder why their traffic isn't growing over time despite all the hard work. So the rest of this course will be focused around a single goal. How to create articles that bring consistent targeted traffic that doesn't fade. And how to convert that traffic into leads and sales. If that sounds good, I'll see you in lesson #2. Welcome to the lesson #2. In this lesson we'll be discussing two major strategies of growing a blog with their pros and cons. I'm going to wrap up the "big picture" that I started painting in lesson #1 and prepare you for the hacks and tactics that will follow. So here's the agenda for this lesson. We're going to start from studying the anatomy of the "spike of hope." Then I'm going to break down two major strategies of growing a blog and the challenges that they bring. Then I'm going to bust the "you should publish more often" myth once and for all. And finally, I'm going to say a just few words about the importance of converting random visitors of your blog into regular readers. So let's go! Part 1. The anatomy of the "spike of hope" According to my observations, most bloggers have an unhealthy obsession about the "spike of hope." It is just too satisfying and rewarding to watch your traffic go up pretty much the same day as you publish your new post. Instant gratification: our brains are too addicted to it. But let's take a closer look at this so-called "spike of hope". Where does this traffic come from? Well, what's the first thing you do after you publish a new article? You share it with your existing audience. You send an email to your email subscribers, you share the link on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and any other social network where you have some followers. In other words, you're asking your existing audience to come to your blog, because you have something new for them. That's the first section in your "spike of hope." And the size of this section is determined by the size of your existing audience. Which means that if you're just starting out, this section would be quite tiny, if any at all. But most importantly, there are no new people in this group. Your email subscribers and social followers have discovered you long ago, so you're not reaching any new people by sending an email to your subscribers or tweet to your followers. This is quite important to understand. OK, the next thing you do to bring more traffic to your newly published article is share it with a bunch of relevant communities, that flourish on different platforms. You post your article to a proper subreddit; You share it with some relevant groups on Facebook; You promote it to some relevant Slack channels; And, finally, you post it to some relevant niche forums or community boards, where your target audience is hanging out. If this is the first time you share your content with a certain group or community, then all the people who will land on your article as a result will be entirely new to your blog. But if you've been consistently sharing your content  with this community for the past few months, most of the people there would know you by now. So this promotion channel is only effective when starting out, but over time the amount of new people that you can reach this way will drastically decrease. And that was the second part of your "spike of hope." So what's the last one? It's the word of mouth. This is the traffic that comes to your article when people from the first two sections share it with their friends and followers. This often happens passively, which means that you don't have to do anything other than publish great content that people will genuinely want to share. But you can also generate word of mouth proactively, by reaching out to people with big audiences and showing them your content in hopes that they will share it with their big audience. Passive word of mouth will usually improve your spike of traffic by like 10-20%, if you're lucky. That's because most of your blog visitors don't have a large enough following, to bring you any good traffic when they share your article. But if you'll manage to persuade a few big influencers to share your content with their huge audiences, that may send a tsunami of traffic your way. So proactive word of mouth can improve your spike of traffic by like 1,000%. But that rarely happens, to be honest. The top people in your field are usually super reluctant to promote others. Especially when your blog is new and they have never heard about you before. OK, so let's wrap up. Turns out that the sweet spike of traffic that you get immediately after publishing and promoting a new article will mostly consist of the people who have visited your blog before. Which makes little sense. Because in order for your blog to grow, you have to be reaching new audiences all the time. And this is where the traffic from Google kicks in. As illustrated on my graph, traffic from Google doesn't come to your article immediately after publishing, it takes quite some time to build up. That is, if you invest in SEO, of course. With a pinch of SEO magic applied, your article will start ranking in Google for some relevant search queries, and this will bring you consistent traffic that will not fade over time. But at this point you may actually argue with me. Traffic from Google takes time to build up, while generating buzz on relevant communities and social media seems like a much faster way to bring people to your blog and grow your traffic numbers. But is that really so? Part 2. Two major strategies of growing a blog So on one hand we have "viral traffic," the one that comes as a result of generating buzz on relevant communities and reaching out to influencers asking for support. And on the other hand we have the "SEO traffic", the one that comes as a result of putting effort into making your content rank high in Google. So which strategy is easier and more effective? First of all, I have to mention that these are actually two extreme cases, which in reality don't exist one without other. I mean there's no way to consistently go viral and not get a single visitor from Google. As well as there's no way to pull massive traffic from Google and not have a single person share your content on Twitter or Facebook. But in order to prove my point, I will discuss them individually. So here are the main challenges associated with each strategy. If you want to grow your blog with viral traffic, you have to be really good at creating content that will resonate with your target audience. It should resonate with them so much that they won't be able to resist the urge to share it with others. That's the challenge #1. But virality doesn't happen out of nowhere. You need to get support from influential people in your industry, who will promote your content to their huge audiences and  kick start the viral effect. Influential people are insanely hard to pitch, so that's the challenge #2. And finally, the goal of your blog is to consistently reach new people, who will become your new customers. So if you rely on viral spikes of traffic, you'll have to regularly produce sticky viral content and regularly get support from industry influencers. Because if you stop publishing,  your traffic will fade. And that's the challenge #3. Now what are the challenges of growing your blog with SEO traffic, that comes from Google? Well, your content still needs to be awesome. It doesn't necessarily need to resonate with people that much, but it has to be insanely useful to them. Which is still a challenge, if you ask me. However, the real challenge is to get backlinks to your piece of content. Because backlinks is one of the key things that push you up in Google search results. And building backlinks is something that most people struggle with. But here's something positive about SEO traffic. You don't have to publish regularly! That's because the traffic from Google doesn't fade over time. Unless of course your competitors put enough work to outrank you. But I'm about teach you how to make sure that it won't happen. So that is my rough comparison of two blog growth strategies. I'm sure you've noticed that I'm favoring SEO traffic over viral traffic. Well, the truth is, I don't have any truly viral articles in my own portfolio. But almost every single post that we publish at Ahrefs blog ranks on the front page of Google for it's target keywords. And still, I do believe that viral traffic can be a worthwhile strategy for growing a blog. But for now, let me dive a bit deeper into "Viral vs. SEO" dilemma and explain where my strong bias towards the latter is coming from. First of all, most newbie bloggers have a wrong understanding of how viral traffic works. Here is the picture that they have in their head: You publish an article and tweet it to your followers. Some of them like it and tweet it to their followers, some of their followers like it and tweet it to their followers. This goes on and on and because of this snowball effect your article goes viral and gets tons of traffic. Right? Wrong! A few years ago guys from Pulsar studied how content goes viral by examining a bunch of real viral campaigns. And these are the visualizations that they have created with the data that they collected: What their study had shown is that content doesn't go viral in a way I just described. There's no such thing as a "snowball effect." Even the opposite, viral content actually spreads in a decay. Let me explain. Content only goes viral if exposed to a super-huge audience. In other words, someone with a huge twitter following has to tweet your article, so that thousands of his followers would retweet it to their followers. These two steps of the viral outburst bring the most traffic and visibility. And from there, there goes a rather quick decay in the amount of retweets and traffic. Back to these visualizations of real viral campaigns. You can clearly see the big hubs that started the chain reaction. But here's the thing. The fact that an influencer has tweeted something, doesn't mean that all his followers will pick it up and retweet it. That is why the top 2 challenges of viral content that I've listed earlier are: Creating super-sticky content that everyone would want to share with others; And pitching the biggest influencers in your space to kick-start the viral effect. Both of these challenges are  incredibly hard to crack. And that is why I am not a fan of chasing viral content. Part 3. Busting the "publish more often" myth That's probably my favorite part of this lesson. What I love the most about SEO traffic, is that you don't have to publish a lot of content, but still can get tons of traffic every single month. If I put our blog URL into Ahrefs Content Explorer tool and pick the last 30 days, it will only show me two articles. But look at our traffic from Google for the past 30 days. It is growing quite consistently. That's because we don't have a nonsense goal  to publish a certain amount of articles every week. Our goal is to create content around very specific keywords, closely related to our business, and make our content rank high in Google for these  keywords so that it would bring us new customers. In fact, you can build your entire business around a single article. I have a great example for you. Take a look at this article from healthline.com titled, "How to lose weight fast." If I put the URL of this article into Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool, I will see that it gets over 300,000 visitors from Google every single month. Let me take just a few seconds to note that the traffic number that you see in Ahrefs is just an estimation. We have a monstrous database of over 400 million keywords, that we use to calculate organic traffic of different websites. But clearly there are many more keywords that people might put into Google. So the organic traffic number that you see in Ahrefs is just an estimation. And the actual Google traffic to a target website or URL would usually be about 2 or 3 times bigger. So please keep that in mind when using Ahrefs for traffic estimates. OK, speaking of the keywords  that Ahrefs is tracking. Based on our records, that article I just showed you ranks for over 9,000 keywords. Let me click that number and see what they are: "how to lose weight," "how to lose weight fast," "lose weight fast," etc. Just think about it. Every month well over 300,000 people find this article while searching for weight loss advice in Google. That's a huge business opportunity right there. Even if you convert half of a percent of all these people into customers, that's over a thousand customers every month, which  is clearly a ton of money. But this example is of course an outlier, because it's quite rare for a single article to get that much traffic from Google. And yet, why force yourself to publish dozens of articles every month, when you can focus your efforts on creating just a few keystone articles, make them rank in Google and get a passive stream of prospective  customers as a result. But there's more! Viral traffic is mostly a gamble. You cannot know upfront if your article will take of or not. You can only guess. And if it does take off, you never know how much traffic this will bring you. But SEO traffic is predictable. In fact, I just showed you how to take any article and estimate it's search traffic potential with the help of Ahrefs. Whatever the topic you're  going to cover on your blog, just put it into Google, grab the URLs of the top-ranking articles, and plug them into Ahrefs, to see how much traffic they get and what keywords they rank for. These traffic estimates will help you make educated data-driven decisions and better prioritize your budget, efforts and resources. And we're about to cover both the planning and the execution in the further lessons of this course. The tactics and strategies that you're about to learn will give you a massive competitive advantage over your rivals. I promise. But there's one last thing left to discuss, before we dive deep into SEO. Part 4. How to convert visitors into subscribers Regardless of the blog growth strategy that you choose to pursue, viral traffic, SEO traffic or a mixture of both, you need to retain people who land on your website. You need to grow your audience! I'm sure you've heard it a thousand times: "You have to grow your email list." "The money is in the list." "Start growing your email list yesterday." Every professional marketer will tell you that you should be growing your email list. Just think about it. If you won't convert a first-time visitor of your blog into an email subscriber, the chances are you will never see them again. This means you won't be able to show them the next article that you publish. You won't be able to pitch them the next product you release. And, as a result, this person won't spread the word about your new content and new products to their friends. In other words, your audience is one of your biggest assets. So the sooner you start building it, the better. There are a lot of tactics and strategies that can help you grow your audience. There are some technical tricks, like popups, slide-ins, welcome mats, Hellobars content upgrades, lead magnets, etc. And there are some psychological tricks, like attractive character, social proof,   personal stories, building rapport, etc. I'm afraid I'm not going to teach you how to build your audience in this very course because it will make it twice longer. But I have recorded a very insightful interview with someone who's exceptionally good at converting visitors into email subscribers and growing a loyal audience. So make sure to check out the bonus materials. You're going to enjoy it, I promise. And that's it for the lesson #2. That was the big picture of growing a blog that I feel it is important to understand before you learn the actual tactics and strategies. Making your "spike of hope" bigger should not be your primary objective. Beating the "flatline of nope" should. And the best way to achieve that is by making your content rank well in Google so that it would bring you consistent targeted  traffic every single month. So that's it! The basic stuff is now over. Starting from the next lesson, I'm going to show you a lot of very specific and actionable strategies that will teach you how to get traffic from Google. We're going to kick off Lesson #3: with an upgrade of your keyword research skills. But don't worry, I'm not going to teach you the same  keyword research tactics that everyone else teaches. I have quite a few very unique insights to share with you, which are based on my experience training writers for our own blog. Sounds good? Then I'll see you in lesson #3. Welcome to the lesson #3. In this lesson I'm going to show you how to analyze the full traffic potential and ranking difficulty of a keyword that you want to target with your article. Here's a quick agenda. I'll show you how to test your article ideas for the so-called "search demand" and how to determine their full traffic potential. The emphasis is on the word "full." Then I'll give you a few simple tips on choosing the best keyword to target. And finally, we're going to talk about analyzing your chances to rank in Google and the keyword difficulty metric that we have in Ahrefs. And just in case you're entirely new to SEO and this is the first time you hear about the practice of keyword research, worry not! I tried to make this lesson very newbie-friendly, even though there will be quite a few rather advanced tricks in it. So let's go! Part 1: How to test your article ideas for "search demand?" Can you guess what is the biggest mistake that newbie bloggers make? They write articles about things that no one is searching for in Google. And actually, newbie bloggers are not the only ones guilty of that mistake. I see a lot of professional bloggers falling into that trap too. Let me explain it with a short story, that happened recently. I get a lot of emails from Ahrefs customers asking me for SEO advice. And one day I got an email from a lady, who was a fantasy fiction writer. She had published a few fantasy fiction books on Amazon, but she wasn't getting any sales. So she started a blog, in order to get some traffic, build an audience of fantasy fiction lovers and sell her own books to them. She was publishing new articles quite regularly for almost a year, but her blog wasn't getting any traffic, her audience wasn't growing and, as a result, she wasn't making any sales of her self-published books. So I opened her blog, to see what kind of articles she was publishing there and these were basically short fantasy fiction stories or chapters from her upcoming books. I mean the titles of her articles looked kind of like this: "My new short story: "Two paladins and one sword." "Chapter #12 from my upcoming book." "The progress on my "Flower of Ice and Fire" book." These titles immediately explained why her blog wasn't getting any traffic and why her audience wasn't growing. As discussed in the first two lessons of this course, Google is the single best way to get a consistent flow of new readers to your blog. But how can you get visitors from Google, when no one is searching for what you're writing about? I mean people don't even know that this lady exists in the first place. How can they be searching for her articles in Google? That said, the main reason she was struggling to get traffic to her blog was lack of search demand for the things that she was writing about. So does this mean that blogging is a bad customer acquisition channel if you're a book author? Of course not! You just have to blog about things that your potential readers are actually searching for in Google, so that they could find your articles and become the regular readers of your blog, and eventually buy from you. Which was my advice to her almost word for word. So what do readers of fantasy fiction books search for in Google? After brainstorming for a few minutes and doing a simple keyword research exercise that I'll show you a bit later, I found a few cool keywords that she could cover on her blog: "books like harry potter," "books like the hobbit," "books  like lord of the rings,"  "authors like terry pratchett." According to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer each of these  keywords has some nice monthly search volume, and "books like harry potter" is the most popular search query among them. People search for it 3,700 times every single month in the US alone, and the global search volume across all countries is 7,000 searches per month. So by targeting these search queries with her blog posts she was almost guaranteed to get a lot of highly-targeted  visitors to her blog. And because these searches clearly indicate that people are looking for book recommendations and therefore willing to buy, she could easily squeeze recommendations of her own books into her articles and make some sales this way. So I hope my point is clear. Writing about things that no one is searching for almost guarantees that your blog will be a failure. You need to write about things that people are actually searching for in Google. And that is why keyword research is such an essential thing to master for any blogger or content marketer out there. Part 2. How to determine the full traffic potential  of a keyword. OK, so we have four cool keywords to target and we know how many times people search for them in Google per month, which is called "search volume." Let's say I decided to write an article targeting the least popular among these four, "authors like terry pratchett." According to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer it only gets 150 searches per month in the US, and the global search volume from all around the world is not much bigger. By the way, the search volume numbers that you see in Ahrefs, and pretty much in any other keyword research tool are estimations. Most keyword tools take their search volume from Google's own Keyword Planner tool, which shows you rounded annual averages. Which is not very precise, as you can tell. Here at Ahrefs we decided to go a step further than most keyword research tools. We paired data from Google Keyword Planner with an additional data source - clickstream. This way we get slightly more accurate search volumes and we can update them more often than most other tools. But at the end of the day, they're still estimations. So back to the lesson. Having monthly search volume estimation on our hands, we can try to calculate how much search traffic we can get if we rank on the front page of Google for that keyword. I'm pretty sure you already know that the #1 ranking result in Google will get approximately 30% of all clicks. Then around 15% of clicks will go to position #2, and around 10% to position #3. And if you rank lower than top 3, you'll get even less clicks, so let's not even bother calculating. These percentages will of course be quite different for each search query, but SEO  professionals just use these simplified averages to make traffic estimations. So what do we have here. With the search volume for "authors like terry pratchett" of 150 searches in the United States, you'll get 45 clicks if you rank #1, 22 clicks if you rank #2, and 15 clicks if you rank #3. These numbers don't seem very exciting, do they? Especially when you consider how much work it would take to write a decent article on that topic. But in reality, you're going to get much more traffic than that. Here in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer we have a handy SERP button. It pulls the top 10 ranking pages for your keyword and shows a lot of useful data for each of them. The column that we're interested in is called Traffic. And it says that the page that ranks #2 for the keyword "authors like terry pratchett" seems to be getting over a 100 visitors from search every single month. This is 5 times more than we have just estimated for that page. That's because this page doesn't rank for "authors like terry pratchett" keyword alone. It also ranks for many other related searches. Which can be seen from the column called "Keywords". It says that this article ranks in Google for 31 keywords. Let's click this number and see what they are. This link brings me to Organic keywords report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool, which lists all the keywords that we see this article rank for in top 100 search results. But I don't need top 100, we just discussed that most traffic goes to top 3. So let's use positions filter to see the keywords where this article ranks in top 3. And except for my original keyword, "authors like terry pratchett", this page ranks for three more similar searches: "authors like terry pratchett" and "douglas adams," "authors  similar to terry pratchett," "books like terry pratchett." A duplicate keyword with quotation marks icon tells me that in addition to regular search listing, this page also ranks in a big featured snippet for each of these keywords. So, as you can tell, different people may use different search queries to look for the exact same thing in Google. And Google is smart enough to understand that these searches are similar and therefore ranks the same page for all of them. We've already discussed this in the previous lesson, where I showed you a weight-loss article, that was ranking in Google for almost 10,000 keywords related to weight loss and pulling over 300,000 visitors per month from search. But that was way above the average. Guess how many keywords an average top-ranking page will rank for? Here at Ahrefs we studied over 3 million Google searches to answer this question. And according to our data, the #1 ranking page will rank for about a thousand related keywords. Which leads us to a following takeaway. Search volume of a single keyword is a bad indicator of the total search traffic potential of the article on that topic. The search volume of the "authors like terry pratchett" keyword in the United States is only 150 searches per month. Which may lead to a conclusion that this keyword is not worth targeting. But according to Ahrefs data, the article that ranks at position #2 for this keyword is generating over a hundred visitors per month from search, because it also ranks for a few more similar keywords. A hundred highly targeted new visitors every month is quite a solid number for most newbie bloggers. And, as I said before, this number in Ahrefs is an underestimation. Which means the actual search traffic to that page can easily be up to 5 times higher. So please don't make content marketing decisions based on the search volume of a single keyword, look at the total search traffic of the top-ranking  pages for that keyword. I wonder if you've noticed another thing here, which is insanely cool. The page that ranks #2 gets 3 times more traffic than the page that ranks #1. How is that even possible? Well, just open both pages and compare them. The top-ranking page is a simple list of book authors, with no extra details about them. But the page that ranks #2 is a public discussion on a forum, where people are sharing their recommendations with some reasoning behind them. Which results in more content for Google to process. In other words, a better, deeper coverage of a topic will often lead to ranking in Google for more related keywords and therefore getting more search traffic in total. But we'll talk more about it later in this course. Part 3. How to find the best keyword to target Here's that simple keyword research exercise that I promised to show you. The one that helped me find these four cool keywords that we were discussing just now: I told you that I found them by putting myself in the shoes of people, who love reading fantasy fiction books. And just guessing what kind of things they might be searching for in Google. But the search queries that I originally brainstormed were actually a bit different: "what are the books similar to harry potter," "fantasy books like the hobbit," "books similar to the lord of the rings," "what authors write in the style of terry pratchett." And according to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, none of them has any decent monthly search volume. But I don't care about the search volume of these queries. We already know that there are hundreds of ways to google for the exact same thing. That's why I always look at the search results for each of these search queries and see how much traffic the top-ranking pages get in total. So by clicking on the SERP dropdown I can see that the page that ranks #1 for "Books similar to the lord of the rings" search query gets almost 500 visits per month. And that is in the US alone. The total search traffic to this page across all counties is almost a thousand visits per month. So clearly this topic has some decent search traffic potential. Even though my original search query had almost no search demand. And if I want to get all this search traffic to my own site, I will have to write an article that would be quite similar to this top-ranking one. So let's see what else we can learn about this #1 ranking page. Did you notice the column called Top keyword? It shows me a search query that is slighly different from my original one, but it has a profoundly bigger search volume. Where does this Top Keyword come from? As you can see, this article ranks for almost 900 different keywords. And the top keyword that we feature here is the one that brings the most traffic to this article. Which makes it safe to assume, that the most popular search query that people use to search for book recommendations similar to "lord of the rings" is exactly this one. And it would also be safe to assume, that if your article will rank high for this top keyword, it will also rank for all other longer tail keywords, that basically mean the same thing. Because this is exactly what we see happening here with this top-ranking article, that ranks for almost a thousand search queries. So if I were to write an article on this topic, I would not target my original search query and title my article something like "10 Awesome Books Similar to The Lord of the Rings" Because it doesn't represent the most popular search query that people put into Google. I would instead target the search query with the biggest search volume, and title my article "10 Awesome Books Like The Lord of the Rings" This is how you find the most commonly used search query for whatever topic you want to write about. So please pause this video and try this little exercise. Step 1: Put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers and think about the things that they might be searching for in Google. Word these search queries in any way that makes sense to you and put them into Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer tool as is. Step 2: Explore the search results for each of your search queries and see how much search traffic they get in total. Step 3: Look at the top keyword, that brings the most search traffic to each of these pages and notice how different it is to your original search query and if it has a vastly bigger search volume. Step 4: Note down the articles with the highest search traffic along with their Top keyword. And that is exactly how I create my lists of content ideas. I have the Top keyword, which describes the topic that needs to be covered, along with its monthly search volume. And I have the URLs of a few top-ranking articles that get the most search traffic for that topic. And the next thing I want to know is how difficult it would be to outrank these articles and get all this traffic to myself. Part #4. How to determine your chances to rank in Google As you can tell, analyzing the search traffic potential of your article idea is a very simple and straightforward process. A much bigger challenge is to determine your chances to outrank the existing articles with your own one and get all this traffic to yourself. The truth be told, no one really knows for sure how exactly Google ranks pages in their search results. Google is using hundreds of different ranking factors, and they are mixing them depending on the search query. A lot of people, who are new to SEO, are often looking for some magic tool, that will give them very specific recommendations on what they need to do in order to rank #1. Or even better... a magic tool that will do it for them. But I'm afraid such a tool doesn't exist. For many years Google was pouring billions of dollars into building the most sophisticated search engine on the planet. So there's no way for some third party tool to crack their algorithms and give you the power to effortlessly get your pages to the top. But what we can do is get clues from pages that already rank at the top of Google. We can analyze them from different angles, compare  them between each other and make assumptions on why certain pages outrank others. And there are only two sources of information for us: It is the page itself, and links to that page from other websites. I'm going to cover the on-page factors later in this course. So for now let's just assume that all the top 10 ranking pages for your desired keyword are equally awesome. And your own page is no exception. The content of your page is 100% relevant to that search query. It helps searchers with whatever they were searching for. It loads fast, it is optimized for mobile. It provides great user experience and it is visually appealing. And I have a perfect example to illustrate such a situation. Take a look at my guide to keyword research that was published at Ahrefs' Blog. This article is clearly relevant to the topic of keyword research, and I doubt that you need more than two seconds to realize that. But if you google for "keyword research," our article only ranks #3. While guides from Moz and Backlinko rank #1 and #2 respectively. If you take a look at their articles, each of them has it's pros and cons. So it's really hard to tell if our own article is better or worse than theirs. Especially it is hard to figure out if you're a machine, and not a human being. So why does Google put us at position #3 and puts Moz at position #1? Well, like I mentioned earlier, they may use a ton of different factors, to identify which page deserves to rank higher. For example, guys from Google have recently admitted that they track how users behave after clicking on a certain search result. How long do people stay on that page? Do they close it immediately after visiting? Do they browse deeper into this website? Or do they go back and refine their search, because they didn't find what they wanted? But think about it for a second... In order for Google to measure how people behave after clicking on your page in the search results, that page should somehow rank in the top 10 search results in the first place. So how do you get in the top 10? Links from other websites is what gets you to the front page of Google. You can think of links as votes. When some website links to your page, they are telling Google that out of all pages on the same topic they like your page best. And the more of these votes your page will get, the more Google will respect it. So, as a general rule, the more websites link to your page, the higher it will rank in Google. Now, back to my example. If you examine these search results in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer tool you'll notice that the article from Moz has vastly more backlinks than our own article. It is much shorter and therefore not as deep as our own guide. But the huge number of links tells Google that it must be somehow better nevertheless. That's why they rank #1. But I'm sure you've noticed that this relationship is not linear. I mean some of these pages have more backlinks than our article, but they don't rank above us. Well, like I said, Google is using hundreds of different factors in their ranking algorithms, and the raw number of linking websites is just one of many. But it's a rather strong factor nevertheless. We did a cool research last year across 2 million random search queries. We wanted to study the correlation of different ranking factors with the position of a page in Google. And out of all ranking factors that we have studied, backlink factors had the strongest correlation with Google ranking. Correlation is not causation, of course. But any SEO professional knows that links are uber-important for SEO . If the search results for your desired keyword have links from hundreds of websites, there's a very slim chance that you'll be able to outrank them, unless you get the same number of links to your own page. Let me show you another cool case. Let's look at the search resuts for a keyword "chocolate lab:" What you can immediately notice is three outlier pages with tons of backlinks, that rank among pages with just a few backlinks. And the next thing you notice is that these three pages aren't perfectly relevant to the search query. I mean the other seven pages are clearly about chocolate labradors, you can see that just by looking at their titles. But these other three are about labrador retriever dog breed in general. How come they rank between perfectly relevant pages? That's because they have too many links to ignore them! And if you were attentive, you might have also noticed that these three pages with a ton of backlinks rank for a ton of keywords and generate a ton of search traffic. We didn't study this at scale yet, but I'm pretty sure that the number of links to a page and it's total search traffic are well connected. That is why I always look at the total number of the linking websites to the pages that I want to replicate on my own blog. Remember my document with content ideas? I always put the number of linking websites next to each URL. My goal is to then cherry-pick the content ideas that get the most search traffic with the least backlinks. So I advice you to pause this video and review the content ideas that you have shortlisted so far. Put the URLs of the articles that you want to replicate into Ahrefs' Site Explorer and note down the number of referring domains in your document. Hopefully they don't have a lot of websites linking to them, so you'll easily get your own article to the top of Google  with just a few backlinks. But that was a very simplified look at the concept of keyword difficulty. If you want to dive deeper, I have published a cool article at Ahrefs blog, titled "How to Gauge Keyword Difficulty and Find the Easiest Keywords to Rank for." Which I highly recommend you to read. And before we wrap up this lesson, there's just one last thing left to discuss. Part #5. How to use Keyword Difficulty metric in Ahrefs I guess you noticed that we have a metric called Keyword Difficulty, or KD in Ahrefs. Remember I was talking about the magic tool that would solve all your ranking problems? Well, a lot of people feel exactly this way when they first see our Keyword Difficulty metric. And then get rather disappointed, when it doesn't live up to their expectations. All because there's nothing magical about this metric. It is simply a proxy to an average number of linking websites among the top 10 search results for your keyword. Remember I told you that links will help you get in top 10, and once you're there, a lot of additional ranking factors will kick in? Well, that is why the hint below the Keyword Difficulty number says: "You'll need backlinks from ~X websites to rank in top 10 for this keyword." See? We don't promise that you'll rank #1. And we put a tilde in front of the number of linking websites so that to let you know that it is an approximation. And my recent example with search results for "chocolate lab" is a great illustration on why you cannot blindly rely on this approximation. Six of the top ranking pages actually have less than 10 backlinks, but KD score says you'll need 38. That's because the other three outliers skew the average to a bigger number. And yet, Keyword Difficulty is insanely useful when you need to narrow down a huge list of keyword ideas to those where you don't need a lot of backlinks to rank. Because reviewing the top 10 search results for a few thousands of keywords will take you ages. And to make a final decision on a keyword, you should always review the top ranking pages. There's no way around it. Please also keep in mind that our Keyword Difficulty score is not linear. Keyword Diffculty 10 means you'll need backlinks from approximately 10 websites in order to rank on the front page of Google. While KD 70 means that you'll need links from 202 websites. And KD 90 means that you'll need links from 756 websites. It's up to you to decide which score is easy and which is difficult. But our customers kept asking us this question, so we had to define four ranges to make it a bit easier for them. So KD below 10 is considered easy, because almost anyone can get links from up to 10 websites. From 10 to 30 we have medium difficulty, because getting up to 36 websites link to you is quite a challenge. Anything above 30 we consider hard, for obvious reasons. And anything above 70 is super-hard because only a few websites are able to generate that many backlinks to their pages. So how many backlinks do you think you can get with your own blog? We have a report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool that may help you to figure this out. Let me plug the URL of Ahrefs' blog and go to a report called Best by links. Here I can see our best performing articles, by the number of websites linking to them. And it looks like our best articles have from a 100 and up to 350 referring domains. Which, according to our Keyword Difficulty scale, means that we can target keywords with Keyword difficulty up to 80. And anything above that would be quite challenging for us. So pause this video and plug your own blog into Ahrefs' Site Explorer to see how many backlinks your best articles have. And by the way, you might be wondering where we get these numbers of backlinks and if you can trust this data. I'm glad you asked, because it is our favourite thing to brag about. Ahrefs' bots have to crawl the entire internet to collect this information. Which is pretty hard to do to be honest. As of today, we crawl 4.1 million pages every minute. And according to a third-party study, Ahrefs bot is the second most active after Google. In other words, you can trust our backlink data. And that wraps up lesson #3. I hope you've learned a lot about analyzing keywords for traffic potential and ranking difficulty, so it's about time I show you four sources of content ideas that will help you fill your content calendar for a full year ahead. Sounds good? Then I'll see you in lesson #4. Welcome to the lesson #4. In this lesson I'm going to solve the common struggle of finding great content ideas for your blog. So that you will never have to worry about it again. So here's the agenda for this lesson: I have four sources of great content ideas for you. These four will be enough to fill your content calendar for a full year ahead, I promise. And then we'll talk about prioritizing your list of content ideas, and decide which of them will have the highest impact on your business. So let's go. Part 1: How to discover great content ideas by studying your niche Regardless of the niche that your business falls into, be it business consulting, health care, insurance, photography or anything else. The chances are a ton of people are talking about it online. There might be forums or different online communities, where your ideal customers are hanging out. There might also be groups on  Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit or Slack. And there might be some sites where people leave their Reviews about relevant products or services. In other words, there's no shortage of places online, where you can go and watch your target audience communicate and speak their mind. Even Reddit alone can supply you with enough content ideas to keep you busy for months. There's a subreddit for almost anything. You're in business of selling knives? No problem, let's search for "knives" on Reddit. And I see two cool subreddits right away: r/knives/ and r/knifeclub/. It took me just a few minutes of browsing these subreddits to find a few great ideas for blog posts: But let's not forget what we learned in lesson #3: We need to make sure that people are actually searching for these topics in Google, estimate the total search traffic potential, see if there's a parent topic that we could target, and finally look at the number of linking websites among the top-ranking pages. So let's put these three topic ideas from Reddit into Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer for a quick research. And immediately one of them seems promising. I see an article at knifeinformer.com titled "The Best Gentleman's Pocket Knife" and it gets almost 400 visits per month in the US while only having one link from one website. And the rest of the search results don't seem very competitive based on how many backlinks they have. How cool is that? It took me just a few minutes to find an awesome article idea, that has quite decent traffic potential and a tiny amount of links. Guess how many content ideas you will find if you browse Reddit for like two hours? And Reddit is just one of the wide variety of places around the web where you can go and study what your target audience is talking about. In fact, amazing content ideas can come from almost any source that is somehow related to your business! This one time I was browsing the book store in the airport, while waiting for my flight. And saw a magazine, which had a title too good to ignore it: "How to setup online business" So I immediately bought it. Not because I was hoping to learn anything new from it, but because this was the magazine that my target audience was reading. And therefore it could help me understand them better. This is how this magazine ended up on my work desk and I was browsing it whenever I wanted to procrastinate for a while. That's how I stumbled upon this article: "Search engines: how to get listed" Seriously? People struggle with that? With over seven years of experience in SEO, I could not understand how someone could not know this. So I pulled Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer tool and entered that headline there. I checked the top-ranking results and I was totally blown away by the amount of search traffic that I saw coming to one of the top-ranking articles. Over 11,000 visits per month from the US alone and 18,000 visits per month globally. And the top keyword of this article is "submit website to search engines." Looks like this is the most popular search query that people are using to search for this topic. And it's search volume is 1,400 searches per month in the US alone. I thought this was a great topic for us to cover at Ahrefs blog, because people who are looking to submit their websites to search engines are actually looking to get traffic from search engines. And that was a perfect opportunity to introduce them to Ahrefs tools. So guess who published a detailed guide on that topic two months ago? And today we already rank at position #8 for the main search query - "submit website to search engines." Which is the bottom of the front page of Google search results. And in just two months from the publish date, this post has already brought us almost a thousand vistors from Google search. Which is quite a decent result for such a short timeframe. So I hope this was a good example to illustrate how studying your niche and getting in the heads of your potential customers helps you to create highly relevant content on your blog and get targeted traffic from Google. And before we move on to the next strategy, I suggest you to pause this video and take action. Search on Reddit & Facebook for relevant communities where your target audience is hanging out. Spend at least 10 minutes browsing each of these communities and look for things that bother people the most and the language they use to describe them; Whenever something strikes you as a great idea for an article on your blog, don't forget what you've leaned in the previous lesson and test this content idea for search traffic potential and ranking difficulty. Try to find at least three cool article ideas, before you move on to the next strategy that I'm about to show you. And just in case you need more guidance in researching your niche and getting into the heads of your pontential customers, we have a great article at Ahrefs blog just about that. Make sure to check it out. Part 2: How to generate keyword ideas using keyword  research tools There are quite a few awesome tools that help you study what people are searching for in Google. Let me cover a few of the most popular keyword research tools and explain how they work. So there's this tool called Answerthepublic which is quite popular among SEOs and content marketers. Probably because of this highly charismatic dude on their homepage. No, I'm just kidding, that's a really neat free tool, seriously. Give it any word or phrase and it will return a list of relevant questions that people put into Google. For example, if I type "cats" into the search bar, it will give me almost 200 questions that contain the word "cats:" "can cats eat dog food," "where cats like to be pet," "which cats sheds the least," etc. You're probably wondering, how does this tool know what people are searching for? Well, the source of their data is very simple - it's Google's Autosuggest feature. If you start typing your question like "can cats," it will immediately show you some popular searches. And it you start typing the next letter, it will give you suggestions based off this letter. That's where this little free tool gets their search queries. As stated on their homepage, they use Autosuggest feature in Google and Bing to give you keyword suggestions. Here's another similar tool that is based on Google Autosuggest feature. It's called Ubersuggest. The difference between the two is that Ubersuggest doesn't focus on questions. And all their keyword suggestions will start from your seed keyword, as you can see here. Everything starts with the word "cats." Both of these tools don't show you the monthly search volume of the search queries they suggest, but you already know where to get it, right? Now, onto the next keyword research tool. Which you probably know already. It's called Google Keyword Planner, and it's a part of AdWords - Google's advertising platform. This tool used to be the single best source for keyword ideas back in the days, but in recent years Google was taking more and more data away from SEO professionals. So today Google Keyword Planner is a great tool for advertisers, that want to pay for traffic from Google, but not so much for SEO professionals, who want to get free traffic from Google. And yet, you can still get great keyword ideas from Google Keyword Planner. If I enter the word "cats," I'll get a few hundred cool keyword ideas, and the tool can even sort them into groups, which is rather handy and useful. The main downside is that you don't see monthly search volume of these keywords. You only see ranges, which are not super helpful. And if you want to see the actual numbers, you'll have to start an advertising campaign and put some money into it. But in any case, Google's own keyword research tool should not be ignored, even though they limit the data that you get for free. And finally, let's look at the keyword research tool that we have in Ahrefs. It's called Keywords Explorer and it runs on a monstrous database of 4.6 billion search queries. We use multiple sources of data to collect a database of this size. But the main one is clickstream. In short, clickstream data comes from a large group of mostly free apps that you install on your computer and give them permission to collect your browsing data, anonymize it and aggregate into a huge clickstream database. From this database digital marketers can then learn what people search for online and which websites they visit. But there's no personal information on any of these people. Clickstream data is literally a rescue to the SEO community as many amazing tools and features can be built on top of it. So back to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. If I enter the same word "cats," I'll get a list of almost a million search queries that contain the word "cats" in them. I guess when you compare this number of keyword suggestions to the number of keyword ideas in Google Keyword Planner you'll see why SEO professionals are so mad at Google, right? But what do you do with a list of almost a million search queries? Well, remember the previous lesson where we talked about Keyword Difficuly? I said it's a great way to narrow down a huge list of keyword ideas to those where you don't need any backlinks to rank. So let's put 0 in KD filter and see what we'll get: "when do cats stop growing," "can cats eat bread," "do male cats have nipples." These search queries could easily be answered with awesome blog articles. If I open the search results for "can cats eat bread" search query I'll see that most of the top-ranking articles get a few hundred monthly  visits from search with almost no backlinks. Which looks like a great opportunity to me. And that was a quick overview of how to use keyword research tools to get a ton of great keyword ideas to target on your blog. Just feed these tools with words and phrases related to your niche and examine the output. And don't forget what we've learned in lesson #3. Always look at the total search traffic potential of the top-ranking pages and how many backlinks they have. And please take action before you move to the next strategy. Go play with the tools that I've just mentioned and see how many awesome article ideas you'll be able to find. Part 3: How to find keywords that your competitors are ranking for "He who wrestles with us, strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper." - Edmund Burke This quote perfectly applies to content marketing and blogging. We can study our competitors, pinpoint their best performing content and beat them at it. But first, you need to know who you're up against. You might already know which websites you're competing with in Google search results. But in case you don't, just put the keywords found in the previous excercise into Google and see who ranks there. Those are your competitors. Let's try that with one of the keywords we've discovered earlier - "can cats eat dog food." When browsing Google search results for that keyword, I see a cool website that catches my attention. The website name is way too awesome to ignore it - lovemeow.com - I love it. So we know that lovemeow.com website ranks well for "can cats eat dog food" search query. Wouldn't it be awesome to know all other search queries that it ranks for? Because we have a tool for that in Ahrefs. Let's put lowemeow.com into Ahrefs' Site Explorer and go to a report called Organic keywords. Here I can see all the search queries that a target website or article ranks for. That is very cool, but not very actionable to be honest. That's why I prefer the report called Top pages. It groups all these keywords that a website is ranking for by the ranking page. So I can easily see which articles bring the most search traffic to this blog. The top-performing article at lovemeow.com blog is titled "Why Does My Cat Stick His Tongue Out". And in brings almost 900 visitors from the United States alone. And the total traffic is 1,200. So how cool is that? Usually when people see this feature for the first time they are totally blown away by the amount of value they can get from it. In just a few seconds you can see all the best performing pages of any competitor. And there's also a column with the number referring domains to each of these pages. So all you need to do from here is cherry-pick the pages that bring them the most traffic while having the least amount of websites linking to them. And once you're done with the first competitor, you can click on Competing domains report and see which other websites are ranking for the same search queries as this competitor. Here's a cool one I see right away: catster.com. Let's browse their top pages. Looks like their articles get vastly more search traffic than what we've seen at lovemeow.com. And some of them have less than 10 referring domains. Which means they should be fairly easy to outrank. And once you're done with catster.com you can click  Competing domains again and dive even deeper into your competitive space. I'm sure you get the idea. So hit pause and take action! Spend some time digging into websites of your competitors and noting their pages best into your spreadsheet. And I have one last source of awesome content ideas left for you. Part 4: How to find low-hanging content ideas from all ower the web I just showed you how to research the content of your competitors and find some golden nuggets that you can easily replicate on your own blog. But you can only do this one competitor at a time. How cool would it be to research the entire niche at once? Let me show you how you can do exactly that. We have a tool called Content Explorer, which is basically a database of 846 million pieces of content, that Ahrefs crawler has collected from all around the web. And I can enter any word into the search bar and find all pieces of content that mention this word in their content, title or both. Let's continue with the word "cats" as our example. I want to find all pages from all around the web that have the word "cats" in their title. Which results in over a million pages. Now, let's see how many of these pages get over a thousand visits per month from Google. We have a filter for that here. And now we're down to slightly over 2,000 pages, that generate over a thousand monthly visits from Google. That's roughly 0.1% of all pages that mention the word "cats" in their title. Which says a lot about how most of the published content performs, right? But how many of these pages generate their search traffic with no backlinks pointing at them? We have a filter for that too. It's called Referring domains. Let's put 0 into it. And now I'm down to 63 pages only. Let's sort them by the amount of search traffic to see the best ones on top. And if I scroll down a bit, I'll see an awesome article:  "The Best Flea Treatment for Cats for 2017." It gets almost 5,000 visits per month from Google while having 0 backlinks! What an amazing opportunity! I can also click the Details button and see which keywords bring search traffic to this article. Looks like it ranks really high for things like "best flea treatment for cats," "best flea medicine for cats," "flea treatment for cats," and such. That's an amazing content opportunity that took me less than a minute to discover. Here are a few more great articles from that list: "How to Calm a Cat in Heat," "Tips for Moving a Cat Long Distance," "Safe Fruits For Your Cat." All of them get decent search traffic with 0 backlinks. And I only tried a single keyword - "cats" - and only focused on articles with 0 backlinks and over 1,000 visitors from search. I can also try some other relevant keywords like "kittens" and loosen my filters a bit, to get content ideas with a bit less traffic and a few more backlinks. Which will give me vastly more results to explore. So how cool is that? As you can tell, Content Explorer tool is a unique and insanely valuable tool, because it allows you to filter through almost the entire Internet of content. And find what brings the most search traffic with the least amount of backlinks. When I shared this trick with our Facebook community, people were totally blown away and immediately used it to find great content ideas for their sites. So hit pause and try this yourself. I'm sure you will find something cool for your own blog too. And one last thing I have to mention is your website's Domain Rating. Which represents the strength of the overall backlink profile of your website. As a general rule, it can be challenging to outrank websites that have high Domain Rating. For example, here you can see an article from Huffington Post that is titled "The Top 100 Most Adorable and Cute Cat Names" It has 0 referring domains, but the Domain Rating of huffingtonpost.com is 80. Which is very high. So if the Domain Rating of your own website is much smaller than that, like 60 or below, It is unlikely that your article will outrank huffingtonpost.com I mean if both articles have 0 backlinks, it is obvious that Google will pick the one, that was published on a stronger website. But if you build a bunch of quality backlinks to your own article, you do have a chance to outrank even high-DR domains. Please also note that the numbers that you see in Content Explorer are cached. I mean there's a small discrepancy in backlink and traffic numbers for the same article in Site Explorer and Content Explorer. But that discrepancy shouldn't be too big, as we update all numbers quite regularly. And this wraps up the four strategies that will supply you with an almost never ending source of great content ideas. And now it's time to prioritize these ideas in your content calendar. Part 5. How to prioritize  your list of content ideas If you were taking action while watching this lesson, I'm sure your spreadsheet of content ideas is full of golden nuggets. Which should feel quite satisfying already. But how do you decide which of them you should tackle first? Well, in the early lessons of this course I promised that we're going to focus on the business value of blogging. What's the point of investing your time and resources to bring people to your website, if these people won't buy from you? So we need to add one more column to our spreadsheet and name it Business value. To fill a cell in this column you'll need to ask yourself: "What are the chances that a person, looking for that thing in Google and reading my article on that topic would become my customer?" I usually give my content ideas a score from 0 to 3, where 3 means that my product or service is an absolutely irreplaceable solution for a target search query, which leads to an easy sell; 2 means that my business will help people with what they are searching for, but it's not essential in solving their search query; 1 means that my business can only be mentioned in passing, because the search query is only slightly related to what I sell. And 0 means that there's not even a chance to squeeze a single mention of my business into the article. Early in this course I told you that with Ahrefs blog we never had a goal to grow monthly amount of traffic. We wanted to make our blog a customer aquisition channel and grow the monthly number of leads that it generates. That's why we often had to ignore topics with huge traffic potential in favor of topics with huge business potential. Let me explain that with a very vivid example. Most likely you've heard about HubSpot. They are one of the biggest brands in digital marketing software field. They have 1,800 employees and a huge content marketing team that runs their blog. According to Ahrefs, HubSpot blog gets almost 2M visits per month from Google. Which is an absolutely staggering number. So let's look at their best-perfoming articles using the Top pages report in Ahrefs. And here's their best article, that brings them almost 80,000 visitors per month in the US alone and accounts for 8% of their entire blog traffic:. "How to Make an Animated GIF in Photoshop." Yeah, it's not a mistake. Their best performing article is a tutorial on making a gif image. Does this article grow their business? Well, the product that HubSpot sells can be described as a "marketing CRM". And if you ask me, the road of someone looking for tutorial on making a GIF image to becoming a paid user of a "marketing  CRM" is kind of a maze. I mean, people who are searching Google for "how to make a gif" are clearly not their dream customers. So this content idea would get a business potential score of 0 from me. Now, let's examine our own blog and see if we practice what we preach. Here are the articles that bring the most search traffic to Ahrefs blog: "keyword research," "top google searches," "website traffic," "seo tips," "seo audit," etc. Obviously, these articles are nowhere near "how to make a GIF" guide in terms of traffic numbers. But they convert readers into customers of Ahrefs very well. Here's a tweet from last week to prove it. This guy took Ahrefs free trial after reading our guide to long tail keywords. And a few weeks later he tweeted that he became our paid customer. This is exactly what we're looking to achieve with almost every article that we publish on our blog. And it is utterly important to keep this in mind at all times. Search volume doesn't equal business opportunity. The searchers' intent behind your search query does. That is why marketers are so obsessed with keywords that have the word "buy" (or it's synonims) in them: "best place to buy dslr camera," "hire a  business coach," "rent an apartment in london." These searches clearly indicate that the person behind them is one step away from pulling money from their wallet. But in all honesty, you should not ignore their generic versions with much higher search volume just because the search traffic coming from them would be harder to convert into customers: Especially if you have some experience writing good sales copy and persuading people to buy what you sell. A person searching for "business coach" might not be ready to hire one right away, but it is your article that could persuade them to do so. So if the more specific search query with a clear buying intent gets a business value of 3, the generic one would still get 2 from me. All you need to do is just stay reasonable with your business value scores and don't fall for writing guides on how to create a GIF image, unless of course you sell some kind of software for creating gifs. And that's the end of the lesson #4. Now, you should have a perfect understanding of where to get almost unlimited content ideas and how to vet them for search traffic potential, ranking difficulty, and business value. And in the next lesson I'll show you how to make sure that your article is properly optimized for the search query that you're targeting. Sounds good? Then I'll see you in lesson #5. Welcome to the lesson #5. How to optimize your article for a target keyword and generate maximum search traffic with it. Here's what we're about to cover: The all-important "searcher intent" and how to match it with your article; How to optimize your article for a given keyword so that to make it perfectly-relevant in the eyes of Google; How to squeeze maximum search  trafficout of your article; And, finally, how to audit your existing content and get the most out of it. So let's go! Part 1. What is "searcher intent" and how to match it. In Lesson #3 I said that the Biggest mistake that keeps bloggers away from getting search traffic is writing articles about things that no one is searching for. Well, as soon as newbie bloggers learn about the keyword research and how to identify the total search traffic potential of a certain topic which we have covered in Lesson #3, they start making their Second biggest mistake: targeting the wrong keyword. How is that even possible, you may ask? Well... let me share a quick story with you. Once upon a time we received a guest- post pitch from one of our customers. He wanted to write a post on how to use Ahrefs for advertising research. We have this Paid search section in Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool, which shows you the keywords that a target website is advertising for via Google AdWords. Along with their ads and landing pages, where they send this paid traffic. And this is what he was offering to cover in his guest article, along with some nice examples. I thought it would be nice to have a post on Ahrefs Blog featuring this functionality, so I forwarded this email to my team and asked to do a quick keyword research & find a good keyword that we could possibly target with that guest article. And they got back to me with a keyword "advertising  research," which has the monthly search volume of 450 searches per month in the US and around a 100 visits from search to some of the top-ranking results. So that's a green light, right? Wrong! By looking at the top 10 ranking pages for this keyword I can see that they talk about advertising research in general. While the guest article that we were suggested was going to talk about researching the AdWords Pay-per-Click strategies of your competitors. Which is a very specific and narrow topic. I mean, people who are searching in Google for "advertising research" are not neccessarily interested in Pay-per-Click advertising specifically. Otherwise, they would Google for "pay- per-click advertising research", right? So we would make a big mistake if we try to target the keyword "advertising research" with an article about Pay-per-Click advertising research. That article would not meet the so-called searcher intent, which Google can easily  figure out by looking at how users behave after clicking on your article in the search results. They would simply bounce if they won't see what they were looking for. So which search query would be the right one for that article? I brainstormed a few relevant searches, tested my assumptions in Keywords Explorer, and got these: "adwords competitor analysis," "pay-per-click competitor analysis," "pay-per-click competitor." Sure, the search volume on all three of them is not particularly exciting, but at least they are perfectly relevant to the suggested guest post. And the top-ranking pages for these keywords do get a little bit of traffic from search, according to Ahrefs. Which I am reminding you is always an underestimation. Unfortunately, we didn't end up publishing that article, so I can't show you the results. But at least I have a cool story that illustrates the importance of targeting the right searcher intent. Way too often newbie bloggers would try to optimize their article for the keyword with the highest search volume, ignoring the fact that their article doesn't really match the intent of the people who are searching for that keyword. And while they think they're making a smart decision, they're actually shooting themselves in the foot, because Google is pretty smart at figuring out what people want when they search for something. And if your page doesn't give them that, it won't rank at the top. So, if you have a great article idea, but there's not much search demand for that topic, don't try to trick Google and optimize it for something it is not - a broad topic with high search demand. You should pick the most relevant search query, even if the search volume seems low. At least this way you get a good chance of actually ranking for that keyword and getting some highly-relevant search traffic. Here's a small exercise, that will help you to re- confirm that you're targeting the right keyword. Take the draft of your article and send it to a few friends or co-workers, asking them what it is about. The words that they will use to describe your article will help you understand what kind of search queries it deserves to rank for in Google. But what if you don't have an article yet? What if you just discovered a cool keyword and you want to write an article on that topic and make sure it would perfectly match the searcher intent? In this case, the best thing you could do is put yourself in the shoes of people, who would search for that keyword in Google and ask yourself a few simple questions: What are people looking for when they search for that keyword? What goal do they have in mind? What is their motivation? What kind of search result would perfectly satisfy them? In other words, think of the "searcher intent" behind that keyword. For many keywords it is plain obvious. Like "how to tie a tie" - clearly, people need an instruction on how to do that. Preferably visual, because it's almost impossible to explain that with words. But sometimes the searcher intent can be quite ambiguous. Like the keyword "violas" - it can be a music instrument or a flower. And if you're unsure about the right searcher intent for some query, the best thing you can do is put it into Google and see what comes up. Google has invested years of work and billions of dollars into figuring out what people mean when they type something into the search bar. And they are actually quite good at it. For "how to tie a tie" they suggest a short video clip, because their data and use behavior signals showed that this is what the vast majority of searchers want. And for "violas" Google gives a mix of search results: some about the musical instrument and some about the flower. This means that the searcher intent for that keyword is actually two-fold. And there's nothing you could do about it. So that is "searcher intent" in a nutshell. It really boils down to putting yourself in the shoes of searchers and using logic to understand what would satisfy them. Make sure you always check the search results for the keyword that you decide to target. If the pages that rank there are entirely different from what you were going to say, you probably misunderstood the searcher intent behind that keyword. And once you choose the right keyword for your article, here's how you optimize for it. Part 2. How to optimize your article for a given keyword So you have a great keyword in mind, and you're absolutely sure that you're going to match the searcher intent with the article that you're about to write. How do you optimize your article for that keyword? Well, You don't! I mean, if your article perfectly matches the searcher intent for that keyword and gives people exactly what they're looking for, that is nearly 80% of all optimization work. Yes, Google is just a machine and it is not smart enough to actually read your article like a human being and understand why it is better than thousands of other articles on the same topic. But Google isn't dumb either. Squeezing your target keyword into your article more frequently than your competitors was a good way to trick Google 10 years ago, but not so much today. Let's examine the search results for the keyword "how to learn seo." Our article ranks at position #5, if we count the featured snippet and the "people also ask" box. How many times do you think we use the phrase "how to learn seo" in that article? Once! Only in the headline. So maybe that's why we don't rank #1 for "how to learn seo" search query? Maybe the competing pages use this keyword more frequently in their content? Let's see... And no! Both articles that rank above us have 0 mentions of that keyword, so why do they rank so high then? That's because Google has enough technology and enough ranking signals to be able to find the most relevant page for a certain search query without relying on how many times that keyword was used on a page. In fact, we have studied the top 10 ranking pages for 2 Million random search queries. And what we discovered was quite fun. 75% of all pages that ranked in Google top 10 don't have even a single mention of the search query that they rank for anywhere on the page. Back to our example with "how to learn seo" search query. Google is smart enough to understand that phrases like "seo learning center" or "online resources for learning seo" are perfectly relevant to what the user is searching for, even though they don't match the search query word for word. This is why I suggested that by nailing the searcher intent with your content you automatically do 80% of all optimization work. Your article is likely to have enough synonyms and relevant words and phrases for Google to be able to understand what it is about. So does that mean you should ignore any kind of keyword optimization and write as you please? Not really. The rule of thumb is to use your target keyword, or at least the most important words of your keyword, in the following places: URL, title, headline, and contеnt. Let's go back to the search results for "how to learn seo." The main words of this keyword are obviously "learn" and "seo". All of the top 10 ranking pages have the word "seo" in their URLs and titles. As for the word "learn", some of the pages have it in their URLs and titles, and others get away with the synonyms and closely related  words like "resources," "tutorial," "training," "teach." So, as you can tell, Google allows you quite some flexibility in keyword targeting. That is why, by simply matching the searcher intent with the content of your article, you're already making it 80% relevant to that search query. Because you are already using all the right words. I'd say that further refining your URL, title, headline and content will probably move the needle by another 10%. This percentage is quite arbitrary, there's 0 science behind it, but you get the idea. And I'm sure you want to learn about the final 10%. There's a great article by Cyrus Shepard, where he explains rather advanced things, TF-IDF (which stands for Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency); Semantic distance & Term Relationships; Co-occurrence and Phrase-Based Indexing; Entity Salience, etc. There's also a great article by Dr. Pete, that shines a bit of light on how Google reads and understands your search queries, in order to find the most relevant search result. Both of these posts are absolutely great reads, and I highly recommend you to check them out if you're serious about SEO. But at the same time, they're just scratching the surface of how Google really works. Their algorithms are much more complicated. So unless you're a professional SEO, I don't recommend you to get carried away with advanced on-page SEO tactics, which are quite technical. The foundation of your success in search is the actual content, not the SEO enhansements that you apply to it. To win in the search results today you need to be an authority and expert on the topics on which you are writing. And if your article is objectively better than what already ranks in Google top 10, you should be there soon. Part 3. How to squeeze maximum search traffic out of your article. What we've just covered is how to optimize your article for a single keyword. But as you already know, it is rare that a page would rank in Google for a single keyword only. I mean, you cannot rank #1 for "how to tie a tie" and not rank anywhere in top 10 for something like "how to tie a tie tutorial." Take any search query and there would be hundreds, sometimes thousands, of other ways to put it. And Google tends to rank pretty much the same pages for all these relevant search queries. And here's the best part. Your page might be ranking poorly for that main keyword. But still get decent search traffic from all these variations. Let's examine the search results for the query  "website traffic," using our Keywords Explorer tool. As you can see, our article at Ahrefs Blog only ranks #5. But it still gets almost 6,000 visits from search according to Ahrefs. All because it ranks for over 600 other relevant keywords. And that's in the US alone. Let's look at the global search traffic data via Site Explorer tool. So the total traffic to this page is almost 9,000 visits per month, where 63% coming from the United States and 10% from the United Kingdom. Pretty decent result, for an article that doesn't rank in top 3 for it's main keyword, right? So let's look at the keywords that are bringing it traffic from Google: "website traffic," "check website traffic," "website stats," 'website traffic estimator," "website popularity," "how to see how much traffic a website gets." That's a pretty wide rage of search queries that it ranks for. I mean, things like "website popularity" and "website traffic estimator" are not so closely related. But Google decided that our article is worth ranking for both of them. Oh, and should I say that our article doesn't mention any of these two search queries? That's because we are practicing what we preach and focus on creating great in-depth authority content, rather than filling it with hundreds of keywords. But who doesn't want more traffic, right? So here's how we are going to optimize this article for maximum search traffic: #1. We need to study the keywords that we already rank for and make sure that we mention them in our article. Like I just showed you, our article ranks for search queries like "website populariy" and "website traffic estimator" that are not even present anywhere in our article. But don't get me wrong, we're not going to stuff our article with every keyword variation that we want to rank for. We're going to think of a natural way to rewrite our article, mentioning these things. We mostly looking for keywords that could be turned into a few additional paragraphs in our article. And "website popularity" seems like a great topic that we could expand on. Second, we need to study the keywords that competing pages rank for, but our page doesn't. To do that, I'm going to use our amazing Content Gap tool that can be found within Site Explorer. So I'll start with the keywords that two pages above us rank for, but our page doesn't. And here are a few search queries that seem promising: "website traffic report," "track website traffic," "measure website traffic." These things easily deserve a few paragraphs in our article that will add value to anyone reading it. And, finally, #3. We need to study other popular searches, relevant to our main search query. For that purpose we have quite a few reports in Keywords Explorer, under the Keyword ideas section. And you can also use Google Keyword Planner tool, which will suggest quite a few interesting keywords to consider. All in all, the goal here is to study the things that people are searching for, related to your main topic and try to expand your article based on that knowledge. In fact, this is how you should be writing your articles in the first place. Study what people are searching for and create an outline for your article, based on these searches. This will help your future article to rank for all these searches and get maximum search traffic from Google. This is probably the best advice that I can give you, in terms of optimizing your article for Google. Knowing what people search for around a specific topic will help you create an amazingly useful article for these people. And here's where you should start applying everything that you've just learned from  this lesson. Part 4. How perform an SEO audit of your published content. In the previous lessons I showed you how to find amazing content opportunities with huge traffic and business potential. And now you also know how to squeeze the most traffic out of these opportunities. So you must be keen to pick a new topic and write an amazing new article for your blog, right? Well, let me stop you right there. If you're looking for a quick win, the best thing you can do is audit the content that you already have on your blog. And here's why. First of all, your published articles may already have some backlinks, which signals to Google that they are cool and deserve to rank. While the new article has to be promoted in order to get some websites to link to it. Secondly, your competitors most likely don't bother updating their content. So if the top-ranking articles for your target keyword seem outdated, you can often outrank them by making your article up-to-date and re-publishing it as if it was brand new. Google will usually reward fresh content with higher rankings. I see this happen quite often. And finally, your past articles might be simply targeting the wrong keyword, and therefore not bringing you any traffic. Figuring out the right searcher intent and re- optimizing your article for the right keyword can do wonders to your search traffic. So here's how you audit your existing content. Go through every published article that you have on your blog and assign it to one of the three following groups. Group #1: "Update" These are the articles, that already bring you some nice traffic from search. I'm pretty sure each and every one of them could be improved somehow, using the tactics, that you've just learned. Even your best-performing articles can be updated and improved. Take a moment to think about it. Most bloggers never bother improving their top- performing articles, and that's a huge mistake. Because the guys who rank below you are most likely working hard to outrank you. Group #2: "Merge" It doesn't make much sense to have multiple articles on the same topic. It's always better to have one great in-depth article other than five mediocre ones. Especially, if those duplicate articles have some backlinks. You can use 301 redirects to point these backlinks  to your main article on that topic and help it rank better. Group #3: "Delete" This group is optional. But here at Ahrefs Blog we have deleted nearly half of our old articles. The primary reason for doing that was that these articles were massively outdated and didn't bring any search traffic at all. So deleting them didn't make any difference to our traffic. However, some people believe that getting rid of your underperforming content makes Google love your website more. I cannot prove or disprove that statement, but if I were in charge of Google, I'd definitely use something along these lines as a ranking signal. And that's pretty much it. I'm sure you have many great articles on your blog that could be further improved. Do it and you'll see a nice traffic boost in the next few weeks. And then you can go ahead and publish some new amazing articles, using all the tactics and strategies that you've learned so far in this course. Speaking of writing amazing articles, that is exactly what we're going to cover in the very next lesson. Sounds good? Then I'll see you there. Welcome to the lesson #6. How to create  great content that promotes itself Here's what we're about to cover: First of all, I will explain why your content has to be great in the first place. Then I'll give you some actionable advice on how to create the kind of content that people will care to read and share with others. And finally, we're going to talk about creating unique content that will help you to stand out. So let's go! Part #1. Why your content has to be great I already gave you a ton of great tips on keyword research and how to discover great topics to write about on your blog. And I'm about to teach you how to promote your content and how to build backlinks to your content, so that it would rank high in Google and bring you passive search traffic every single month. But there's something in-between, which is insanely important for your blog's success. And that is creating great content. I know, I know, you've probably heard this advice a thousand times and your first reaction would be "Tim, please, let's just skip that and move on to the stuff that matters!" But it is the stuff that matters. The quality of your content predetermines the very success of your blog. If your content is awful, all the promotion and link building tactics that I'm about to share with you won't work. As well as the other way around - if your content is top-notch, you'll have to work a lot less promoting it. The word of mouth will do the job for you. So, to Recap: Great content promotes itself. While awful content is awfully hard to promote. Let me give you a few good examples from Ahrefs blog. I'm sure you know Reddit. This is an online community where a lot of very smart people are hanging out. And they are very skeptical most of the time. So if there's something wrong with what you posted there - you can be sure that they will be very vocal about it. And here's the thread, where someone has posted an article from Ahrefs blog. When I saw that it has 20 comments, my first thought was that Redditors were grilling us. But it turned out that they  were actually super-positive. And they didn't just say good things about that specific article that was posted, but about our blog content in general. See yourself: "Can't just be me that finds the blog posts from Ahrefs really good reads?" "Ahrefs always seems to have some great posts out there." "Yeah, I like their posts as well." "I agree - I really like their stuff." So what did we do to get these raving reviews on Reddit? Nothing! We didn't submit our article to Reddit - one of our readers did that. We didn't ask our friends and co-workers to post positive comments - the Reddit community naturally enjoyed our content. As you can probably tell, we got quite a bit of traffic from this Reddit thread. And it all happened with zero intervention from our marketing team. All we had to do is publish a great article on our blog,  and the promotion on Reddit happened naturally. Here's another example. You may know the GrowthHackers community, where some people submit the content they enjoyed and others check it out and upvote it, if they happen to like it. Then the most upvoted articles of the week are being sent via email to all members of the community. And that is hundreds of thousands of people. So here's one of those weekly newsletters, where an article from Ahrefs Blog scored at the #1 position. This case is very similar to the one from Reddit in a sense that we didn't have to do anything to make it happen. It wasn't our employee who submitted this article to GrowthHackers and all the upvotes were 100% natural. I didn't even know that our article was trending at GrowthHackers until I received this email newsletter. Again, zero promotion was done to make it happen. All we did is published a great article that our readers enjoyed and shared with others. But don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating against promoting your content on Reddit, GrowhHackers or any similar communities that exist in your niche. It's called "Publish & Pray" approach and it won't get you very far. I do recommend you to be active everywhere, where your target audience is hanging out. And promote your content to these people, whenever you get a chance. With these two examples I was trying to illustrate how much easier it is to get traction at these communities, when your content is objectively awesome. So instead of spending your time looking for "secret" marketing tactic that will help you to hijack these communities, you should instead put all this time into making your content as awesome as possible! Because this is the single best way to conquer any audience and turn them into your fans. Your goal is to make your content so awesome, that anyone reading it would want to share it with someone else. I love what Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer, tweeted the other day: "When writing a post, I get into a mindset to answer just this 1 question with a Yes: "Would anyone email this article to a friend?" Way too often bloggers think that their content flops because they don't promote it enough, while in reality their content flops because it's awful. In the words of Ryan Holiday: "Promotion is not how things are made great—only how they're heard about." So before you start promoting your new piece of content, please make sure that it deserves to be promoted in the first place. Part #2. How to create content that people will care to read and share with others Most resources that I've examined while preparing for this very course will advice you to "create great content," and call it a day. I mean, what does it mean "to create great content?" Ain't the content you create great already? And how do you know if it's not? Well, I don't consider myself to be a content marketing superstar, but in the last few years I managed to make Ahrefs Blog one of the best ones in the SEO space. And I think, along the way, I figured a few ingredients that will make your content great: Here they are: Quality, Uniqueness, and Authority. Let me expand on each of them one by one. Quality. In all honesty, there's no shortage of advice on how to improve the quality of your content. So I'll just do a brief recap of the things that I'm sure you're already well familiar with. Here they are: #1. Learn to write well. Writing is a skill that almost anyone can learn and master. Think of playing a guitar. When you first try it, you surely can produce some sounds, but it can hardly be called music. But then you learn some chords, how to pick strings and so on. And after some time your friends are asking you to take the guitar and play them something. Same with writing, at first it will be very clumsy and tough to read, but after some learning and practice people will start enjoying your articles. Luckily, there's no shortage of advice on the topic of "how to improve your writing." Just start learning and practicing as soon as possible. Now, the next thing you do to ramp up the quality of your content is... Improve how it looks. It is a well studied fact that most people will skim through the article before reading it, which will help them to evaluate if it is worth reading at all. And if your article doesn't look good, people are unlikely to risk their time reading it. Here are the things that make your content visually appealing. The design of your blog, quality images, short paragraphs, subheadings, quotes, lists, and all sorts of formatting tricks. All these things make your article pleasing to a human eye and transmit a message to your blog visitors that the author of the article invested quite some time to ensure pleasant reading experience. But let's move on. The last but not the least. You need to craft an eye-catchy headline. Headline is the only bit of your entire article that people will see on Twitter, Facebook, Google and on the homepage of your blog. Which means you only have about a dozen words to persuade people that your article is worth their attention. Writing headlines that lure people into your article is both art and science. There are many ready-made headline templates that you can try using, as well as many psychological tricks that will educate you to create your own attention-grabbing headlines. I won't teach you any of that, because I'm not a professional copywriter. But there's one piece of advice that I can give you. Make sure to brainstorm at least five different headlines for every article you write. If you won't invest the time and effort into coming up with just five headline variations to choose from, your entire article is almost guaranteed to flop, no matter how good it is. In the words of Andrew Chen, from Uber "Titles are often written as a vague pre-thought, but in fact, it's the most important creative decision you'll make." And this wraps up my brief recap of ramping up the quality of your content. But in all honesty, all these things are just a proxy to the actual idea behind your article. Which brings us to the second ingredient of great content: Uniqueness. I see a rather upsetting trend in the blogging and content marketing space. When they go after some keyword, many people research everything that has already been published on that topic and then try to squeeze it all into a single article of theirs. But this way you're only creating a clone of existing content and not adding any extra value. And if it's a clone, it doesn't deserve more attention than the original. So with this approach you're immediately putting yourself one step behind your competition. If you want to stand out with your content - it has to be unique. So how to create unique content? Well, you still have to research everything that has already been published on the topic. But then you don't create a clone. You create something that would be different from what's already there. Ideally you want to say something that hasn't been said before. Which is rather hard to do, as it requires you to be at the very forefront of your industry. These people are called thought leaders. And most likely you're not one of them just yet. So another option is to find a new angle, which would be somewhat different from the conventional opinion on that topic. Ideally you'd want to turn 180 degrees and challenge the status quo - this often generates a lot of buzz. But only if you have good arguments to make your point. And finally, if the above is not an option, you might simply try to explain that topic better. You might not be the thought leader of your industry, but you might be a great writer, teacher, and storyteller. If you invest enough time into finding better arguments, better proof and better examples, you do have a chance to outperform the original piece on that subject. And now, here goes the last ingredient of great content: Authority. Like I just mentioned, in order to say something entirely new and unique, you have to be at the very forefront of your industry. You have to be an authority in your niche. Let's say I do a few weeks of research and write a cool article on the topic of colonization of Mars. Would you read my article on that topic? Or would you prefer to learn about the colonization of Mars from someone with more authority in that subject? Like Elon Musk, for example. If you go to YouTube and search for his talks on that subject you'll see that they get millions of views. That's because Elon Musk is probably the most qualified person in the world to talk about the colonization of Mars. So you know he can teach you a lot of things that you won't be able to find elsewhere. Hence the crazy amount of views. And that is a nice illustration of the impact that authority and credibility have on the content that you create. But what if you're not the Elon Musk of your industry? Does that mean you're doomed to oblivion? Not at all! There's a simple trick to "hacking" authority that writers have been using for ages. Take a look at this article at Wait But Why, that explains the colonization of Mars start to finish. It is super long, so you'll need a rather compelling reason to spend your time on it, right? Well, how about that: this article was co-written by Elon Musk. I bet now you're thinking that every paragraph of this post is totally worth your time, right? That's how you "hack" authority. If you're not the best person to talk about a certain subject, find that best person and interview them. Obviously, it is almost impossible to get a hold of a person like Elon Musk and interview them for your article. But I'm sure that whatever industry you're in, there are many high-profile people who are easily accessible. Think about journalists. This is one of the core duties of their profession - to find credible sources and use them in their writing. If you want to create great content, you need to be a journalist. Here's an example of our own article at Ahrefs blog, where we tried to answer a question "how to become a marketing manager". We could easily crank up an article on that topic in a few hours and call it a day. But instead, we took time to reach out to 10 high-profile marketers and used their advice to create a great resource on that topic. As you can see, we featured all 10 of them early in our article, so that to show our readers that there are quite a few very smart people behind what they're about to read. Part 3. How to create unique content that will stand out As you can tell by now, I'm a big advocate of creating 100% unique content as opposed to re-writing what has already been published. If you will write about things that cannot be found elsewhere, your blog is almost guaranteed to be a success. But where do you find these unique things to blog about? I really like what Rohin Dhar, the CEO and Founder of Priceonomics, said in his Content Marketing Handbook: "Authentic information that your company has access to is the currency of truly valuable content marketing. Sure, there may be more "shareable" content out there - cute animal pictures, snarky commentary, celebrity gossip, and the like - but that stuff won't get you customers. Information, on the other hand, will. It can be data that your company produces, insights you have because of your industry experience, or stories about the people you have access to." Let's focus on that last sentence. You can craft unique content from: The data that your company produces; Insights you have because of your industry experience; And stories of the people you have access to. I do admit that it's easy for me to be an advocate of these things, since I work at Ahrefs. We have tons of data that we can study. We have tons of unique insights that we can share; And we have access to the best minds of the SEO industry. But what if you're a newbie blogger and you don't have these kinds of luxuries? Well, actually you do! Anyone can collect some unique data about their industry. Anyone can come up with unique insights related to their industry. Anyone can connect with industry experts and get a bit of help from them. I know this, because not too long ago I've been a newbie blogger myself. Take a look at this article, that I wrote for my personal blog back then. I wanted to write a post about guest blogging, but there were a ton of articles on that topic already, published by well-known people with a ton of authority and a big audience. My only option to stand out: among them was to do something entirely unique. Which no one else did before me. Well, remember my advice earlier in this lesson? I decided to turn 180 degrees and challenge what all existing guides were saying about guest blogging. I wrote some guest articles before and I didn't see any of the outcomes that all these guides were promising I would get. So I could easily write a cool article based on my own experience in guest blogging. But why would people listen to some random blogger with zero credibility, right? As we've just discussed, people want to learn from authorities. So I followed another advice from this lesson. I acted like a journalist and reached out to over 500 bloggers, big and small, and asked them to share some data with me on how their guest articles performed and if they were happy with the results. This whole venture resulted in one of my best articles to date. And even though it was published on my personal blog, which hardly has any traffic, that article generated quite a buzz and got over a hundred links from 60 different websites. And it generated a total of  10,000 visits to my blog. And keeps generating a bit of passive traffic even years later. Would I be able to get this kind of result by writing an article with the same tips that can be found in other articles about guest blogging? Of course not! My article only performed so well, because it was 100% unique. So I hope that my story will discourage you from creating new clones of existing content and encourage you to bring something entirely new to this world. Let's be honest. The vast majority of people are too lazy to do these kinds of things. But that is actually a good thing! The more steps you take towards making your content awesome and unique, the less competition you're going to encounter. And that wraps up the lesson on creating awesome content. And in the next one we're going to start talking about link building and the kind of content that attracts links. Sounds good? Then I'll see you in the next lesson. Welcome to the lesson #7. How to create link-worthy content (and stop worrying about link building). Here's what we're about to cover. Do you always need backlinks to rank? How to create content that attracts backlinks. And finally, the rarely-mentioned "secret" to acquiring backlinks. So let's go! Part #1. Do you always need backlinks to rank? This is a tricky question to answer. So let's just start off with a few facts. Fact #1: Google's Andrey Lipattsev has revealed that backlinks are one of  Google's top 3 ranking signals; Fact #2: The majority of SEO professionals agree that it's not possible to rank in Google without any backlinks. And Fact #3: There were quite a few SEO research studies that showed a rather notable correlation between the number of backlinks pointing to a page and the position of that page in Google search results. A while ago we even performed our own correlation study here at Ahrefs. We analyzed the search results for nearly 2 million random search queries and discovered that backlink factors correlate with Google position a lot better than any other factor. Even the usage of an exact match keyword in title, headline or even actual content of that page had a weaker correlation. So, it seems that everything is in favor of backlinks, right? Well, in that case, why did ⅓ of SEOs in my poll voted that you can rank in Google without any backlinks? That's because the question itself is tricky. Can you rank in Google without backlinks? This is not a "Yes or No" question. The only correct answer here is "it depends." So let me explain what caused such contrasting opinions with a nice example. I'm a big fan of a video game called Fallout, and I also have a unhealthy habit to research anything and everything in Ahrefs. So when I discovered that there was a Wikipedia for everything Fallout, I naturally dropped it into Ahrefs to see what was going on there. Turns out this website is generating over 20 million visits from Google every single month! Which is quite an impressive number. So the next two things that I wanted to find out were: how many pages are responsible for this huge search traffic? And how many backlinks do they have in total? I can see the number of linking websites right on the Overview report of Site Explorer tool. It says 7,500. And in order to see the number of pages that are bringing them traffic from search I need the Top Pages report, which can be found under Organic search section. It defaults to US, so I switch to All countries and get over 65,000 pages that are generating search traffic to this website. So what do we have here? Over 65,000 pages with search traffic; And only 7,500 linking websites. Do you see where I'm going with this? By looking at these two numbers you realize that there's absolutely no way that every page with search traffic has backlinks, right? Let's see if that is the case. I'm going to search for pages about Fallout bobblehead figures (because I actually have a few of them on my work desk). As you can see from the RDs column, many of these pages have 0 websites linking to them, and yet they get thousands of visitors per month from search. So did we just get a proof that you can get search traffic without backlinks? Well... Yes and no. There are three things in place which allow these pages to get a ton of search traffic without any backlinks pointing at them. First of all, there's simply a lack of competition. The amount of content that can be found in Google on the topic of Fallout bobblehead figures is super small. If I put "fallout 4 intelligence bobblehead" into Google, it will return 1,500 results only. That is nothing! It means that only a few pages on the entire internet mention this thing. Try other topic, like "keyword research" for example, and you'll get 450,000 results. Secondly, the top ranking pages don't have any backlinks pointing at them. Let's put "fallout 4 intelligence bobblehead" into Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer and see how many backlinks the top 10 ranking results have. The "SERP overview" report shows me that 8 of the top 10 ranking pages have 0 backlinks. Which means that a quality relevant page has a good chance at ranking for this keyword even without any backlinks pointing at it. And finally, third point. All top 10 ranking results have high Domain Rating. See that DR column? It stands for Domain Rating and reflects the strength of the overall backlinkprofile of each website. So the top ranking pages don't have any backlinks pointing directly at them. But the websites that they belong to do have a lot of backlinks. And in this particular case, the weakest DR is 68. Which means that these top ranking pages all belong to very strong websites. And if the Domain Rating of your own website is a lot weaker than that, it is very unlikely that you will be able to outrank them. Unless, of course, your page has a few good backlinks pointing directly at it. Like that outlier that I'm sure you've noticed. The Domain Rating of this website is just 59, which is much weaker than 68, especially considering that Ahrefs DR scale is logarithmic. But that page has 9 backlinks coming from 4 different websites, which allows it to rank among the sites with a much higher Domain Rating. And besides, that page is not even perfectly- relevant to our search query. I mean, the search query is asking specifically about the "intelligence bobblehead" while that particular page talks about "bobblehead locations". So how come a page that is not perfectly relevant to the search query ranks so well? Well, that's because it has more backlinks than other pages which sends a signal to Google that this page must be very important. And I think this is a pretty good illustration of how backlinks help you rank in Google and get search traffic. So let's wrap up the whole thing real quick. For your page to rank in Google without backlinks, three requirements should be met: First, there should be a lack of pages on that topic in Google. Second, the top 10 ranking pages for that keyword should have 0 backlinks pointing at them. Third, the Domain Rating of your website should be  higher or at least comparable to the Domain Rating of the top ranking websites. Obviously, I'm oversimplifying things quite a bit, but you get the general idea, right? And in fact, it almost never happens that a popular search query with good business potential would meet all three of these requirements. So in the absolute majority of cases you will need backlinks pointing directly at your page, in order for it to rank high in Google. And in case you decide to target some "unpopular" topic where the top-ranking pages don't have any backlinks pointing at them, you still need a decent Domain Rating. This indicates that your website has accumulated enough of the so-called "link juice" that can be transferred to other pages via internal links. And the natural question that comes up at this point is: How do I grow the Domain Rating or Domain Authority of my website, so that the pages that don't have backlinks would still rank well in Google and generate search traffic? Well, all you need to do is create content that will attract a lot of backlinks so that you could then funnel the "link juice" from these pages to the pages that you struggle to get links to via internal links. In SEO we call this kind of content "linkable content," or "linkbait," or "link-worthy pages," or "linkable assets." All these terms mean more or less the same. And the next section of this lesson is just about that. Part #2. How to create content that attracts backlinks The entire Lesson #6 (the previous one) was devoted to the topic of "great content." I showed you that making your content great is uber-important. Mainly because great content promotes itself, while awful content will always flop, no matter how hard you promote it. Well, great content also tends to attract a lot of backlinks. Great content = linkable content. End of lesson. No, I'm just kidding. Great content doesn't always attract backlinks. There are a few more requirements that need to be met. At its core, Linking is just a form of sharing. But just because a piece of content is "great", this doesn't necessarily mean you will share it with others, right? Let's say you were struggling to tie your tie and found a great video that solved this problem for you. Would you then go ahead and tweet it? I don't think so. Linking to that video is even more unlikely as it requires a lot more effort than a simple tweet. And besides, in order to link to a piece of content, you have to own some kind of web property where you can link from. Which the vast majority of people don't have. This is why link acquisition is a hard nut to crack. If you want your article to attract backlinks, you need to make your readers want to share it with others. Luckily, there has been a ton of research along the lines of how word of mouth works" and what makes people want to share something with their social circles. Generally, the things that people enjoy sharing will fall into one of the four categories: Emotion, Utility, Numbers, and Stories. In the first group we have content that will spark an emotion in you. For example, news will often take us by surprise, make us angry or make us upset. In very rare cases, it may also cheer us up. And once you feel that emotion, you naturally want to share it with others. Humans are social creatures and we tend to pass our emotions on to each other, rather than keeping them inside. The second group is all about utility. If we discover something particularly useful, we'll be inclined to share it with others. This is a way to earn the so-called "social currency." If you provide value to the society by helping them solve their problems, the society will love you back. The third group is all about numbers. Numbers help us make a point and add credibility to what we say. That's why we like to reference research to solidify our argument. And finally, stories. We love them because they're easy to relate to. It's one thing to read some general advice on how to lose weight. But it's a totally different thing to read a real story of how someone has lost weight, and learn from their first-hand experience. So these are the four general types of content that people like to share and some basic psychology behind them. At this point I have to disclose that I don't have a Phd in Psychology and the advice I just gave you is quite basic. But it should be enough to get you thinking in the right direction. And should you decide to go beyond that advice (which I actually suggest you do) there's a great book that I can't recommend enough. Contagious by Jonah Berger - an absolute must-read for any content marketer out there. So that was the theory. Now, how about some practical tips? I just gave you four types of content that should attract backlinks, but how do you know which type will work best in your specific industry? You may decide to test everything and see what sticks. But usually, you don't need to do this. Why? Because chances are your competitors have already done the hard work for you. All you need to do is analyze their content and find out what brought them the most backlinks. Let me show you how it's done using Ahrefs Blog as an example. I'll copy our blog URL and put it into Site Explorer. The report I need is called "Best by links." This report will give me a list of all articles at Ahrefs blog ordered by the number of links that they have. By looking at this report I can see that six of our top 10 most linked articles are research studies. Which means that in our industry people prefer to link to data-driven posts. The most successful among our research studies is the one that gives a numeric answer to an extremely popular SEO question: "How long does it take to rank in Google" This study has links from almost 500 websites. What about the other four of our top 10 most linked articles? These ones fall under "Utility" group: A guide to keyword research, a guide to link building, a guide to outreach, and a collection of actionable SEO tips. These are very detailed and very actionable guides that teach people different aspects of SEO. And because of their utility they brought quite a few links to our blog. This is how you analyze what tends to attract backlinks in your industry by studying your competitors. Just plug their site into Ahrefs Site Explorer, go to Best by links report and look for patterns. Go try it now! I'm sure you'll get a ton of ideas for link- worthy content in less than five minutes. And this wraps up the section on creating link-worthy content. I guess you won't be surprised if I say that we have covered this topic at Ahrefs Blog. The article is called "Deconstructing Linkbait" and I highly recommend you to check it out for some additional insights. But don't let the terminology fool you. Linkbait, linkable assets, link worthy content - these things sound like they generate backlinks out of the thin air. Which is obviously not true. If you want your content to get links, you need to get some eyeballs on it first. Because people cannot link to things that they don't know exist! In other words, even link-worthy articles require a ton of promotion in order to get links. And before I give you a list of the best content promotion strategies, here's one "secret" to acquiring backlinks that  marketers rarely talk about. Part 3. The rarely mentioned "secret" to acquiring backlinks I hope you've noticed that I'm using the quotation marks around the word "secret." That's because it's not really a secret that someone would be purposefully hiding from you. It is rather an "unsexy" topic that marketing experts are unable to pitch to their audience. And you're about to learn why. Let's look at another poll that I did at our Facebook group. I asked what percentage of backlinks our customers were proactively building, as opposed to acquiring them naturally. And over ~30% of responders said that the majority of their backlinks come naturally. But let's define the term "natural backlink." The definitions may vary from person to person, but in my opinion, a backlink can be called "natural" if you didn't make any effort to connect with the linking website or any person associated with it. Let's say you sent someone a personal outreach email with a heads up about your article. You didn't ask for a link directly, but they have linked to your article anyways. According to my definition -  that's not a natural backlink. You made a targeted effort towards acquiring a link from that specific website, so that link is considered manually built. But let's say you tweeted your newly published article, and one of your Twitter followers linked to it from their website. In that case, it is a perfectly natural link. This time you didn't direct your efforts towards that specific person and their specific website. This was a broadcast message to your entire Twitter following. And we have arrived to that link acquisition "secret" that I wanted to share with you. You can aquire tons of natural backlinks by broadcasting your content to a big audience of your fans. Here at Ahrefs we only build around 20% of our backlinks manually. While 80% of the come naturally as a result of broadcasting our content to a large audience of people. We have an email list of nearly 50,000 blog subscribers. We have built-in notifications in our software which is used by tens of thousands of people daily. And we have a decent following on Twitter and Facebook. These three channels alone allow us to reach a rather substantial number of people without spending a single dollar. And then there's also paid reach. For every article that we publish we have a decent advertising budget, that we can use to reach relevant people on different platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn,  Pinterest, Instagram, etc. The more money we pour into our ads, the more people we're going to reach. So with every article that we publish at Ahrefs Blog we can easily reach a relatively large amount of people. And if your article is link-worthy, some of these people will naturally link to it. That is how almost every article that we publish ends up in Google top 10 without any manual link building done by our marketing team. That is the "unsexy" secret to acquiring backlinks. Big audience of fans plus a solid advertising budget. I'm sure now you see why I called it "unsexy." Because most people don't have a big audience of fans or any budget for content promotion. Well, I've been there too back when I was running my personal blog and bootstrapping my own projects. And back in those days my link building was exactly the opposite of what it is today at Ahrefs. I was building 80% of all my backlinks manually, and only about 20% of them came naturally. That was tedious as hell. So if you're only starting out with your blog, I have some bad news for you. Up until you grow a large audience to broadcast your newly published content to, or allocate some money to pour into ads, you'll have to build most of your backlinks manually. The takeaway: start building your audience as soon as possible. The sooner you build a large audience of people who you can easily reach with your newly published content - the sooner you can let go of all of those tedious link building tactics. Speaking of which. The topic of our next lesson is content promotion. Sounds good? Then I'll see you in the next lesson! Welcome to the lesson #8. How to promote your content and make it rank high in Google. Here's what we're going to cover in this lesson. Four common content promotion mistakes. The best content promotion strategies. And how to compete with the "big guys" in Google's search results. So let's go! Part 1. Four common content promotion mistakes Let me ask you a question: what goal do you have in mind when promoting your content? For the vast majority of people the goal of content promotion is to get as much traffic as possible to their newly published article. And they are super happy and satisfied if they manage to beat the traffic record of a previously published one. That sounds like a great goal to pursue, which aligns perfectly with the goal of growing your blog and your business, right? Well... no. If your only goal with content promotion is generate short-term traffic, I suggest you to go back and watch this course again, starting from the very first lesson. Because by focusing on short-term traffic you're focusing on the "Spike of hope", which as we have discussed in those first lessons will eventually fade to nothing anyway, taking you back to where you started. If you want your blog to grow - you need to focus your efforts on building passive consistent traffic. Which you get by pushing your articles to the top of Google search results! And that is pretty hard to do, I must say. Guess how many articles reach the front page of Google in a year after being published? 5.7%!!! And by "reach the front page of Google" I mean ranking for at least a single related keyword, not even the main topic that they're targeting. This percentage comes from a study that we carried out last year. We tracked the performance of 2 million newly published pages and it turned out that only 5.7% of them were seen in Google top 10 for at least a  single keyword within a year from being published. This means that a staggering 94.3% of all newly published pages never reach the front page of Google and never get  any search traffic at all. Can you guess why? That's because most people prefer to rely on the "Publish & Pray" approach and hope that their pages will rank  in Google by themselves. Which obviously never happens. In the previous lesson we have discussed that your website cannot rank in Google without backlinks. Which leads us to the conclusion that the primary goal of content promotion should be to build quality backlinks to your content, so that it will start ranking in Google. And this brings us to the first mistake of content promotion. Mistake #1: Focusing on short-term traffic over backlinks. But wait a minute, didn't I say in the previous lesson that the articles at Ahrefs Blog aquire 80% of their backlinks naturally as a result of generating traffic to them and expecting some of these people to link to us? Which means that "generating traffic" basically equals "acquiring backlinks". So how come I am now saying that you should not focus on traffic? Well, the thing is this equation is only true for big and established blogs and won't really work for those who are just starting out. Let me give you three reasons why. Reason #1: Only a tiny percentage of all your visitors will link to you. From my personal experience, acquiring one natural backlink for every thousand visitors is a pretty good result. So if you want to get just 10 natural links to your article, you should aim for at least 10,000 visitors to that specific article. If that math doesn't scare you - go for it. But for most newbie bloggers 10,000 visitors to a single article is far from achievable. Reason #2: People tend to link to websites that they know and trust. This explains why Wikipedia has a ridiculous amount of backlinks and their articles are super-hard to outrank. Most people would prefer to link to a Wikipedia article over a similar post on a blog that they've never heard of before. No one wants to risk sending their readers to some questionable website, right? That's why brand new blogs struggle to acquire links naturally. And finally, reason #3: Most people don't have a website to link from. It's easy for me to talk about acquiring natural links while Ahrefs blog belongs to the internet marketing niche where almost everyone owns a website. Usually even more than one. But in many other industries that is not the case. Which makes natural link acquisition nearly impossible. So as you can tell, turning traffic into natural backlinks is the kind of luxury that is only  available to well-known established websites and the success largely depends on the type of industry you're in. If you're not in the fortunate position of being a well-known and established website, I'm afraid you'll have to manually build your backlinks, rather than wait for them to come naturally. And I'm about to share quite a few actionable link building strategies with you. But not before we discuss three more mistakes of content promotion. Mistake #2: Giving up content promotion too early. Most bloggers have a so-called "content promotion checklist" that they reference when promoting every new article that they publish. It usually looks like this. Send a newsletter to email subscribers. Post on social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc). Submit to Reddit and any relevant forums and communities; Reach out to everyone, who was mentioned in the article, etc. Some bloggers have more items on their checklist than others. But as soon as that list is completed, they forget about that article and move to a new one. And that is a big mistake! You should not quit promoting your article just because you're out of the items in your content promotion checklist, no matter how big that list is. Your goal is to rank high in Google and get passive search traffic to your article, remember? So your content promotion should not stop until you reach that goal. There's a rather famous piece of advice, which suggests that you should put 20% of your efforts into creating content and 80% of your efforts into promoting it. These numbers are meant to illustrate that content promotion is uber-important. And while I totally dig what the author of that advice was trying to say, I actually think that it is a very misleading analogy. So I invented my own rule. It's called the 110/110 rule. And it means that you should  go an extra mile in both: creating an absolutely outstanding piece of content that your readers will love; and promoting it super-hard and not quitting until it reaches the top positions in Google. So why don't you do a bit of research and throw a few more items into your content promotion checklist? Luckily, there's no shortage of different tactics that you can use, just Google around a bit and you'll find a ton of ideas. Let me add just a few more  items for you to consider. Submit your article to relevant  groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.; Mention it in relevant conversations on public Slack channels; Repurpose your content into different formats (video, audio, slides, images) and syndicate it to proper websites with a link to the original; Reach out to everyone who has linked linked to articles on the same topic; Reach out to everyone who has published  articles mentioning that topic; Publish a guest post that references that article and make people want to check it out. And here's something very important. Most of these strategies can only be used once, but some of them can be scaled almost indefinitely. Like guest posting. What stops you from publishing more and more guest posts that each link to your article, thus helping it to crawl up the Google rankings? Same with outreach, it scales rather well and it's a great way to get quality backlinks. We're going to cover both of these strategies later. And now, mistake #3: Abandoning your old content Imagine the following situation. A year ago you have published a great article. You promoted it a lot and got some nice backlinks that helped it to rank in Google top 5 for it's main keyword. Ranking in top 5 is a very good result, so you decided that your job here is done and moved on to creating new content, never bothering to revisit that article again. That doesn't sound like a bad scenario, right? Well, first of all, why would you settle with any Google position but the very first one? I mean, if that article brings customers to your business, you want it to get as much relevant search traffic as possible, right? And besides, if the search query that you're targeting has some good business value, you can be sure that sooner or later your competitors will try to outrank you with their own articles. In other words, abandoning your content is a no-no. But what are your options? You cannot just keep promoting the same article with the same content promotion strategies, because you're only going to irritate people this way. Well, there's a loophole that you can use. After your article has been live for a few months, you should re-visit it and find ways to make it better. And once you update your article - you can re-promote it again with the same content promotion strategies as if it was brand new. Here at Ahrefs we only spend half of our time and efforts on creating new content. The other half goes into updating old content. Here's why we do that. First of all, if the article gets traffic from Google we want to make sure that our visitors are getting the most up-to-date information on that topic. Letting our articles age results in a bad user experience. Secondly, the mere act of updating your article with fresh information sends a positive signal to Google and often leads to better rankings on its own. And finally, in most cases our updates are quite substantial. We often re-write the entire article from the scratch which then It allows us to promote it to our audience again as if it was brand new. In fact, when we email our blog subscribers with a link to an updated article, we do disclose that it's not entirely new. And so far there hasn't been a single complaint about this. In fact, we've found the opposite. The spike of traffic that we get from promoting an updated article is almost always bigger than when it was first published. Our "SEO tips" article is probably the best example I have. We re-launched it three times in two years, each time generating more and more traffic. You bet we're going to continue updating and re-launching it in future. And there's one last content promotion mistake left to discuss. Mistake #4: Not spending  money on content promotion. As you already know, We have a decent advertising budget for every article that we publish at Ahrefs blog. This allows us to reach a huge number of people that we wouldn't be able to reach otherwise. But whenever I mention that to other bloggers, most of them tell me that they can't afford to spend money on content promotion. Well, in psychology they call this a Limiting Belief. The truth is - you can afford to spend money on content promotion. You just fail to justify it. So let me try to help you with that. I have two good arguments, that should do the job. Argument #1: The "free content promotion methods" are not free. So how much time does it take you to promote a new piece of content? One hour? Five hours? Ten? And your time is worth something, right? So why don't you multiply your estimated hourly rate by the time it took you to complete all items in your content promotion checklist? This way you're going to get the cost of what you think are your "free" content promotion methods. And now that you know the price tag, why don't you add 10% to that sum and use that money to run a Facebook ads campaign? Think of it as an additional item in your "free content promotion methods" checklist, but this time you're paying with your money instead of paying with your time. And you might actually discover that putting your money into Facebook ads has a much better ROI than putting your time into some of these other free strategies. Argument #2: Your content  should sell your product. The best way to justify spending money on content promotion is by getting this money back in a form of sales or customers. If an article doesn't bring new customers to your business - I can understand why you don't want to spend money on it. But why did you spend your time promoting it then? And, in fact, if an article doesn't help you to get new customers, why did you even create it in the first place? Do you see where I'm going with that? Paid content promotion is a litmus test for the business potential of your content. Here at Ahrefs we're not afraid to pour money into content promotion, because we know that our content converts. Check out this tweet I saw the other day: "Excellent content on long-tail keywords. It also resulted in me signing up for a free trial. Great work @ahrefs :)" And a few weeks later Thomas also tweeted that he became our paid customer. Which is a perfect illustration of how our blog brings new customers to our business. And this wraps up the four mistakes of content promotion that I wanted to warn you about. Here's a quick refresher. Mistake #1: Focusing on short-term traffic over backlinks. Mistake #2: Giving up content promotion too early. Mistake #3: Abandoning your old content. Mistake #4: Not spending  money on content promotion. And now it's time to review the actual content promotion strategies. Part #2. The best content promotion strategies I'm sure you have researched the topic of content promotion before and have seen a ton of tactics, strategies and even so-called "growth hacks." And just when you think you've learned it all, you stumble on a new case study showing you how someone has generated a bazillion visits to their blog with a brand new amazing tactic. Sounds familiar? Well, you're not going to get any of that in my course. First of all, it is very important to understand that there's no tactic or strategy that will make an awful piece of content popular. The quality of your content always comes first! And secondly, if your content is objectively awesome, it will promote itself. Which is something that we have covered earlier in this course and I showed you qute a few examples from our own blog. So instead of pitching you some super-smart- secret-ninja-killer content promotion tactics that will make you a superstar by tomorrow, I'm only going to briefly review a short list of the most popular content promotion strategies and explain what they're good for. In fact, most content promotion strategies can be organized in just six categories. Reaching your existing audience. Reaching relevant communities. Content repurposing and syndication. Guest blogging. Outreach. And paid promotion. Let's review them one by one. #1 Reaching your existing audience. Generally, you do that by sending an email newsletter to your blog subscribers and posting a link to your newly published article on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest and any other social network where you have some following. But if you're only starting out, your email list is super-small and you don't have a lot of followers on these social networks. Which means you cannot expect any traffic and backlinks to magically appear out of nowhere. So it does make sense to start building your audience as early as you can! If you invest time and effort into building your email list and your social following, they will later become your most effective content promotion methods. #2 Reaching relevant communities. You can do that by submitting your article to relevant groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. You can also submit it to a proper subreddit or any other relevant forums. And finally, there's a new trend for creating Slack channels in different industries. So you can join those and plug your articles there. In theory, that sounds like a holy grail of traffic. But once you actually try it, the harsh reality will kick in. The thing is most of these communities hate self promotion. You might get away with mentioning your article once or twice. But if you overdo it, you'll almost certain be banned. So instead of joining a hundred communities with a single goal to spam them with your content, I'd suggest you to pick 5 or 10 of the very best ones and become an active member there. Once the moderators notice that you consistently provide value to the community, they will pretend they don't notice that you plug your own articles now and then. And besides, if you make enough friends within each community, they will start plugging your articles into conversations without you having to do that yourself. #3 Content repurposing and syndication. It's not too hard to repurpose your content into different formats (audio, video, slides, images, etc.) and then submit it to appropriate platforms. Even if no one will ever find your content there, you still get a bunch of nice backlinks to your article, right? And besides, if the original content is awesome, why should the repurposed version be doomed to oblivion? Back in 2016 we have published a cool tutorial teaching people how to do SEO audit. To this date, that article has generated over 60,000 visits. But guess what, we also created a short 15-minute walkthrough based on that very article and published it on YouTube. That video has generated 10 times more views than the article - that's over 600,000 views. In fact, a lot of the traffic to our article was actually generated by this video. It ranks #1 in YouTube for the keyword "seo audit" and keeps generating more views and more traffic to our blog every day. I've also seen similar results from repurposing your content into a slideshare presentation. And you might also consider repurposing the best articles from your blog into a podcast. In other words, you should try a few of these formats and see what works best for you. #4 Guest blogging. I don't think I need to explain guest blogging to you, right? In my opinion, it is one of the best ways to get high-quality backlinks and sometimes even a bit of nice referral traffic to your blog. I won't expand on this topic right now, as we're about to have a full section on guest blogging in the very next lesson. If you have a hard time getting published on other blogs, you can try answering relevant questions on Quora or any other Q&A sites that exist in your niche. Or you can simply leave comments on other blogs, referencing your own articles. Most bloggers hate to see comments with links, but if the comment is genuine and the article you're referencing is awesome - they might let it slide. Other than that, you can also try to get cited by journalists. There's a nice service for that, called Help A Reporter Out. And we have a nice case study about it on Ahrefs Blog. And finally, if you have already achieved some notable results in your industry you can try pitching yourself to podcasts and interviews. which often leads to quality links and referral traffic with little time-commitment. #5 Outreach. This strategy is an absolute must. If you don't have outreach in your content promotion checklist, you're seriously missing out. The basic rule of thumb is to send personal heads up to everyone who was mentioned or referenced in your article. But don't ask them for links or tweets, it's your content that should be the motivator, not you. An entirely different strategy is to reach out to everyone who has linked to similar content. Or who has mentioned similar topics in their own articles. These are very powerful outreach methods, which deserve special attention. So the last lesson of this course is fully dedicated to outreach. And we have one last group left. #6 Paid promotion. As discussed previously, paid promotion is an absoute must if you consider your blog a business tool, not a hobby. Almost every major social network has their own Ad platform - Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, you name it. I'm sure you're also well aware of Google's own advertising options. These things are quite obvious, right? A somewhat uncommon advertising option is a paid email newsletter. In our own niche of digital marketing quite a few websites offer this service, but the price per visitor is always way higher compared to Facebook Ads or even Google Ads. So we have never paid to be included in someone's email newsletter. And that wraps up my review of the most common content promotion strategies. I hope that now you have a much clearer picture of how to promote your next piece of content. Or re-launch the old one. Part #3. How to compete with the "big guys" in Google search results Whatever industry you're in, the best search queries are most likely "taken" by someone already. And that "someone" is usually a big established website that is better than you in every possible way. They have a strong brand, full of credibility and trust. They have a lot of resources for creating amazing content. They have a big loyal audience to whom they can promote their content and get links from. They have a huge advertising budget to reach insane amounts of people. And to make matters worse, they already rank at the top of Google for all those juicy keywords that you wish to rank for. Which means that they get highly-relevant consistent traffic to their pages every single month. Which means that some of these people will end up linking to these pages. The mere fact that it ranks #1 in Google makes their page worthy of a link. And then a consistent flow of new backlinks will obviously strengthen the leading position of their pages in Google search results. That is a very discouraging cycle, right? I call it the "Vicious Cycle of SEO" Take any page that ranks in Google top 3 for a popular keyword and put it into Ahrefs Site Explorer tool. Like this guide to keyword research from Moz. Does it get a bunch of new backlinks every week because they actively promote it? Of course not! It gets all these new links on complete autopilot! It ranks high in Google and therefore has a consistent flow of targeted visitors, many of whom will link to it afterwards. As you can see from the graph in Ahrefs, the pace at which this article acquires new backlinks is quite high. It would be almost impossible to keep up with them if you were building all your backlinks manually. So how do you break into this Vicious Cycle of SEO and outrank those big guys? Well, I'm afraid there's no way to do that. Unless of course you're able to create a vastly better piece of content and you have enough resources to reach a comparable amount of people with it. This is the only way you stand a chance at building a comparable amount of backlinks in a relatively short timeframe. So the only advice I have for you is this. Don't go after "big" keywords until you grow a big enough audience and accumulate enough resources to effectively wrestle with whoever currently ranks at the top. And besides, there's absolutely no reason to target highly-competitive search terms, while there are tons of untapped opportunities to easily grow your search traffic. In the previous lessons of this course I have shared quite a few great tips and strategies on how to discover low-hanging content ideas that would bring you a ton of search traffic with minimum effort. But "minimum effort" doesn't  mean "no effort at all". Even those low-hanging content ideas will require some backlinks to get to the top of Google and bring you the search traffic. And, as we have previously discussed, you cannot just sit and wait for backlinks to come naturally. You need to build them manually. And that is exacly what we're going to cover in the very next lesson of this course. Sounds good? Then I'll see you in Lesson #9. Welcome to the lesson #9. How to build backlinks to your blog content Here's what we're going to cover in this lesson: The best link building strategies for blogs. How to get backlink ideas from your competitors. How to build links via guest blogging. And finally, a few simple guest blogging "hacks" for better results in less time. So let's go! Part #1. The best link building strategies for blogs The word "best" in the title of this section means that I'm not going to cover every link building strategy there is. Because there's just too many. So I'm only going to share a few of the most effective ways one could build links to their blog articles. Based on my personal experience. But before I give you my shortlist, here's a quick refresher of what we've discussed so far: You're unlikely to outrank the top 10 ranking pages for your target keyword, without at least as many good backlinks as they have pointing to your own page. Popular blogs tend to get natural backlinks simply by broadcasting their content to a large audience of fans and expecting some of them to link to it. The pages that rank high in Google tend to get natural backlinks on autopilot. I call this a "Vicious Cycle of SEO." And, finally, if you're just starting out, you should not wait for links to come naturally. You have to manually build them. Which you can do with these four strategies: Leaving comments; Replicating your competitors' backlinks; Guest blogging; And outreach. Let me expand on each of them. Strategy #1. Leaving comments. You're probably rolling your eyes right now. But no, I'm not living in 2010. I do actually think that this is a great strategy to kickstart your link building efforts and help spread the word about your content. Notice that I didn't say "blog comments" but comments in general. That's because blogs aren't the only place where you can leave comments with links to your articles. We also have niche forums, online communities, Q&A sites, and even YouTube videos. For example, in our own niche (which is SEO) Reddit and Quora are rather popular places where people exchange opinions and link to relevant content. I have quite a solid comment history on both of these sites, so you know I'm advocating something that I'm actually doing myself. But if you take a closer look at my comments on Reddit you'll see that only a few of them have links to our blog articles. Reddit hates spammers and if you only post there to drop links - you're going to get banned. But if you take time to consistently provide value to the community - no one will have a problem with you linking to your own content now and then. Which is exactly what I do there. Quora is a bit different in that sense. I have left well over 100 answers there and most of them have links to my articles. But that's not because Quora is suffering from a lack of moderation. Trust me, they're very strict with spammers too. But do my comments on Quora look like spam? Each one is unique, well formatted and above all provides a ton of value to the conversation, before asking readers to click on my link for some extra details. And even though I haven't been active on Quora for quite a while, my answers still get thousands of views every single month, which results in some nice referral traffic to my content. So I highly recommend that you find a few popular communities in your own niche and start actively engaging in them. But what if you struggle to find any relevant online communities in your niche? Well, you can still leave comments on blog articles, right? As a fellow blogger, I'm sure you know how great it is to get smart insightful comments on something you just published. But on the other hand, no one wants to get comments from people who're only looking to promote their own stuff. So my advice with leaving comments on relevant blogs in your industry is not much different from what I just said about community sites - it only works if you add the actual value to the conversation. And now it's time to acknowledge the elephant in the room. In 99% of cases the comments that you will post online will have nofollow links. And since nofollow attribute means that the link doesn't pass any SEO value to your website - why even bother? Two words: "Side benefits." Look at the two of my latest answers on Quora. One has 800 views and the other 8,000 views. And because both comments have links to articles from Ahrefs Blog, I'm sure we got some nice referral traffic from them. And I have zero doubts that many people who visited Ahrefs Blog after reading my comments on Quora ended up becoming our regular readers. And as you already know, the bigger your audience of fans gets the more links you're going to acquire naturally, as a byproduct of broadcasting your content to them. So did these links from my Quora answers helps my articles to rank better in Google? I don't think so. But did my comments on Quora help me reach a lot of people with my content, convert them into fans, and get some natural links from them afterwards? Absolutely! Leaving comments on relevant blogs has a ton of side benefits too! Check out the story of Ryan Stewart that he shared in his guest article at Ahrefs Blog. Ryan posted a very insightful comment on Robbie Richards' personal blog. And at the end of the comment, he linked to an article on his own blog. Not only did Robbie not delete that self-promotional comment but he actually tweeted Ryan's article. But there's more. Later on he invited Ryan to participate in an "expert roundup" that was published at his personal blog. Which means that Ryan got a perfectly legit dofollow link from a perfectly legit relevant blog. In other words, one simple comment with a nofollow link set off a chain reaction of valuable events: referral traffic from a blog comment; a tweet from the blog owner; a dofollow link from that blog; some more referral traffic from that link, etc. Not bad for a simple blog comment! You bet, Ryan! I hope that was a vivid enough example to persuade you that leaving comments online is not some kind of spammy old-school way to promote your content, which does more harm than good. I honestly believe that leaving comments on relevant blogs & communities is the best way to kickstart your link building efforts, put your name out there and start making valuable connections with prominent people in your niche. But make sure you go after quality, not quantity. And that was the first link building strategy in my list. What about the other three? Well, we're about to cover two more in this very lesson: Replicating your competitors' backlinks and Guest blogging. And as for Outreach, I decided that this strategy requires a lesson of it's own. So we'll cover it in the next lesson of this course. Which is the last one. And now let's talk about replicating your competitors' backlinks, shall we? Part #2. How to get backlink ideas from your competitors Analyzing your competitors' backlink profiles can lead to a goldmine of link building opportunities, which you wouldn't otherwise be able to discover. But some competitors have tens of thousands of backlinks. So there's no way you can review them all manually—it would take too long. For example, here at Ahrefs one of the blogs we compete with for search traffic is Brian Dean's backlinko.com. We have quite an overlap in the keywords that we're targeting with our articles, so it would make sense for us to learn which websites link to backlinko.com so that we could pitch our own content to them. But if we put backlinko.com in Site Explorer, we'll see that over 11,000 websites are linking to it. That's a lot of backlinks and we certainly don't have time to manually review all of them. So how on earth do you analyze big backlink profiles of your competitors without going crazy? Well, let me show you three great strategies that will help you to quickly make sense of such a large dataset. Strategy #1. Find their "superfans." Let's continue with an example of backlinko.com which is a competitor to Ahrefs blog. Brian Dean has published quite a few amazing articles over the last few years and I know for  sure that he has grown a big army of fans who consistently link to his content. Wouldn't it be cool to know who they are? If someone is so eager to link to the content of your competitor, they might be interested in your content too. So how do you find these superfans? You could try going to Referring domains report, filtering by dofollow links only and then sorting the results by the number of dofollow links from a domain. But because the web is full of trash, you're very likely to see a ton of very strange websites there which don't look like websites where you would care to be featured. So there's a better way! Go to the Best by links report and set HTTP code filter to 200. This will give you a list of the pages on your competitors' website that have generated the most backlinks. Now, take up to 10 of these pages and copy/ paste them into Ahrefs' Link Intersect tool. Make sure to strip the protocol from each URL and use the Prefix setting. This will give better results. Let me do that with five of the most linked-to articles at backlinko.com. After clicking Show link opportunities, I get only 66 websites that have linked to all five articles of our competitor. If I start exploring those, most of them would likely turn out to be legit websites worth getting a link from. And because they link to not one but all five articles on a blog that we're competing with, there should be a very high chance that we can get a link from them too. That's how we went from over 11,000 random websites that link to our competitor to only 66 that are worth our immediate attention. But the fun doesn't end there. Maybe some of these websites have already linked to us? We have a cool setting for that in Link Intersect tool. Just enter your own website there and all sites that already link to you will be excluded from the results. So let's put in ahrefs.com and see how many websites link to all five articles at backlinko.com but have never linked to any pages on ahrefs.com. And there's none except for ourselves. Which means that all their "superfans" already know about us. But we're not finished yet. We can go back and change this little setting from All to Any. This will expand our results by including websites that link to any four of these articles, any three of these articles, any two of these articles and even any single one of these articles. Let's see how that looks. And now we get 34 hundred results. These sites have linked to articles by our competitor but have never linked to us. Which makes them perfect outreach targets. Clearly, there will be some trash here too but many legit websites can be easily identified just by looking at their domain names alone: bestitpoint.com, ezmarketing.com, ecomtuning.com, futurecontent.co. These four look good, and when I open them, I can see that they're digital marketing agencies. Each of them has a blog from which they were linking to articles at backlinko.com. And because our content overlaps so much it should not be too hard to connect with these guys and find a way to get featured on their blog. Now, 34 hundred websites is quite a lot to go through, even if you're just quickly scanning them for good-looking domain names, like I just did. But if we look at the intersect column, we'll see that it drops to 1 as early as page #7. Which means that we have slightly over 300 websites that link to 2 or more articles by our competitor but have never linked to us. The rest of them only link to a single article, so they're not really superfans. Now, 300 is a totally manageable number. You can scan through this amount of websites in less than one hour and find quite a few good link opportunities. And then you can take five more articles from the blog of your competitor and analyze them with link intersect. Then you can do this with some other competitor of yours. Strategy #2. Find the "power linkers." I just showed you how to use Link Intersect tool in Ahrefs to identify "superfans" who consistently link to articles of your competitor. But there's another cool way to use Link Intersect. You can find websites that link to a few blogs that you're competing with, but they have never linked to your own blog. Sounds good? So let me put five well-known blogs in our own industry and see how many websites have linked to all five of them but never linked to ahrefs.com. And we have over 200 results! Now, this is a real goldmine of link building opportunities. All these websites have mentioned content from all five of our competitors but have never linked to us. This has to be fixed! I'm sure if we send a personal outreach email to all 200 site owners and introduce them to Ahrefs Blog, many of them will end up linking to us. I know this for a fact, because we regularly reach out to these kinds of sites. And once you're done with all websites in that list you can repeat with five other blogs that you compete with. Or, you can play with that "All/Any" setting to expand the list of results the same way we did when looking for "superfans." All in all, with the help of Link Intersect tool in Ahrefs you should be able to discover a ton of great link opportunities with just a few hours of work. And we have one last competitor research strategy left to discuss. Strategy #3. Analyse their latest backlinks. While taking action on the previous two strategies you should always pay attention to the date when each of the linking websites was last updated. Chances are many of the websites who are linking to your competitors probably did so quite a long time ago, but they're not actively updating their website anymore. While there's still a chance to persuade them to link to you, the likelihood drops rather significantly. So why don't you look at the most recently acquired links of your competitors. In Ahrefs we have a report just for that and it's called New Backlinks. So let's see who has linked to backlinko.com in the last few days. I usually just skim through a list of backlinks and look for domain names that look good. So here's one cool name that caught my attention: marketingninjas.com. If I do a site: search in Google, I will see that they have never mentioned Ahrefs on their website. I can also go to the Referring Domains report for ahrefs.com and look for marketingninjas.com among them to verify that they have never linked to our website. And they haven't. So that's the kind of a link opportunity that I was looking for. By browsing their website I can see that it's yet another marketing agency which has an active blog. So all we need to do is reach out to them and pitch them some of our own content. If they enjoy articles from backlinko.com, I have no doubts that we'll be able to impress them with our own blog. And they might link to some of our articles later on. So that's how you mine great link opportunities by researching who links to your competitors. In just a few hours of browsing their latest backlinks you can find enough opportunities to keep you busy for weeks ahead. Here's one last tip. With Ahrefs you can receive email alerts every time your competitors get new backlinks. Just go to Alerts section of Ahrefs, the Backlinks tab, and click New alert. But most likely your competitors are getting hundreds of new backlinks to their blog every week, or even every day. So if you setup a backlink alert for their entire website, or even entire blog you will quickly get overwhelmed with the amount of backlinks that Ahrefs will be sending via email. What I suggest you do instead is setup alerts for a bunch of individual articles from their blog that you care about the most. For example, these could be the articles that are currently outranking your own ones in Google search results. This way you're only going to receive email alerts with new backlinks pointing directly at these few articles. Which would make these email reports very insightful and actionable. Go try it with a few best articles of your competitors and see how it works. Part #3. How to build links via guest blogging I'm about to teach you a few guest blogging tactics that someone might even call "advanced." But let's not forget about the very basics. The quality of your content always comes first. I actually think we should start calling it "the fundamental rule of content marketing." If your content is weak, even the smartest tactics and strategies won't work for you. But if your content is top notch, you'll get astounding results with little to no effort. So that aside, let's address two of the most common challenges in guest blogging. How to never run out of blogs to guest post for. And how to create more quality guest articles in less time. Without further ado, challenge #1. How to never run out of blogs to guest post for. Most guides to guest blogging will suggest you to use advanced Google search operators for finding blogs to guest post for. Like your_topic "guest post," your_topic "guest article," your_topic "write for us," your_topic inurl:submit, etc. And then you're supposed to somehow scrape Google search results for all these search queries, save them into a spreadsheet, run de-duplication and maybe even pull some SEO metrics which would help you vet them. If you ask me - that is too troublesome. So here's how you get a huge list of guest blogging prospects in five minutes or less. Go to Content Explorer and put your topic there. In fact, you can use any keyword that you know blogs in your industry are likely to mention. For example, blogs in the SEO industry will often talk about things like link building, keyword research, SEO audit, anchor text, etc. So let's take the keyword "link building" and put it into Content Explorer. And I get over 120,000 pages that mention this keyword somewhere in their content. But I don't need a list of pages, I need a list of blogs to guest post for. So I put a checkbox next to "One article per domain" setting. And from 120,000 results I go down to 39,000 pages that belong to unique websites and mention my target keyword. Next, I need to use the Language filter, because I'm only going to write my guest articles in English. And finally, if I don't feel confident writing articles for top blogs in my industry, I can use Domain Rating filter from 30 to 50, so that I only see results from mildly popular blogs, where I have a much higher chance of getting published. And we're down to slightly over 5,000 unique websites that mention my target keyword in one of their articles. And because their Domain Rating is not too strong, I know they're likely to accept my guest article. 5,000 is more blogs than you'll be able to write for in your lifetime. But should you need more guest blogging prospects, you can always loosen up the Domain Rating filter and you'll get vastly more results. And of course you can always start fresh with some other seed keyword. For example, you could try searching for keywords that are not so closely related to what you do. I started with keywords like "link building," "keyword research," "seo audit," "anchor text," etc. because they're highly related to what we do at Ahrefs. But I could actually go much broader than that: "startup marketing," "growth hacking," "website promotion," "online business," etc. As you can tell, by playing with different seed keywords you will end up with an almost never ending supply of blogs to guest post for. And this time we have two elephants in one room. Elephant #1. How do you know these blogs allow guest posts? I don't. But is that even an issue? If a blog doesn't have a "Write for Us" page, or any other signs of guest posts being accepted, why not just email them and ask about it? Here at Ahrefs we don't have a "Write for Us" page and we never advertise an opportunity to publish your guest articles. But we do publish guest posts from time to time. It all goes back to "the fundamental rule of content marketing" that I mentioned earlier. If you have a compelling idea and your writing is of an exceptional quality, you might get accepted even by the blogs that don't normally allow guest writers. Let's face it, the vast majority of people who pitch guest articles are only willing to invest 30 minutes-or-so to crank out something barely readable and hope it will land them a backlink. But most bloggers are too polite to say "Your content is awful," so instead they say "Sorry, but we don't publish articles on our blog." And even if your content is top notch and you still get a "no," well, it didn't hurt to ask, right? Next time that might be a "yes". And besides, even if you were turned down, you still put yourself on the radar of a prominent person in your industry. By the way, remember what I said earlier about the side benefits of leaving blog comments:? If you really want to publish your guest article on some popular blog in your niche, try to get the attention of the blog owner via smart insightful comments first, and only then reach out offering to write a post for them. Works almost every time. Elephant #2. Why should I publish articles at low-DR blogs? Doesn't low-DR mean that a link from them has little value? Technically, from Google's own perspective, you're not getting a backlink from a domain. You're getting a backlink from a specific page. That is just how their PageRank formula works. That said, a highly popular website can have a ton of weak pages, while a small new website can have a few very strong ones. And besides, some of the small websites will eventually grow into big and popular ones, right? So you shouldn't shy away from guest writing for a blog, just because their DR is low. A better question to ask would be "Do I think this blog will still be around in 3 years from now?" If the answer is "yes," go for it. If it's "no," leave it, because you clearly don't want to spend time writing quality guest articles that will eventually disappear without a trace. Obviously, you should aim to publish guest articles on the very best blogs in your industry. But if you pitched them a few times and got rejected, you'll have to work your way up, writing for low-DR blogs in order to build your skill and portfolio of published articles. Up until the big guys will start to recognize you and let you write for them. So that was the challenge #1: how to find the blogs to guest post for. And here goes challenge #2. How to create more quality guest articles in less time. I'm sure you can easily come up with a great topic for a guest article. Maybe two, or three. But try to brainstorm at least 20 unique article ideas. I bet you'll start to struggle somewhere after #7. Which is why I'm happy to share two awesome techniques that will solve this headache for you. #1. The Splintering Technique In the previous lessons of this course I was advising you to create epic in-depth articles which would cover a certain topic better than anyone else. Well, why don't you think of this big awesome article as a collection of smaller ones, like a piece of wood that can be broken into many splinters? Here's an example. Take a look at this guide to link building at Ahrefs blog. Right away you can see that it consists of 6 chapters. Well, this means that we can easily write six unique articles, each talking about a separate chapter from this link building guide. When creating this guide we had to make these chapters fairly short, because we didn't want to overwhelm our readers with unnecessary details. But if we were to create a dedicated article for each of these chapters, we could go as deep as we wanted without the fear of making them too long. I think this is a perfect way to come up with ideas for guest articles. You create a single awesome resource that would target a general topic, and then you break it into smaller "splinters" and submit each of them as a guest article on a different blog. Which would link back to that big awesome resource and help it rank in Google. And the thing that I like the most about this technique, is that you can produce these splinters in little to no time, because you did all the hard work educating yourself on that topic and all it's aspects while writing that big awesome article for your own blog. Go look at your past articles and see if you can find any potential splintering opportunities in them. #2. The Perspective technique Let's say we used the Splintering technique to turn chapter #6 of our link building guide into an awesome guest article about the future of link building. Does that mean that we cannot use this same topic again for writing another guest article? Of course we can! All we need to do is change the perspective slightly. We could talk about the future of link building for startups, ecommerce sites, small businesses, local businesses, non-profits, etc. I know these topics sound a bit clumsy, but you get the idea of how "The Perspective technique" works, right? For every unique guest article idea that you have in your list it is possible to create a few nice variations, by changing the perspective slightly. That said, by applying the Splintering technique and the Perspective technique just to our single guide to link building, we could easily come up with nearly 20 unique guest article ideas in less than 20 minutes. So these are two of my favourite ways to easily come up with unique guest article ideas. But don't limit yourself to these two only, google around a bit and you'll find quite a few more great techniques that will help you brainstorm cool ideas for your guest articles. Part #4. Simple guest blogging "hacks" for better results in less time Here at Ahrefs our content marketing team has published a rather solid number of guest articles in the last few years. And we have discovered a few simple "hacks" that I'll be glad to share with you. Some of them might seem obvious, but I still think that they deserve a mention. Hack #1. Pitch more blogs than you can handle. Negotiations take time. Blog owners might not reply to your emails for days, or even weeks. You shouldn't worry about this but you should factor that in. Your guest blogging should not suffer from these long wait times. And hence the first hack: send more guest post pitches than you can handle. There's a great book, called "Oversubscribed" by Daniel Priestley. It teaches you that It's always good to have more demand than supply. Imagine dozens of bloggers queuing to get a guest article from you. This way you actually get to pick and choose which blogs you want to write for and which ones can wait. So come up with two or three awesome article ideas and pitch them to 10-15 blogs. Just don't send all your pitches in one day. Send the first few and give them a few days to respond. Then send the next batch. This way, if one blogger is slow to respond, just reply them with something like "Sorry, you weren't responding for a few days, so this article idea was taken by another blog. But don't worry, I'm sure I'll be able to suggest something else for you that would be just as good. I'll be in touch with more article ideas shortly." This is how you create a queue of bloggers waiting for your guest articles. Hack #2. Link to multiple  articles from your guest post. This sounds like a no-brainer, but many people simply forget that they can do that. And no, I'm not talking about filling your guest article with links to your own stuff top to bottom. Make it relevant and make it natural. If the link doesn't quite belong there - don't try to squeeze it in. These days most bloggers are very sensitive to any self-promotional links, so quite often they will only allow a single link to the homepage of your website coming from your author bio. So if you send them an article full of links to your website - this might get them pissed and they won't publish anything at all. From my experience, you shouldn't put more than two self promotional links in your guest article. But that largely depends on the blog owner. Hack #3. Link to other guest posts of yours. This is a nice loophole for when the blog owner is hyper-sensitive to having you link to your own website. Linking to your other guest articles is good for two reasons: Reason #1: According to Google's PageRank formula, by linking to a page that links to your website you're increasing  the power of that link. Reason #2: You can reach out to this other blog owner and let them know you just landed them a quality backlink. They will be super happy about this and they might return this favor sometime in future. This is a simple but very powerful hack. Make sure you put it to action. And finally... Hack #4. Write guest articles for blogs that have never linked to you before. It is a well known fact that the number of unique domains that link to a page correlates well with the ranking position  of that page in Google. Correlation is not causation but the experience of many thousands of SEO professionals confirms that the more unique websites you have linking to your page - the higher it usually ranks in Google. So when building links via guest blogging it's in your best interest to pitch blogs that have never linked to your website before. In Ahrefs' Content Explorer we have a cool feature just for that. Remember we had a list of 5,000 potential guest blogging targets? Well, we can click a button called Highlight unlinked domains and see which of these websites have never linked to our own website. Then we can go ahead and export them using the Export only highlighted checkbox. As easy as that! And if you're looking at a random blog and you want to know if they have linked to you before, just go to the Referring Domains report for your own website and search for that domain there. That's it! But how strict should you be about this rule? Should you say "no" to every blog owner who gives you the opportunity to write another guest post for them? Well, as we just discussed, Google's PageRank formula counts backlinks between pages, not websites. But clearly every subsequent link from the same website will have less value. Otherwise it would be too easy to manipulate Google by creating just one website with a million pages that link to you. So here's what I think. You should only write a second or third guest article if it's a really good blog. Or if you don't have any better guest post opportunities at the moment but have a few finished articles that you need to publish somewhere. And that was my final guest blogging tip. We have one last link building strategy left to discuss. That is outreach, and I'm going to share everything I know about it in the last lesson of this course. Sounds good? Then I'll see you there! Welcome to the lesson #10. How to build links and promote content via blogger outreach. Here's what we're going to cover in this lesson. How to use outreach for content promotion. How to find thousands of high-quality outreach prospects. And how to write ridiculously effective outreach emails. So let's go! Part #1. How to use outreach for content promotion. First of all, outreach is not a digital marketing strategy. Influencer marketing, guest blogging, broken link building - these are the strategies in digital marketing, or tactics, whatever you prefer. And outreach is just a tool that you use in order to execute on them. If you want influencers to promote your content, you need to reach out to them. If you want bloggers to publish your guest articles, you need to reach out to them. If you want website owners to fix their broken backlinks, well… you get the idea. That said, there's no such thing as an "Ultimate Guide To Outreach." It simply cannot exist because there's just too many use cases to consider. So in this lesson I will not teach you all possible applications of outreach, which in fact go way beyond marketing and into business development and networking. We're only going to focus on using outreach for spreading the word about your content and landing some high-quality backlinks along the way. And before I tackle the two common outreach issues - where to find outreach prospects and what to say in your outreach emails - I want to address three things that people often get wrong when promoting their content via outreach. And the first thing that many people fail to understand is that outreach is in fact content promotion. Imagine the situation: You emailed 100 people with a link to your article. 80% of them opened your email, 30% clicked your link and read the article 10% emailed you back with their feedback but non of them tweeted or linked to it. Most people would conclude that their outreach has failed and would probably never bother doing it again, because "it doesn't work." But think about it, by sending 100 emails with 80% open rate, you're putting yourself on the radar of 80 awesome hand-picked people from your industry. 30% clickthrough rate means that 30 of these awesome people have actually visited your blog and read your content. And a 10% reply rate means that you've just made a connection with 10 awesome people from your industry. Which, as we learned in previous lessons, can often lead to a ton of additional benefits. Yes, you didn't get any tweets or backlinks. But it would be wrong to say that your outreach has failed, as long as your emails get opened, your links get clicked, and people reply to you. That's why I said that outreach is content promotion. Obviously, 30 people visiting your blog is far from a life-changing amount of traffic. But you've only sent 100 emails. What if you send 1,000 or even 10,000 emails? That will translate into 300 or even 3,000 people visiting your blog. And I have no doubts that many of these visits will eventually result in tweets, backlinks and all sorts of other "side benefits." "Tim, but isn't sending 10,000 emails called SPAM?" That is a great question and it brings us to the second thing that people often get wrong: #2. There's a fine line between outreach and SPAM Yes, if you send 10,000 emails in a week, or even in one month - that is SPAM. There's no way to properly research this many people and send each one a personalized email in such a short timeframe. So when I talk about reaching out to 10,000 people, I actually refer to a long term strategy, that would be executed in the course of a year or maybe two. Which gives you enough time to do it right and not be a SPAMmer. Think of outreach and SPAM as two ends of one spectrum. This spectrum represents the amount of effort that you put into each individual email that you send. This includes finding the person you want to get in touch with; researching them, to make sure they're a good fit; and, obviously, writing a personalized outreach email to them. On one end of this spectrum we have an auto- generated list of people which you never bothered to manually review. Plus a generic outreach template which you copied from some popular "guide to outreach" and barely even customized. This approach is pretty much the definition of the word SPAM. And on the other end of this spectrum we have a small list of people who you took time to thoroughly research, which gives you the opportunity to write a unique and very personal outreach email to each of them. That is how outreach should be done in the ideal world. But in all honesty, both ends of this spectrum are nothing but extremes, that you should stay away from. You don't want to send 10,000 nearly random people a generic email template. Especially if you care about your reputation in that industry. That would be an equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot. But at the same time, you don't want to spend weeks researching a handful of people and crafting the most perfect outreach emails possible. Just to realize they're too busy right now for whatever you're sending them. The right approach is somewhere in the middle albeit leaning more towards the "Ideal Outreach" end of the spectrum. Each industry is very different and I recommend that you experiment with the amount of effort that you put into each outreach email before deciding where on this spectrum is right for you to settle. And just in case you're reluctant to give up on the quality of your outreach, I have one last piece of advice for you: #3. Perfect outreach doesn't guarantee any results. I just mentioned a situation where you spend weeks thoroughly researching a handful of people and sending them the best outreach emails they have ever received. And then it turns out they're too busy to reply. In all honesty, this is quite a common scenario. If you tried outreach before, I'm sure you will agree with me on that. And the reason why it happens is painfully obvious. Life gets in the way. Your "perfect outreach email" may flop due to a hundred different reasons that you're not even in control of. What time of the day the person will see your email. Will they open it on their mobile phone or desktop computer. Are they in a good mood. Is their schedule full right now. How many other emails they have received today, etc, etc, etc... So yeah, perfect outreach doesn't guarantee any results. You need to mentally prepare yourself for this and not get discouraged when people don't reply your emails. Here at Ahrefs we rarely get Open rates above 80% and the Reply rate almost never crosses 30%. And we consider these numbers to be quite good. If your own numbers are way lower than ours, here are a few quick tips. If your open rate is low, make sure you're sending to the right email address. Especially if you're using some automated software to pull these email addresses for you. We have a great post at Ahrefs blog that should help you with that: "9 Actionable Ways To Find Anyone's Email Address." Also experiment with your email subject. If you're using a generic email subject like "something you might like," don't expect people to open it. You should create subject lines that would somehow reflect your outreach excuse. More about this later. Now, if your clicks rate is low, invest more time into vetting your outreach prospects. It can be that you're simply reaching out to the wrong people,   or they are no longer interested in that topic. Or make sure to clearly specify what's so unique and awesome about your article   that would make them want to click the link and check it out. And finally, if your reply rate is low,  make sure you ask for their feedback. A simple request like "Let me know your thoughts" actually works quite well in terms of getting replies. Also make sure you're not asking for a favor. Most people prefer to not reply emails because they don't want to say "no." As you can tell, these tips are mostly based on common sense and might even seem obvious. But I get so many awful outreach emails that I felt I had to include this advice in my lesson. And we're done with the basics. Now, let me show you how to find thousands of high-quality outreach prospects. Part #2. How to find thousands of high-quality outreach prospects Let's go back to the very beginning and read the title of this lesson once again: "How to build links and promote content via blogger outreach." I placed "build links" first so that to remind you that this is the primary goal of your outreach efforts. As for "promoting content," we just discussed that it's a natural byproduct of your outreach efforts rather than the primary goal. So who should you reach out to? Who are the people, that are likely to link to your piece of content? How about the people who have already linked to existing articles on the same topic; or have already published  articles mentioning that topic. Do I even need to explain why these two groups of people are the perfect outreach targets? Nevermind, I'll be fast. They clearly have websites to link from and they clearly have a certain interest in your topic. Sounds fair? Now, let me show you how to easily find these people. Group 1: People who have linked to existing articles on the same topic. The logic here is painfully obvious.. If these people have previously linked to some other articles on the same topic, they might as well link to your articles too. That is of course if your article is somehow better than the one they're already linking to, or offers a unique perspective. Otherwise they just won't care. So how do you find people who have linked to similar content? Well, the best place to start is of course by doing a few Google searches for the topic that you want to rank for with your article, see who ranks at the top, and then look up who's linking to them. I usually use Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer tool to do that. So let's see who ranks at the top of Google for the keyword "seo audit." There's our own article from Ahrefs blog ranking at position #1 with over 80 websites linking at it. And there's an article from Moz blog that ranks at position #2 with almost 300 websites linking at it. Even though we already rank at the top, it wouldn't hurt to get a few more backlinks to our article, so that to secure it's #1 position. And those 300 websites that link to Moz article are the perfect targets. Let's see who they are. All I need to do is click on that number of referring domains and I'll be redirected to a proper report within Site Explorer tool listing all 300 of them. From here I usually turn on the "dofollow" filter and re-order my list to see sites with the least dofollow links at the top. Then I use my сlassic link research approach that is called "look for domain names that make sense." Works for me every time. In this particular situation Platinumseoservices looks interesting. By clicking the Backlinks dropdown I can see that they have linked to Moz article from their own blog. If you ask me, that is a perfect outreach prospect. And I'm sure that by reviewing all of these 250 websites that link to Moz article with dofollow links I'll be able to find quite a few more awesome websites to reach out to and pitch our own article. And that is just a single one of the top-ranking articles for the topic that we want to rank #1 for. Just look at the Domains column that shows how many websites are linking to each of these search results. I'm sure if I review all of them, I'm going to find a lot of great outreach opportunities for promoting our guide to SEO audit. And once I'm done with the search results for the keyword "seo audit," I can brainstorm a few other relevant search queries like "how to find seo issues," "analyze website seo," "find SEO issues on a website," "diagnose seo problems," etc. These extra searches might help me discover a few more relevant articles that have links from cool websites that I could reach out to. And I know what you're thinking. "Tim, that is very cool but how do you actually persuade all these people to link to your article when they're already linking to your competitors? No worries, the entire next section of this lesson is devoted to answering this very question. And now let me show you another cool way to find articles on the same topic as yours, that have a lot of backlinks to piggyback from. And this time I'll be using the Content Explorer tool. Let's find all articles that have the words "seo audit" in their title. And there are over 2,000 of them in the Content Explorer database. Now let's see how many of these articles have backlinks from at least 20 websites. And we're down to only 100 results, which I can then order by the number of linking websites. And immediately I see a cool article by Distilled titled  "Technical SEO Audit Checklist for Human Beings". It has links from over a hundred different websites. Here's another one from Entrepreneur.com which also has a ton of websites linking at it. I didn't see these articles when I was browsing the top 10 Google search results for some relevant keywords just a minute ago. Which makes Content Explorer an awesome source of unique outreach opportunities that you most likely wouldn't be able to discover otherwise. But that's not all! If these articles have generated so many backlinks, there's a good chance that someone is going to link to them again in future. That especially applies to the articles that rank well in Google for their topic. Remember the "Vicious Cycle of SEO?" Let's take this article that ranks #5 for "seo audit." According to the Site Explorer tool, it has been attracting new backlinks quite consistently over the past few years. So wouldn't it be cool to know whenever some new website will link to this article? Because I can easily keep an eye on that with Ahrefs Backlink Alerts. I can setup alerts for a bunch of articles that get consistent traffic from Google and get an email notification whenever they get new backlinks. That is pretty cool, right? But let's move on to group #2: People, who published articles, mentioning your topic. Let's rewind back to my example of some Australian blog that was linking to SEO audit guide published at Moz. By the context of this link I can tell that the author simply wanted to reference a good guide to performing SEO audit. I mean, they don't really mention anything specific about that Moz article - just SEO auditing in general. In other words, they could be linking to any other article just as well. Now, where am I going with this? The chances are there are a ton of people who have mentioned "seo audit" in their articles but didn't bother to link anywhere at all. Let's see if that is the case using our Content Explorer tool. I'll search for "seo audit" again but this time not in the Titles but in the actual content of the pages. And I get almost 14,000 results. That's a ton of articles, mentioning "seo audit." But let's see how many unique websites they belong to? We have One article per domain checkbox for that. And we're down to slightly over 6,000 articles that belong to different websites. I can also filter by language to focus on English articles only. But that is still 5,000 results. That's not a number that you would be excited to review manually, right? But If you were watching my course from the very beginning, I'm sure you're now well familiar with the functionality of Content Explorer and how to narrow down your list of results using it's awesome filters. For example, I can use Domain Rating filter to focus on popular websites only. Or vice versa, I may target smaller sites because there's a higher chance to impress them with my content and persuade them to link to me. Alternatively, I can filter by the Search traffic. And I see that there are 40 articles that are getting over 1,000 visits per month from search while mentioning my topic "seo audit." I would totally go an extra mile to persuade these people to link to our SEO audit guide. Their articles get some decent search traffic, so if they link to me, some of that traffic will eventually land on my blog. And finally, I can use my favorite Highlight unlinked domains feature to differentiate between websites who have already linked to our own website and those who have never linked to us. The people who have linked to our website before should probably know us fairly well. So when reaching out we can use this "connection" to our advantage. But those who have never linked to us will require a more careful approach. More on this in the final section of this lesson. So that's how you find people who have previously mentioned your topic in their articles. Guess what I'm going to say next? You can easily keep an eye on the newly published articles that mention your topic with the help of… Drumroll please! Ahrefs Alerts. Just go to Mentions tab and click the New alert button. Put your keyword there, maybe even use the OR operator to specify a bunch of them in quotation marks. Select where you want to look for it - in title of the article, in content, or both. Exclude domains that you don't want to get results from. Like Youtube, for example,  or perhaps your own domain. And pick the frequency of updates. I suggest you to set this one to "Daily." Think about it. Being a blogger yourself, you're hardly excited when people reach out to you about the articles that you wrote months ago. But when you publish a new article and people reach out about it within days or even hours, you're very open to a conversation, right? That's why it is so important to use all sorts of alerts in your marketing and act on new outreach opportunities as soon as they land in your inbox. OK, so we have just covered two groups of people: those who have linked to similar articles and those who have mentioned your topic in their articles. But if you have studied outreach before, you might say that I'm missing out one more group of people that you could reach out to. That is group #3: people who tweeted articles on that topic. Let's search for "seo audit" in Content Explorer once again. This article from Moz was tweeted almost 400 times. The one from Entrepreneur.com was tweeted almost 200 times. I can click on these numbers and it will redirect me to a Twitter search for the article URL showing me who has tweeted it recently. Or I can click the Who tweeted button right in the Content Explorer and get a list of these people straight from Ahrefs' own database which I can then easily export. I know that a lot of blogging and marketing experts suggest that you should be reaching out to these people, who have tweeted content that is similar to yours. Yet I'm not a big fan of this strategy. Do you memorize everything you tweet? I certainly don't. I hardly remember what I tweeted yesterday let alone a week ago. So when I get outreach emails saying something like "Tim, you tweeted this article three months ago and I have a similar one which I thought you might be interested to check out..." I just click "delete." In my opinion "you tweeted a similar article" is a super-weak outreach excuse for anyone to care about. Especially if that tweet was sent a long time ago. Yeah, you could start monitoring Twitter for fresh mentions of your topics or when people tweet articles that are similar to yours. But why send these people an outreach email when you can simply tweet them back? "Hey, that's a great post! You might want to check out this one too... It talks about this&that which wasn't covered in the article you tweeted." So in my opinion, this is more of a "social media engagement" strategy rather than an email outreach strategy. But you don't have to trust me on that. Try it both ways and see what works best for you. And now, onto the final piece of the puzzle — writing insanely effective outreach emails. Part #3. How to write ridiculously effective outreach emails Let's go back once again to that article from Platinumseoservices.com.au that is linking to Moz SEO audit guide. What's the point of reaching out to these guys with our own guide to SEO audit? I mean, what do I tell them? "Hey there! The Moz article is bad, our article is awesome! So you should swap that link to us." Pretty sure this kind of outreach email will go directly to Trash. But I think I see a pretty decent outreach excuse here. This article from Moz is freaking six years old! In other words, by linking to this article they're giving their readers an outdated resource. Isn't that a compelling enough reason to send them an email? Now, in all honesty, our own SEO audit guide is not super-fresh either. It's 2 years old as of today. So we'll have to update it first to be able to effectively pitch it as a better replacement to that outdated article that they're linking to. And my outreach email would probably look like this: "Hey Ghan, I've noticed that you're linking to SEO audit guide by Moz from one of your articles. But I'm afraid that Moz guide is dated 2012, which means it's 6 years old and, therefore, massively outdated. We've just published an awesome guide to SEO audit at our own blog and I invite you to check it out! It talks about some new tech that is being used in SEO audits as of today and gives people rather clear instructions on how to audit and fix their websites. And If you happen to find our guide useful, perhaps you would consider linking to it from your article. Thanks, Tim" I'm sure you agree that it's a pretty decent outreach email, that feels personal and doesn't look spammy. All because I'm using a good outreach excuse - the reason why I am reaching out them. This is uber important! If you don't have a compelling reason to reach out to a person, don't reach out to them! Other than that, did you notice that my outreach excuse is focused around them, and not on myself. They are linking to an outdated resource while they could be sending their blog readers to a fresher and much better piece of content. So your outreach email should be focused on the recipient, not you! Why would anyone care about a random person who's reaching out to them out of the blue? So you have to find a way to make your outreach email about them! Just like I did in the example that I just shared. And to fuel your thinking process let me give you three common outreach excuses. #1. You know they are interested in the topic and your article provides a fresh angle that they can't afford to overlook. #2. You know they have a strong opinion about  something and your article has some new and unique proof that further reconfirms their stance. #3. You've actually mentioned them in your article and featured their work. As you can tell, the first two outreach excuses are very much alike. And they rely on the "Fundamental Rule of Content Marketing" that I can't stop rehearsing again and again. If your content is awesome and unique, many people would be happy to get a personal heads up about it. You can use the first outreach excuse if you're 100% sure that your article talks about something that your recipient doesn't know. Just make sure to articulate that something in your outreach email, don't make them read the entire article to find out what it is. And the second outreach excuse is all about sending them some additional details or arguments about the things that they already know. This could be a new case study that proves their point, or maybe some relevant news. Now, the third outreach excuse is entirely different. This time you're not appealing to their knowledge, but to their ego. Who doesn't like when others say good things about them and feature their work? If you ask me - I surely do! And whenever people reach out to me saying that some of my work was mentioned in their article, I feel like a total ass if I don't check it out and reply them to at least say "thanks." In marketing we call this strategy "EgoBait." So whenever you mention the work of other people in your article, you should always give them all the credit and you should always send them personal notes of appreciation for doing such amazing work. But like with any other strategy that I've shared in this course, it won't work unless it's genuine. If you try to shoehorn dozens of people in your article with a sole goal of EgoBait'ing them, trust me, that won't work. OK, so these were the three general outreach excuses that I recommend you to use when reaching out to people. But what about backlinks? So far we only discussed how to make people care about your outreach email and reply to you. But how do you actually persuade these people to link to your article? Well, I'm afraid there's no way to do it. Unless of course you offer them money or... kidnap their cat. Which is something that I don't really endorse. But I just showed you a nearly bulletproof outreach excuse, right? Linking to a six-year old outdated article is clearly a big issue that these guys would care to fix, right? Eh, not really. There's a good chance that they don't really see this as a problem. And even if they do, they might not use the replacement that we're offering them and swap that link to something else instead. I'm afraid there's no magic outreach excuse or a selection of words that would persuade these guys to link to our article right there right now. That's why I didn't even ask them to do it. At least not in a direct way. Remember how I framed my request? "And if you happen to find our guide useful, perhaps you would consider linking to it from your article." I didn't say "could you please link to our article?" That kind of request would cancel everything I wrote earlier to make my outreach about them. And they would obviously ignore it. Which is why I'm not being pushy with a link request. Remember the "Fundamental Rule of Content Marketing?" Well, I'm hoping that my content will do the job of persuading them to link to it. Not my direct request. And besides, based on my own experience, most people are very reluctant to go back and update their old articles. But if you manage to impress them with your content, many of these people will gladly link to it from one of their future articles. So this is how you write ridiculously effective outreach emails without being pushy or ruining your reputation in the industry. One last tip: follow-ups. I don't know who was the first one to say that it's a good idea to send follow ups, but from my own experience they do more harm than good. So I don't advice you to send follow ups! OK, maybe just a single one. I mean, have you seen any case studies where people got a lot of positive replies on their third of fifth follow up? I haven't. But I've seen quite a few cases where people publicly ridiculed bad outreach emails and those nagging automated follow ups. And that was my last outreach tip. But in all honesty, I could easily record another long lesson about outreach because I have quite a bit of experience being both the sender and the recipient. And I actually published two articles on the topic of outreach which I highly recommend you to read. And that's the end of this lesson as well as the end of this entire course. I sincerely hope that you enjoyed it and that you're going to put all those tips, tricks, and strategies into action and grow the traffic of your blog and the revenue of your business. That's it! Signing off now and hoping to hear from you soon! Bye!

Channel: Ahrefs

Views: 91,113

Keywords: blogging course, blogging full course, complete blogging course, blogging business, blogging for business, blogging for business free, how to start blogging, how to start a blog, how to start a successful blog, how to start a blog for free, how to start a blog for beginners, how to start a blog step by step for beginners, how to monetize a blog, blogging tips, blogging for beginners, blogging tips for beginners, blogging for dummies, blogging, content marketing, ahrefs

Id: chhuYT6jVPQ

Length: 200min 40sec (12040 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 21 2022