If you want to get good at link building,
you need to practice. And one of the best reachable goals you can
set for yourself is to build your first 100 quality backlinks. Why 100? To be honest, it's a bit of an arbitrary number. But for a lot of low and mid competition niches,
it's enough to get a meaningful amount of organic traffic. For example, this golf site gets around 4,500
monthly search visits with around 150 linking domains across their site. This low authority travel site has around
175 referring domains and gets over 4,000 monthly search visits. And this parenting blog with around 70 referring
domains gets over 5,000 monthly search visits. Most importantly, building 100 quality backlinks
will give you the practical experience you need as a link builder because you'll have to
communicate with a lot of different people. So in this tutorial, I'm going to show you
how to get your first 100 backlinks using tried and tested tactics. Stay tuned. [music] Backlinks are undeniably the lifeblood
of higher Google rankings. And once you start getting them, organic
traffic often climbs in tandem. But not all backlinks are created equal. I often see new sites that start by building
low quality backlinks with comment spam, forum links, PBNs, and links from coupon sites. And sometimes, these backlinks are enough
to move the needle initially. But building low-quality links can be a dangerous
game to play because they can literally wipe your site off of Google. Now, while link building can vary from niche
to niche and even from page to page, there are a few tried and tested tactics that can
work for anyone with minimal experience. So let's start with the easiest method and
that's to start with organizations, communities or clubs that you're already part of. Whether it be personal or pleasure, in everyday
life, we integrate ourselves in communities. That can be anything from a law association
to a non-profit organization to a school's parent advisory board. If you're a part of one of these organizations
and it's relevant to your site, ask for a link. Oftentimes, they'll have team or advisory
board pages where it actually makes sense to link to your site. Start here because it's about as
easy as it gets. But that's only one link. So let's get into our second tactic. And that's to use HARO to build
authoritative links to your homepage. HARO stands for Help a reporter out. It's a service that connects journalists with
sources and sources with journalists. After you've signed up as a "source," you'll
get emails with a list of queries from journalists at various publications. And these include Business Insider, The New
York Times, and USA Today to name a few. Now, there are tons of requests that come
in on a daily basis and the majority won't be relevant to you. So you can set up a simple Gmail filter
to sort through the noise. Just go to your Inbox and click on the caret
to bring down Gmail's search options. Next, set the "From" field to haro@helpareporter.com. Then, you'll want to set the subject to HARO
within square brackets since all of their emails include that in the subject line. Finally, set the "Has the words" field to
any keywords you want to monitor. And you can also use the OR search operator
to include multiple keywords or phrases. Click Search to see the results your search
filters would include and check out some of the emails to ensure you're
getting relevant results. If everything looks good, click on the caret
again and then click Create filter. Now, even though we've filtered down the results
to relevant ones, it doesn't mean journalists are going to cite you just because you responded. And while you should go the extra mile to
provide unique and insightful information, half the battle is in responding to
the right questions. So to increase your chances of getting mentioned,
look for queries where they're likely looking for multiple experts on the topic. For example, in this query, Bustle is looking
for relationship therapists as in the plural of therapist. And they want to know more about
boredom in relationships. Now, the description is even more clear
that they want multiple experts. She says: "I'm working on an article called
"13 common mistakes that lead to boredom in a relationship." So more likely than not, she's looking for
multiple experts that can fill in the blanks in her outline. So if you happen to be a relationship expert,
provide your best answer and then move on to the next query or carry on with
the rest of your day. Bottomline, HARO is a super-easy way to get
high quality backlinks because the journalists are the ones that are soliciting sources
and not the other way around. I'd recommend using HARO without
an end date in mind. The quality of links are just that good for
the amount of effort it takes to respond. Alright, the next tactic is to do
some guest posting. Guest posting is when you create content
to be posted on another website. And generally speaking, that post comes with
attribution and a link back to your site. Now, while some sites won't allow you to link
to yourself within the content, most will, as long as it makes sense and adds
value to your guest article. So the first thing you need to do is find
websites that are likely to accept guest posts. To get started, you can use Ahrefs Content
Explorer, which lets you search through billions of pages and get SEO metrics for all of them. Just search for a topic related to
your niche and run the search. Next, let's set a Domain Rating filter to
weed out both very low and very high authority websites. So I'll choose a range like 30 to 60. I'll also check the "One page per domain"
box since we don't need to pitch the same website multiple times. Finally, I'll set the "Published" filter to
the past 90 days, which will help us narrow in on websites that have published
or republished content in the last 3 months. Now, we still have around 90,000 websites
to pitch, which is just way too many. So let's head on over to the Websites tab,
which will show you the top 100 websites from your results. And to get a better idea of which sites would
more likely accept guest posts, let's sort the table by Authors, because if there are
multiple authors on that site, then there's a higher chance that they have
guest contributors. Now, it's just a matter of looking at the domain
names, visiting ones that look relevant, and pitching your guest posts. Now, it's important to note that while guest
posting can be a great way to build links, what often gets overlooked is that when you
write for reputable sites, you have the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise to an
audience that someone else has built. That means you can get exposure
backed by trust. And since time is finite, it's worth prioritizing
websites that will likely provide the best overall value for your time and expertise. Alright, the next tactic works great for experts
in their field and that's to do podcast interviews. Much like guest posting, being interviewed
on a podcast puts you in the spotlight as an expert in front of someone else's audience. Now, the thing I love about podcasts as a link
building strategy is that it only takes around an hour of your time and links are almost a given
if you choose your podcasts appropriately. A lot of podcasts have "Episodes" pages
on their websites. And these pages almost always include
a link back to the guest's website. So to find podcast prospects, you can simply
reverse engineer a podcast interviewee's homepage backlinks. So assuming you were in the SEO niche, you
might look at Ahrefs' backlinks because a few of us have been on some podcasts. So just go to Ahrefs' Site Explorer and search
for ahrefs.com and set the search mode to URL since again, podcast links usually
point to the guest's homepage. Next, go to the backlinks report. Now, since Ahrefs is a pretty established
brand, you'll see links from various sources. So to narrow in on just links from podcasts,
just search for "podcast" in the Include box, and set the filter mode to search in
the URLs and titles of referring pages. From here, you can sift through the results,
visit relevant pages, and pitch yourself as a guest when appropriate. Another great thing about podcast interviews
is that oftentimes, hosts will also link to other resources that are mentioned
in the interview. So it's actually possible to get links to other
pages across your site if it comes up naturally in your conversation. The benefits to being on podcasts
goes way beyond links. You get the chance to meet like-minded people
in your industry and building your network can go a long way even from an SEO perspective. Alright, the final thing I recommend you do
is email outreach for your best content. Now, don't get me wrong, getting links to
all pages on your site is a great thing. But chances are, you won't have time to do
outreach for every single page on your site. Plus, it's a lot easier to promote something
that's unique or insightful versus something that's informative, but generic. For example, let's say you have a personal
finance site and you have some unique data on how the pandemic affected
credit scores across the nation. That's interesting and it's probably something
that people in your niche will actually want to be contacted about. And if they're impressed by your content,
they'd probably link to you in existing or future content. Whereas a post on let's say, "What are credit
cards," could be well-written and informative, but you probably won't have anything to say
that's much better than what's already out there. At least enough to motivate someone
to link to you. Now, there are so many ways to do outreach
for links and your approach will vary depending on the topic and angle you'll be taking. So instead of going through a hypothetical
example, I strongly suggest watching our link building module in our SEO for beginners course
or if you've already had some exposure to email outreach for links, then check out some
of our more advanced tutorials in our link building playlist. I'll link up both in the description. Now, you might be wondering, how long
will it take to get my first 100 backlinks? There really isn't a definitive answer and
I don't think speed should be your goal especially when you're just starting out. Think of link building like eating
steamed broccoli everyday. It may not be the most exciting or delicious,
but just as broccoli delivers essential nutrients to your body, links deliver trust and authority
to your website, which results in higher Google rankings. So what's important is that you stay the course,
implement these tactics and iterate on them as you get hands-on experience. Getting high quality backlinks isn't easy. And that's probably why it's still
a ranking factor. So go and try these tactics out for your site,
and if you enjoyed this tutorial, make sure to like, share and subscribe for more
actionable SEO and marketing tutorials. I'll see you in the next one.
