Link Building | How I Got 3,157 Backlinks in One Year (Step-By-Step Tutorial)

link building is without a doubt the hardest part of seo you know you can't hack your way to the top it's based on reaching out to real people which can be intimidating and if you're just starting out as a beginner it can be really difficult to get those initial 100 backlinks to build your domain authority that's why in this video we're going to cover the exact link building tactics that actually work in 2022 and the strategies that i use to build over 3000 backlinks in my blog's first year this in turn grew my traffic to over 500 000 monthly visitors and now i make over 150 000 a month from my blog which i just started in january 19. so we're going to cover link building in 2022 and exactly what you need to do but before we get started make sure to watch my free blogging master class so we go over my exact content my link building my seo strategies and my affiliate strategies how i make over the 150 000 a month with my blog click the link in description below check it out and let's get into the topic for today first let's cover how backlinks were extremely important in growing my blog's traffic so here's my hrefs profile and you can see all of this stuff in the main profile here we have backlinks referring domains organic keywords and organic traffic and we can see the backlink profile and referring domains from when i started in january 2019 and this you know growth curve up to 2022. and we can see all of this has a direct correlation with the organic search traffic that i've been receiving over my in my blog over 500 000 monthly readers traffic valued at over a million dollars a month if i were to bid on it from an organic perspective so getting these backlinks you know made my site trusted in google's eyes and scaling the backlink acquisition was one of the most important things anyone can write content and create content but getting a lot of backlinks is the key and you know the way that you can find success and get more traffic to your blog so if we look at my you know my referring domains these are all of the websites that are linking to my blog adam and freud.com so we see if we want to sort it by domain rating to see the most authoritative sites linking to me we can do that we can see their sites like weebly wix dream host calendly hubspot business insider big commerce entrepreneur.com lots of you know really high authority sites so in this video i'm going to cover specifically how i got these links all these good links you know over 3000 active links that i worked for in my blog's first year we're gonna go over the main strategies that you can use to get these links too first we have to cover the fact that there is a major problem when it comes to link building advice out there you know i google something like link building strategies here and i see tons of different articles there's tons of um you know influencers here ahrefs neil patel brian dean at backlinko scm rush yoast and you know there's a complete list of seo link building strategies here 170 plus link building tactics you know and everybody teaches the tactics they teach the way to do it with an email right like broken link building the skyscraper technique do guest post outreach do these things and ask people for links in a certain way but there's a real problem with those approaches because they don't go into the human psychology of links and what they actually are links are a value exchange links are like the currency of the internet if you can get a link from a high authority site to your blog that has real value that has value in the real world that can boost your rankings so simply asking for that for somebody with not providing them anything in return is actually really difficult so the problem is there's a ton of different individual link building tactics but it's mainly you know email outreach and things that don't necessarily work if you don't have leverage and you don't have a relationship that's why it's really difficult they teach the tactics but ultimately it comes down to the real human psychology of link building and building real relationships all right so we know that there's a ton of different link building tactics out there 170 or more but how do we actually do link building strategies that work in 2022 let's narrow it down to the only two real link building strategies that i use and that is what i call guest posts are the engine and partnerships are the fuel so in order to get a lot of links to your blog you need leverage and you need the ability to provide links for other people remember this is a value exchange when we do our outreach when we send our messages we want to be able to provide something of value in return so i'm going to start you know showing you a little bit about how this works and how i specifically do it for my blog let's start first with guest posts so guest posts are a great way to build links from one site to yours by writing an article for another site and linking to your article on your website so here's an article of mine that i wrote a guest post on addthis.com this actually wrote in 2019 five ways to increase your ecommerce sales with pop-ups and banners um so if we go down let's actually find where i link to my blog so here's one it says uh back here's anchor text back that with your email marketing software and it links to my article on email marketing software so that passes page value from this individual article on addthis.com linking do follow link to my article on email marketing software and that passes link value that helps that a specific article rank it boosts my domain rating overall and it's a great way to get links so you'll see i also added you know another link into this one uh on landing page builders and then i have my guest author bio at the bottom and it's actually kind of funny this was back in 2019 so you can read that and see it says i'm a strategic partnerships manager for bigcommerce i was working full-time at the time and it has my link to my home page so in a guest post you can link a couple times to yourself uh to individual articles on your blog in the content that's key you want you want links in the content not just that home page link in the bio google's good at knowing the difference between what's in the content and what's in that author bio so you know an easy way a good way to get links to your blog is to work for them and do guest posts so i want to get into the guest post strategy in depth right now because it's really important that we understand exactly how to do this so first there's a number of different steps when it comes to guest posts number one is what sites am i actually going to write for who am i going to reach out to so that's number one finding the list of sites that you actually want to reach out to one interesting way that i do that is actually with hrefs so again i'm going looking at my site what if i wanted to find you know a competing domain of mine so i'm looking at my competitors according to hrefs and seeing you know other sites that rank for similar keywords to me and then based on that list i can see who's actually ranking to them so something like bloggingwizard.com i'm going to use that as an example so i'm going to go to blogging wizard great site i know them personally they're cool and i'm always friendly with the competition too so you can do this specifically for your niche but you can see look at their referring domains so look at competing referring domains in your niche or some of the big players in your niche and then you can just go by you know domain rating you can see dreamhost woocommerce wp engine a lot of great links here all you do is export that list so export the first 1000 you know referring domains from a competitor and that could be a good idea of sites to reach out to and you can sort it by domain rating you know filter it out get rid of some of the websites that aren't com there's a little bit of manual stuff there but that's a good way to initially you know build a list of targeted sites that you want to reach out to so maybe create a list of you know 100 sites as a goal and start doing outreach so now that you have a list of targeted sites you want to reach out to the next step is actually finding the right person to reach out to and message so in an example you know i wrote a guest post for flippa.com how i grew a blog to 500 000 monthly readers in under two years it's an interesting one i linked to my homepage i link to a lot of things on my site and i can kind of give you an overview of how i found the right person to reach out to you at flippa so what i did was i went to linkedin and i typed in flippa and i found the company page i went to that company page and then i went to all their employees so i'm trying to find the right person and typically the person you want to reach out to is like a content manager or an editor or something like that so now we have the list of all of the employees at flippa i'm going to search for the word content and boom this is the person that i would probably reach out to at flippa the content and marketing manager so that's the person that i would reach out to now i can reach out to them and connect with them on linkedin and then i can send a message to them directly there and then also what i want to do is you know get their email address and you can use a tool like hunter hunter.io in order to find their email address so you can put in the domain like flipa.com and it will tell you you know the the structure of their email so it might be first name at flipper.com or first.lastname at flippa.com it'll give you that structure so then you know based on their name on linkedin and the structure of the email exactly what their email address is so then next to that column in your spreadsheet with your domain rating and the sites that you want to reach out to you can start adding in that contact information so that's step two actually finding the person that you want to reach out to the third step in this process is actually sending an email message to your target contact and to do that you can you know send a kind of a templated approach but you want personalization in it as well you want a more targeted approach more of a sniper approach than a mass sending 500 emails based on a mail merge or something like that so here's an example of one that i sent and how i lay out my email i say hi becky my name's adam and i write to 500 000 readers per month at adamenfro.com where i talk about yadda yadda and this is a personalized sent so i say great post on this and i link to the post that we read and i always and then i had a couple extra sentence marketers are on the lookout for different things your art your article shares expert opinions this was very helpful now here's the key sentence right here i write 15 to 25 plus guest posts per month on high quality sites in the sas marketing and online business space boom there's my leverage point that's an interesting thing i'm not asking for a guest post directly i'm saying hey it's nice to meet you i write a ton of guest posts already maybe i can link to you so that's the value exchange i can link to you i'm not asking for you to link to me yet and then we say i wanted to see if we could talk about collaborating together via a link exchange and or contributing a guest post to your site let me know what you think ps you can read about me and forbes and entrepreneur so there's social proof built in here five hundred thousand monthly readers forums and entrepreneur links and i'm saying i can actually i do a ton of guest posts i can actually link to you so that's where the you know the leverage comes in and using links like a currency and saying i'm open to doing this but i can also link to you and that you know that type of outreach has a much higher success rate because i'm not just saying hey i want to write a guest post at high quality i'm saying i write a ton too and i can use these guest posts as link trade to get other guest posts so it really helps in your outreach and overall strategy now i have this now because i can say you know i write to 500 000 readers i've been informs an entrepreneur if you're just starting out and you don't have that you don't want to say something like i write to zero readers at here's my domain i'm a brand new blogger at this you need to find your unique leverage point so that might be your professional experience in your career you know when i first started sending these outreach messages i didn't say i'm a blogger with no traffic at adamandre.com i said i'm a you know digital marketing director at big commerce i was using my career as leverage because that was more impressive than my blog yet was so maybe it's your career maybe it's something an you know an insider knowledge that you have maybe it's a unique thing that you shared on your blog you need to find your unique leverage point only you can identify that but that's the part where you can really build the snowball effect of getting this to work because then once you start getting some initial guest posts um you know accepted then you can start using that as trade bait using it to build these real relationships with other websites show those as samples in your future outreach and it helps with everything so that's kind of how i look at framing an email message it's actually going after you know providing value to them what do they want typically links after you've sent your initial message to your target contact then the question is do they actually answer and if they do answer then it's time to get right into it and pitch a topic so here's an example email of a site that was in the writing niche that i pitched topics for you can see in this email it says we i say we'd be happy to link to one of your articles uh in our guest post in exchange for writing a blog post so they actually answered because of the link value that i shared and said that i can link to them they might not have answered otherwise so i say what do you think about one of these topics here's the topics how to start a blog for writers how to market your nonfiction book online how to outline a non-fiction book and how to self-publish a book on amazon so i typically pitch three to four topics to this content manager and you know they there's clearly a formula for this one is you gotta make sure it doesn't exist on their blog yet it would be bad if you pitch something that already existed and they already published two it really should make sense for their audience their audience comes first when it comes to these guest posts it's not about you and what you want to write it's about what their audience wants to read three it should be you know keyword optimized make sure that you know you're structuring this title in a way that makes sense i like to add like x-ways because like to do this or how to do this or you know make sure that it is based on target keywords and then finally like one nice thing nice to have is like if you can easily link to your a blog post of yours in it so like this one for example how to start a blog for writers i wrote a post on how to start a blog easy to link to so then they can say she got back and said awesome i think the first topic how to start a blog would be very interesting um they want to edit and approve any guest posts so letting him do that here are the guidelines so then they share the guidelines a thousand plus words yadda yadda let me know if you're interested so then you know that's when you start the process and you say okay yes i can write this guest post i'll have it for you in a couple weeks or something like that so that's the next step pitching topics and you want to make sure that you do it for things that don't exist on their site are seo optimized and are good for their audience so now the question comes who's actually going to write this guest post because i published 80 guest posts in 2019 doesn't mean that i wrote them all i actually outsourced most of them i wrote some of them but this is the tricky part right it's like man you're telling me i have to write all these blog posts for my own blog now i have to write all these guest posts to that kind of sucks well there's a lot of ways to do this one you can outsource the writing to a freelancer so you can effectively you know find a good freelancer and get a 1 000 1500 word article written for maybe 100 or 200 so that's a good way and then if you get links in that article that are valued higher than that or maybe you trade a link in that article or you sell a link in that article whatever you do you can make your money back on that another way to do it is you know you can outsource it or now there's ai writing tools so you can write something from scratch with a tool like jarvis so let's say i want to use or jasper jasper.ai and we can say something like i'm going to do this example of how to start a blog for writers for writers and then i'm going to put in like this article describes how to start a blog for writers and what you know book publishers can do to improve their reputation online continue title i'm going to generate some ideas and see what jasper comes up with how to start a blog for writers that's not bad tips for book publishers i'll use that one intro paragraph i'm going to generate ideas to come up with an intro paragraph so let's see what they come up with if you're a writer it's important to have an online present a blog is a great way boom let's use that one and open the editor so this is pretty simple let's see how quickly i can do this um setting up your blog the first i'm going to start writing so the first step in starting your blog is to get web hosting it's and then i'm just going to compose a long thing and see what happens this will give you a place to store your blog's files make it accessible online once you have a web post you need to choose a blogging platform wordpress it's time to create content this can be anything from short stories and essays to book reviews and author interviews be sure to post i'm just going to hit compose again this looks good in order to attract readership you'll need to promote your blog there are many ways to do this a very positive target audience some comments sharing links on social media submitting articles okay so this actually ended it a little bit early so we're going to kill this sentence off but we're going to go back to going here and let's let's try to start another paragraph um so we talked about web hosting we talked about promotion we talked about let's talk about um let's see when it comes to blogging writing content is important but link building is vital to compose by creating links to your blog from other websites you're telling google that your blog is an authority okay we got another sentence done boom so now we're just getting this down and let's see how long this is right now if i go to the total words word counter we're already at 345 words so maybe we need 1500 words so we could probably do that in a matter of 15 to 20 minutes creating that content that we can add our headings in we can add our links in and maybe with our ai writing tool we can actually write the guest post ourselves in about an hour or 45 minutes now remember you don't want to always you know you want to check this and make sure it's good writing but for guest posts we don't need to be you know perfect like we're writing them for our own blog so with an ai writing tool or outsourcing to a freelancer you can get the guest post written very quickly so now the guest post is finally written you can see it's published you might have to follow up a few times you send the google doc make sure the sharing settings are optimized so that they can easily see it your links are in and then you send it in the email you say here's my finished guest post please let me know when this will be published like what a rough publish date may be you have to push this process a little bit forward to keep it moving sometimes it could take two days sometimes it could take four or five months to get the article published it's completely based on that site's content calendar so as you can see here's my finalized article how to start a writing blog a guest blog by adam enfroy and you can see i linked right here but first let's look at why you should start a blog and that links to my own site early in the content and then it covers all these different things and it goes pick a niche choose a platform focus on delivering value optimize your content and all of that with my guest author bio so that's it you might have to follow up you get that but now i have a couple links pointing from that site to mine so then the question becomes okay so i can do this guest post outreach i can link to my own blog and then i can also trade those potential links like if i'm writing for a website and then i do future outreach i can say here's five articles i'm currently writing can i you want to link in one of those would that help me get a guest post on your site so all of this value exchange building real relationships with these people and when you start providing value and they show that you you know you can get them links they'll actually might probably start working with you more there's major influencers and people that are big in the marketing world that i actually linked to up to 20 times for free without offering anything in exchange before i did outreach so i might have linked 10 to 20 times to someone like smart passive income before i reached out for a podcast interview or a guest post or something like that so it's a big value exchange and like the more valuable you are the more links you can provide the easier it is to get links yourself so then the question comes well what do i actually link to then i have like say 100 articles on my blog or 50 articles on my blog how do i choose what to link to you know i have this guest post i have these partnerships and other people writing guest posts what sites or what articles should i prioritize well that ultimately comes down to understanding the url rating and how link value is passed so here's an ahrefs search for the keyword how to make money blogging this is one that i rank for it's a pretty hard keyword to rank for and i rank number three between two and three usually for this and we can see that there's all these metrics on the first 10 ranking sites there's dr domain rating ur url rating url rating is really crucial when it comes to ranking and understanding authority on a website because there's domain rating just because you have your domain rating is going up well each individual article's url rating also has to increase so when you publish something online a new article your url rating is typically 10. so it starts out at 10 and then the more links that you build to that individual article the higher that url rating goes and you can see the url ratings on the first page to understand the authority of all of these articles so when we look at this one we see they're very high like every single one is the lowest is 28 but that's wix.com and there's a lot of in the 30s 40s and even 1 in the 50s a couple in the 50s so and you can see all these domains so there's hundreds of domains or 40 domains 100 domains pointing to these articles now that's not you know those aren't all earned links a lot of the stuff in these seo tools is kind of random random spam kind of general links that you get so you can actually look in and see how many links there actually are we have to understand that url rating passes value from one article to another so if my url rating on this make money blogging post is 43 that's very high you know 10 is when you start gets up to 20 30 starts getting high 40s higher so if i link out from my make money blogging post with a high url rating to another website that passes a lot of value if this article only had a 10 url rating and i linked out to somebody that wouldn't be as much value so url rating plays a crucial role in understanding the value of links that you get so if you're asking for a link or you're doing a link trade you can try to find you know url ratings that are high because when you think about it if you're getting a link from a webpage to your blog how many links are pointing to that take a step further how many links are pointing to that blog post if there's a hundred links pointing to this authority post and you're getting a link from that one that's much more valuable than an article that doesn't have any links pointing to it so think of it as link juice as they say or link value passing from page to page so looking at the opportunities that lie in your niche is important so if i was just starting a blog today i would probably say i'm not going to write this article right now on how to make money blogging or try to get links to it right now because it's very competitive at this point in time maybe it's a little bit too late to do it but the key is if you could find you know websites that are ranking in the top 10 with a url rating that's lower maybe it's 10 maybe it's under 20 then that shows you that a lower authority page still has a chance of ranking on page one if it has good content so then maybe you start getting links to that article so you want to get links to your transactional money you know list posts as i talked about in other videos it's important that a good amount of your videos are a good amount of your articles are transactional posts so for example another one i rank for is podcast hosting and when we look at that one i rank number one for podcast hosting which is the 15 best podcast hosting sites so it's a transactional post it's a list post for affiliate revenue so those are the ones you actually do want to get links to and people say how can i get links to them it's really hard it's actually not there's a ton of different anchor texts that you can use so for example if i want to link to podcast hosting i would write something on a podcast type website about how to start a podcast or podcast recording equipment or a guest post on podcast software or something like that and i would link and use the anchor text something like you know when choosing the best podcast host or here are the top picks for podcast hosting you don't even have to include the url anchor text is not as important as it once was you actually don't want to spam your anchor text with the exact keywords you're going after the anchor text can be something like choose from this list or here's a list of the best something that doesn't even include the keyword because google is good at understanding context but you can see this one also has url ratings in the 40s 80s there's one that's a 16 but most of these are pretty difficult to rank for so what do you look for what do you look for when you want to start thinking about what to link to on your own blog well the strategy of this is a content assembly method so what you want to do is you publish content on your blog in a minimum viable format it's not going to be perfect every time that you publish it but you create a simple like viable post maybe you start with just the five best options and then you can eventually over time build it to 15 or 10 or whatever you want then you you see your initial search ranking viability so the more authority that your website has the more links that you have the fir the initial ranking will change so maybe when you first start your blog you see that you're ranking on page 10 for things not getting any traffic then you start building some links overall to a bunch of different articles your homepage links in the bio and then when you publish an article you're on page four automatically when you first publish it you're like this is good then sometimes maybe now you get more links in authority then you publish an article on a topic and that article goes to page two automatically or three so that's where authority raises all ships basically and when you start seeing that you're on page two that's when you wanna start building links to that article you look at the url our url ratings of the competitors you look at where you are ranking currently and it's something that's on page two maybe it's gonna get to page one maybe you need links for that one maybe you do need content updates but it's a constant cycle of links and content updates to get your content to rank so i would look at you know prioritizing transactional posts that can make you the most affiliate revenue in your niche ones that aren't too overly competitive where the first page is saturated with url ratings in the 40s and 50s something that you can viably rank for and something that you're creeping up the rankings for so maybe it's on page two or page three and some links will help boost that and then you look at your google analytics you look at ahrefs you see what you're ranking for and you see if that's going up or down so it's really based on data what you link to is never going to be perfect but we want to push our links to the right areas to build the right knowledge graph in google's eyes so when you're thinking about what do i link to try to link to just about everything that you're writing at first to get enough data and start to tell google what you're an expert in and then hone in over time on your transactional list post based on the url url rating of the competition and your current ranking to start to get to page one so remember you have to get to page one to make revenue and that's the whole point of link building building links in order to get to page one and then make money so we talked about guest posts the entire process of creating one publishing one and then we talked about figuring out what to actually link to but guest posts are not everything there they should really only be like 40 to 50 of your link profile the other one is made up with other tactics so i want to briefly cover that one in depth as well and that's what i call white hat link insertions so that's basically getting links in older articles that aren't guest posts by asking for them and how do you do that well it's based on leverage so let me show you an email example of that i reached out to a website here and they wanted to be featured in an article of mine so i had traffic to an article on landing page builders and a company reached out to me and said i want to be included in your list of landing page builders because mine was ranking so i was in the leverage position so they asked to be you know included now i'm in the power position saying you know i can do that but what do i want in return sometimes you can sell spots in articles if they're ranking really high for competitive valuable keywords sometimes if it's not quite worth it then that's when you want to ask for links in return so i was asked is it possible to get a good position in this article and also in the landing page article and he said yes you can give me the link of a blog and our team will find the best match to link to you and i said sounds good yep i can do that we can also link um so here's an existing stat and an article of yours that uh that works once again i'll get everything updated so then this is how i send white hat link insertion requests so they come to me or i reach out and say do you want to be added can you link to me then it comes to i'm asking for the link so i'm saying link from this article so i found and i searched this website so i can do something like site adamenfroi.com page and i can you know find any instances of something so for example if i want to try to find a link a good link for my landing page builder and let's say i want a link from hubspot i would do hubspot.com and search landing page so they have an article on landing page designs you can also use the hrefs um serp feature you know the chrome extension to show you the url rating of that individual article so it's a 55 really highly authoritative page i want a link from this one so i want to link to my landing page builder's article from this one and then i'm going to control f and try to find is there any mentions of builders yes there is i can get this popup off the screen oh it's just there so let me go and try to find landing page okay so now i'm looking through the article there's plenty of places i could ask for a link to my landing page builder's article so i could try to do it like something like into your own landing pages i could try to do it like many many of the other landing pages i could try to link there if you want to find a spot that can textually make sense for that link in a high authority article so i'm going to look here um otherwise minimal landing pages landing pages help people desire that's actually worth their precious time and energy so i'm looking through this article and we're talking about these different things let's see what else we have so they're giving examples here and you know we can find a good spot so they're talking about specific landing pages so it's a little bit harder in some of these spots you can see we have to really scan for it and find a good spot that would work so if i let's say i can't find it because that often happens what if i put the landing page builder because that's what mine's all about so they have an article that's like a product page they have an actual article on landing page builder so in this example they may not link to it because they actually have an a specific article on there but then let's try let's mix it up maybe i want a link instead to my web hosting article so they have the ultimate guide to web hosting so that's a 40 url rating i'm going to try to ask for a link in this one let's say perfect boom i would ask for a link right here so i could say hey hubspot like if that was the example of them reaching out to me i would say yeah i can do that but could you link to my web hosting services article from this anchor text right here so i find the spot for the existing anchor text and it could be here some web hosting services and that would link to my article the web hosting article so it would be linking to this one and i could ask for a spot there's tons of spots in this article i could ask for a white hat link insertion on i could do it here web hosting services i could do it here some web hosting services i could do choose the right web hosting service that would probably be the best one so i could ask for it that way and this is how i ask i basically ask and i say here's the existing link right here on your article change this to this or i can say here's the exact anchor text link to this let me know if this can be added and i'll update the stuff right away so when you're asking for a link you ask here's the you make it as easy as possible for them you say this is the link on your website i want the link from this is the existing anchor text that exists that will link to you know my blog and then here's the article on my blog so to ask for that is really simple but you have to get yourself into the leverage position in order to ask for that in the first place i asked for it and they get added every single time because i'm doing something in return i'm typically adding you know their content into an article or doing something of value and the question then is do you always do these like link trades no i don't i don't think that's good either but you can do you know a number of them if it's a big company like hubspot and their dr's 90 well then of course you know i want to link for them and many sites in your niche have interlinking and will link together so ultimately you want to ask for links in old authoritative pages and do your guest post links but this is all based on value you can start to see this is really based on value and leverage and building real relationships and having a backlog so again guest posts are the engine of link building and link trading and building relationships and then partnerships are the fuel you can get links from other people's guest posts you can ask for links in existing articles but you need to have the value of backlinks in your repertoire so that's the video on link building i hope it was helpful to you make sure to watch my free blogging masterclass i go over this way more in depth we have a lot more content there and you know it goes over my content link building affiliate marketing strategies how this all blends together because search intent keyword research what to link to how to do link building how to start ranking how to monetize the articles all of this stuff builds a successful blogging business in the 2020 so make sure to click the link in the description below and let me know what do you think about link building you know was this video helpful to you did it shed some light that there's only a few real you know strategies that work it's not about the tactics it's more about the personal relationships and psychology i hope it was helpful to you please like this video comment below and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Adam Enfroy

Views: 75,727

Keywords: link building, seo link building, link building strategies, link building seo, link building for beginners, link building tutorial, link building for new website, link building for bloggers, how to do link building, how to do link building for a website, link building course, seo link building tips, seo link building strategy, link building 2022, link building case study, link building tutorial 2022, link building tactics, link building in 2022, link building strategies 2022

Id: Kv5A15UPPHU

Length: 30min 38sec (1838 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022