In search engine optimization (SEO), links are crucial ranking factors that can significantly impact your website's performance and rankings. This is why site owners launch link building campaigns to get high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites to increase their organic rankings and traffic.
However, instead of going out of your way to contact site owners for links, consider earning them instead.
This post tackles what earned links are, why they're important (and arguably more valuable than link building outreach), and how you get site owners to link to your site naturally. Let's go!
What Are Earned Links?
To help you understand what is link earning, you must know what it takes to launch a link building strategy nowadays.
Whenever you reach out to site owners for a backlink, they usually ask for payment to publish your guest post with a link included to your site or insert a link in an existing page on their site. This is normal because high-quality online publications are simply trying to capitalize on the demand of getting good backlinks to your site.
Earned backlinks happen when websites voluntarily link to your site page. You neither asked them to link to you nor paid for the link placement on their website. They did this because you have achieved earned authority--they found value in your content, and linking to it allows them to provide the same value to readers.
What is the Purpose of Earning Links?
The reason to develop and execute a link earning campaign is it complements your link outreach initiatives.
The latter requires you to contact highly qualified link prospects asking for backlinks constantly. And since not everybody will reply to your messages on time, you'll have to send follow-ups to remind them of your previous message.
This goes on top of paying websites to publish your link, which is an added expense to the messages you will send them.
You won't have this issue with link earning as part of your "SEO earning" efforts-- it doesn't require as much resources to generate high-quality backlinks for your site. The main idea of this link acquisition type is to create content that search engines would rank for its target keywords, and people find valuable enough that they'll link to it.
To be clear, you may not generate as many links as a link building campaign. It depends on how high the content ranks on Google search before more people willing to link to your content can see it. But when done correctly, you can expect the links to come rolling in!
What Do Earned Links Have to Do With Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing involves promoting a product or service through the seller's unique affiliate link. To get this link, you must join affiliate networks that partner with different brands.
To earn from affiliate marketing, launch affiliate campaigns to encourage as many people to click on the links you got from the affiliate program and purchase the products. For every successful sale, you will earn commissions online for each item sold.
Now that you know how to earn from affiliate marketing, you aim to generate as many sales as possible. The most common way to do this is by setting up an affiliate site and generating as many highly qualified visitors as possible to convert into buyers.
But, you must integrate SEO into your affiliate marketing strategy to generate more affiliate sales and grow your affiliate marketing income. That means creating high-quality content and generating as many high-quality backlinks as possible to increase your site's organic traffic.
This is why getting earned links is a vital tactic that affiliate marketers like yourself must focus on when building their affiliate marketing strategies. Links can positively influence your search engine rankings, which primes your website for affiliate marketing success.
12 Examples of How to Earn High-Quality Links
As a site owner or affiliate marketer, acquiring links naturally and in the easiest way possible is in your best interest. Below are different link earning tactics you must include in your marketing campaigns to increase your revenue and affiliate income.
#1 - Launching a Content Marketing Strategy
Invest in creating high-quality, engaging, and informative content for your website.
In particular, you need to develop content clusters on your site where you create as many informational articles as possible on a topic or category in your niche and interlink them. Optimizing them using tools like Surfer SEO allows you to rank them for their target keywords too.
Creating useful content targeting multiple keywords relevant to your niche via content marketing increases your site's chances of ranking for its keywords, improving its visibility and allowing more websites to link to them.
#2 - Using the Skyscraper Technique
Instead of creating as many content pieces about your topic as possible, you can hone in all your efforts on building massive how-to guides that you will create for your content.
Also known as the Skyscraper Technique, this is where you research content related to your topics that generates the most backlinks, create a much better version of it on your site, and wait for it to rank on Google.
To create this content type, you need a tool like Ahrefs that lets you check the pages of your competitors with the most links you can replicate on your site.
From here, consider using a content optimization tool to increase its chances of ranking on search engines. Aside from Surfer SEO, you can use tools like Frase to show relevant keywords to include in the content. Legiit also has freelancers that can optimize your Skyscraper content using this software.
#3 - Popularizing a Term
In case you're wondering, Brian Dean of Backlinko popularized the "Skyscraper Technique." a tactic that existed long before. But he brought more eyeballs to it, thanks to coining a special term to describe what it does. And this is something you can do as part of your link earning strategy.
Ironically, to help you develop a branded term for a tactic, strategy, event, or phenomenon that people in your industry experience, you need to use the Skyscraper Technique to identify content that people link to and put your unique spin on it. If done successfully, people can associate the term with your brand, improving online credibility and visibility.
#4 - Conducting Original Research
Publishers love linking to statistics as they help reaffirm their beliefs and make their case to their audience. That's why you must develop ways to gather data and turn your findings into statistics people can refer to in their blog posts and content.
The easiest way to do this is by running a short survey on your website. Create a form using JotForm asking questions to respondents. To increase the response rate, make the survey easy to answer by asking multiple-choice questions.
Then, embed the form on a page on your website and promote it on different social channels. You can also email your subscribers about it to increase its reach.
Once you've collected enough respondents, you can write a post on your website about your findings and add your insights about it. This allows you to show statistics people would want to link to and share your expertise about the subject.
#5 - Creating Infographics and Visual Content
You can leverage infographics and visual content to attract publishers to link them to their blog posts. And the great thing is that it's effortless to create infographics with available tools like Canva and Visme. Choose from its pre-designed templates and edit them as necessary.
For the best results, turn your best-performing pages on Google search into infographics. Once done, embed the visual content to the page. This allows you to make your page more "linkworthy," thanks to the infographic that makes the content much easier to understand.
#6 - Offering Free Tools
Tools are a great way to build links naturally to your site. However, creating one that people can easily use from their browsers requires you to have web development experience. Not to mention, your tool needs to fill a gap or demand in the market for it to truly attract the attention of your audience, resulting in more backlinks.
Thankfully, you don't need to create a complex tool and software from your website to generate organic links. A standard tool you can easily make is a calculator. For example, Jon Dykstra has various calculators published on his site to help visitors compute content cost, content ROI, and more.
His audience finds this valuable because he caters to site owners running an affiliate marketing business or making money off display ads. More importantly, he creates these calculators using JotForm as well, so you don't need coding experience to create them.
#7 - Participating in Online Communities and Forums
The same concept as building relationships with influencers applies here. Join relevant online communities and forums and start interacting with members by replying to their threads. Make sure to add value to the discussion and not just copy what other people say.
Eventually, your contributions will not go unnoticed. Some online forums allow you to unlock features that only the best members can get, like badges, titles, and other forms of recognition. You can even add a link to your profile page or a signature that appears at the bottom of your forum posts.
#8 - Building Relationships with Influencers and Industry Experts
Find micro-influencers in your niche who you should contact and strike a friendship with. Aside from looking at their social media followers, email subscribers, and other metrics that determine their influence, check how frequently they reply to other users and retweet their content on their feed. A tool like Buzzsumo can show you this information.
But where does link earning factor in the equation? Once you've forged a relationship with influencers, there's a chance they might check out your profile that links to your site and browse your content. If they like what they see, they might share the content on their social media, if not link to it on their sites.
This process won't happen overnight. In fact, it'll take some time before influencers would check out your content if they do. The goal here is to build the relationship organically and let nature take its course. If you have good content worth linking to, they eventually will.
#9 - Interviews with Industry Leaders
Once you've built strong relationships with influencers, cash them in by interviewing them on your website. Set up a video call and record it using Zoom or similar. Do your research and ask questions that previous interviewers haven't asked the influencer before to ensure that you deliver something new in your interview.
Once published, expect the influencer's followers to share the post on social media and link to it on their websites.
#10 - Hosting Events and Webinars
Holding industry webinars, workshops, or events is a great way to showcase your expertise, gather attention, and earn links.
To get started, you need to use a webinar platform to host participants during the event from their browsers and download the recordings. It could have features like screen sharing, poll, chat, and Q&A to make your webinars more dynamic and engaging for attendees. Finally, a platform with a landing page creator where you can gather signups is also a plus.
To help you earn links from webinars, choose an evergreen topic to discuss and upload the recordings immediately after concluding the event. This allows you to attract links even after the webinar is done.
#11 - Opening Yourself Up for Interviews
Create a page on your website allowing you to accept free interview bookings using Calendly or similar. The only catch is that they must link back to your site, on top of other requirements, to make this link earning tactic worthwhile. The more authoritative you have become over time, the more inquiries you should receive from people booking an interview with you.
#12 - Offering scholarships or sponsorships
For local business owners, create a sponsorship program to attract educational institutions. This can help provide their students with financial relief to continue their education, which is attractive to these institutions. Just iron out the details, including a link to your site, and fulfill your end of the contract.
Earned Link Building: Is It Worth It?
Setting up an earned link building campaign is worth every penny in your marketing efforts as it helps you grow your traffic and potential revenue.
But what stands out with the tactics above is how they help you build a sustainable online brand that you can be proud of!
By building relationships with your target audience through the content you create and via social media, you create a positive brand image in the public. And once people start seeing you as an expert and influencer, they can't help but link to your site.
And to help you get started with link earning, get help from Legiit's content creators to write optimized content that will attract links from authoritative websites. Filter through writers and designers with the best reviews and ratings to help you identify the best freelancers to hire for your project.
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