In the current crowded market, people naturally gravitate towards the best. Your first step is to generate awesome pieces of content that other sites would want to link to. In a nutshell, you should have linkable content that a website owner would think could add value to their website and to their readers. Luckily, you can take steps to ensure your content stands out.

Here are the tips for creating valuable content that other websites will want to link to:

Get your own data: unsourced data doesn’t offer much value in the blogging world anymore. People are obsessed with authority and solid research, and when you write content with valuable data, anyone who wants to refer to it has to link it. A Moz and Buzzsumo’s report on the correlation between links and shares found out that people prefer to link to content that is evidenced or data-backed, specifically research content that provides new insights. 

 Pay more attention to your headline: Studies reveal that for every 100 people that see your headline, 20 will read more. This means that getting more exposure and introducing your content to the people who are likely to link, improve the conversion rate of your headline. Draft and redraft your headline while including words that elicit emotions from the reader. Try out as many headlines as possible to increase your chances of writing a kick-ass headline.  

Make it interesting, unique, and actionable: There are the three basic elements that make your content rise above the rest: interesting, unique, actionable. To make your article interesting means using the right tone and having a fresh take on the subject matter. If you are writing on a topic that has proven popular, tell your story or opinion from another angle to avoid being a bore. A unique article should have some original data and your personal side of it. An actionable article tells the reader what to do with the information you are providing them with. When a reader feels the techniques you are providing will help them realize positive change, you will get more attention, shares, and links.

Make it authoritative and well-sourced: The biggest part of generating content that deserves linking is by providing authoritative sources for your information. Outbound links undoubtedly form the basis of a successful SEO strategy. When you link back to other bloggers and websites, they are likely to return the favor. 

Write longer content: One of the most effective ways to generate links is to create longer and more authoritative content. People value longer, more comprehensive content. Studies reveal Google gives ranking priority to writings with over 2,000 words in length. Building the tallest skyscraper with your content means creating content that is more helpful than existing options. Consider turning a complex, text-heavy blog post into a more sharable and engaging infographic.

The most effective technique to get backlinks is to send an outreach email asking the recipient to link back to your site. However, creating email outreach emails takes sound strategies to ensure your emails are getting read. With the revelation that an average person receives over 90 business emails each day, you need to make yours stand out. Obviously, the trade-off between customizing emails and sending enough emails to increase your link prospects is a real thing, so you must find the most productive balance. With the right strategy, you can create an engaging copy that will get your prospects to take action and boost your link-building efforts.

The following are a few actionable tips to help you write better outreach emails.

Personalize and make it relatable: Keep in mind the target of your email doesn’t know you. Essentially, you have no more than 15 minutes to hook a stranger, arouse their interest and curiosity, and establish a connection with them. To achieve this, you must write a personalized email. Writing a generic copy that addresses everyone else may not incentivize the target audience to read it. Studies reveal creating highly personalized emails improves the likelihood of getting a higher response.

Make the pitch less than 80 words: After introducing yourself and building a connection with your recipient, ask for a backlink to improve your site’s SEO. Remember, your recipient is a busy person, so keep your pitch short and to the point. Experts recommend that your pitch should be less than 80 words. The longer your pitch is, the higher the chances of being ignored or the recipient reading it halfway.

Include a CTA: You should ensure you include a call to action on your email to drive results. State clearly what you want the recipient to do after reading your message. The ideal CTA should prompt the email recipient to link back to your site. An example we have used follows:
“We put a ton of work into this guide. If you think this guide could be helpful for your readers, would you consider sharing a link to this somewhere on your page?”

SEO research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines. Keyword research offers valuable insights into the queries that your target audience is searching for on Google and helps to find potential sites that could add your link. Keyword research helps you determine the topics that people care about and how popular the topics are among your target audience. These insights ultimately inform your content generation strategies. Once you know the keywords that enjoy a high volume of searches per month, it becomes easier to identify and sort your content into high-value topics that generate higher traffic and backlinks. To kick off this process, find sites within your target group and use Google Search and other Best SEO tools to come up with the topics, subtopics, and specific keywords you think are important to rank in the SERPs.

An important step to any link-building strategy is to find websites that are likely to link back to your site. You can start your process by finding the top content in your niche or industry currently ranking for your target keywords and target the sites that have linked to it, by using tools like Ahrefs. Create better all-around content than the page they are already linking to, this is known as the skyscraper technique. Afterward, send an outreach email to all those sites and persuade them to link to your article. 

The best way to find sites linking to your competitor’s content is using SEO tools to check competitor’s backlinks. The ideal tool will likely generate a massive list of websites linking to you and your competitors. Narrow down these results to a few websites that are likely to present the best link opportunities, making sure the sites are relevant, authoritative, and not spammy.

As mentioned earlier, email outreach is an important step in the link-building process. When sending cold emails to sites asking them to link back to your site, it is important that you use the right email address. Most tactics tell you to conduct lead research and compile a list of prospects to email. However, simply researching a lead won’t result in a perfect list of emails. Currently, finding a person’s email is harder than ever due to the fear of spam. Using an info@example.com email might get read, but it’s difficult to customize without knowing who will be on the other end reading it.

Here are a few ways to find your prospect’s email address in no time:

• Scan the site for the contact information. Also, if there is a page about the organization’s team or staff, be sure to check that out.
• Start with a basic LinkedIn search: Some prospects will put their emails directly on LinkedIn. Consider looking for a person via LinkedIn rather than just the website’s “info” email.
• If you can’t find an email on the website or LinkedIn, then you can also try the Facebook page for the organization. Oftentimes, you can find an email in the ‘About’ section of a Facebook page.
• Subscribe to a prospect’s newsletter for insights and real email

Once you have generated your prospect’s email address, send the email, being sure to customize each pitch accordingly. The best industry practice for customizing your email pitch includes:

• Scan the prospect’s LinkedIn, Github, or Twitter profile to find out if there is anything you can relate to. Highlighting these in your first message could make all the difference.
• Use a prospect’s name more than once: hearing or seeing our name sparks a chemical reaction in our brain. To get improved results during your email outreach campaigns, add a recipient’s name multiple times. Ensure you mention them in the body of your email casually.
• Send an email at the perfect time: send your email when it is most likely to be opened. Studies reveal Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days to send emails.
• Congratulate the recipient on their most recent achievement. This could include a new product launch or a successful marketing campaign. Mention the specific milestone in your email

To maximize the customization of your outreach, but also to minimize time spent crafting an email, we recommend using tools like BuzzStream or Pitchbox. These tools allow you to use placeholders that will autofill for most values, like names and URLS.

Relationships are undeniably the new cornerstone of a successful backlinking strategy. The best links are those from a related authority site. The most effective way to get a link from a high-ranking site is to establish a legitimate non-transactional relationship with the owners or the person running it. Identify the leaders and offer them something of value. It could be an expert opinion or a social media post from your social profiles. Though reciprocal linking is commonplace (I’ll link to your site if you link to ours), we recommend against doing it in most cases as recommended by Google in their webmaster guidelines.