ULTIMATE GUIDE TO LINK BUILDING
YOUR OWN HIGH-QUALITY, LEAD-GENERATING, BRAND-BUILDING CONTENT Ideally, by the time you get around to pushing your own content on others for link consideration you have amply warmed up your link prospects by promoting them, helping them spread their message, and demonstrating that you both care about the audience and the industry as a whole. By engaging your link prospects in this manner, you have sown the seeds of trust. They are now more likely to consider mentioning work you have done—work that does not directly promote them in some way. Especially if it’s great content.
Examples of High-Quality, Lead-Generating, Brand-Building Content Ideally your content pushes your industry’s thought forward, delivers relevant traffic, confers a bit of reputation on your brand by association (from where you earn mention and links, or, if you publish it offsite, from the publisher’s brand), and even generates business leads. That’s quite a tall order, right? Isn’t this supposed to be a book about link building? Well, we believe that this sort of content is the highest form of link building, in that it satisfies so many different objectives simultaneously. It’s what we strive for in our own marketing, and it’s what we urge our clients, prospects, and the market as a whole to work toward. No, it’s not easy, and it takes a lot of attempts before you start really getting it right. Here are some examples of content that does it all right (forgive our hubris in mentioning some of our content here—note that it should also help you in the content-creation phase): n n n n
Link Building with Content: How to Attract Links and Leads 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity How to Research, Create, and Distribute Highly Linkable Content The Link Prospector
People, Work Hours, and Cash Required Creating this kind of content—whether it’s a tool, article, video, or whatever—requires significant investments of time. There’s no easy way around this one! At some point you have to put your position or your organization’s position out there in a format that’s going to help you achieve multiple business goals simultaneously.
Notes and Tips To make your content more linkable and reputable, you may have to go to the experts in your organization, and lean on them to share their time and expertise (the same 126
n CHAPTER 18 / PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER