How to Determine Which Link Building Strategy Really Works

Last week, I was privileged to join our Link Building Team with their monthly meeting – the time when they will lay down all the strategies they’ve done for the past months, the results, and how they can improve them in the months to come.

Last week was pretty special though because the team, after many months of sticking with the same strategy is finally going to move out of their comfort zone, and test different strategies.

So today, I will reveal three out of five link building strategies our team will be conducting, and how exactly we’re going to do these in the next couple of months. With the goal of determining which link building strategies (out of so many) are still effective even up to this moment.

1. The Skyscraper Technique

Thanks to Brian Dean for this strategy.

To help you understand, Skyscraper technique is a strategy that aims to create fresh and better content out of the existing ones in the hope of getting the same or even better number of shares, backlinks or mentions than the original content. But don’t get me wrong, you’re not going to plagiarize; instead, you will craft a better version of it.

How we’ll do it:

Step 1: We will look for link-worthy content – manually and with the help of tools. Based on the niches of SEO Hacker and our clients, we will look for relevant articles, check the number of shares, backlinks or mentions.

We’ll do this by searching topics on Google search, or by looking for topics using tools like Topsy and Buzzsumo.

Step 2: Craft something even better. This part will be quite challenging, especially with so many information available out there, “how are we gonna create something better?”

Thankfully, we have the most amazing and creative writers in the world.

Step 3: Reach out to the right people.

We want to make sure that we’re not just looking for relevant articles, but also creating a list of people who we can tap after we’ve finished crafting the content.

Who are these people? These are people who’ve already linked to an article on that topic, people that are interested in that topic and has the same niche as you.

Over the next few days, we will also draft email templates that we will use to reach out to these people. This will be part of the testing, and we’ll make sure to share whatever template we’ll find effective.

Brian Dean’s Link Building Case Study should help you understand more about this technique.

2. The Roundup Technique

Inspired by Heidi Cohen’s 3 Content Curation Superpowers, we came up with the strategy called The Roundup Technique. The goal is to tap niche-related experts, conduct interviews, write a roundup post and reach out to the right people.

How we’ll do it:

Step 1: List down topics, and from these topics, come out of questions. Questions shouldn’t be random at all, these should resonate your audience’s questions to make sure that they’ll not just read it, but will actually share it as well.

Step 2: Find niche experts. If your client is a Real Estate company, you can tap architects, engineers, real estate brokers – depending on your questions, and your audience’s expectations.

You can find these experts using directories, Google search, or BuzzStream.

Then email these experts.

Step 3: Create a roundup post. Creating a roundup post is very easy, in fact it’s so easy that you only need to be organized enough to be able to craft one.

To help you with creating a roundup post, read our guide for this: How to Write a Roundup Post That Gets Over 400 Shares.

Then you can do two things:

a. Publish it on your blog or client’s blog.

b. Offer it as a guest post to other niche-related website. Offering this kind of article actually gets higher acceptance rate.

Step 4: Promote your roundup post through social media, and by informing experts that your post is now live. Make sure that your article is easy to share to save their time – always remember that experts are usually the busiest people in the world. You don’t want to bother them all the time.

3. Broken Link Building

I know this sounds a little passe, but believe it or not, it’s still working for some, and we believe that will work for us too.

Broken link building is a strategy used by many SEOs to find pages that has dead links, and offer a replacement for it.

How we’ll do it:

Step 1: Find pages with dead links.

This is something that can’t be done manually (unless you have all the time in the world). You’ll need tools to help you. For our team, we will be using Xenu’s Link Sleuth and Simple Google Results.

Step 2: Organize your list. You don’t want a messy, and disorganized list of dead links. You need to filter it, and make sure that you will only tap the relevant and quality websites.

Step 3: Reach out to webmasters

This is the most important part of this strategy. If you fail with this, all your efforts with prospecting, and organizing your list of dead links wouldn’t mean a thing. Be sure you have the webmasters correct email address by using an email finding tool.

What you want to do is to send them a personalized email, telling them how much you love their content, and people will love it too, especially if it doesn’t have broken links. You can also email websites that you really love, and help them by mentioning that they have broken links and that you have a resource that they can use as a replacement.

Here’s a good example of a good template:

Hey (first name),

Just wanted to start off  by saying that I love (and I mean love!) (their site).

In fact, I spent my afternoon yesterday combing through a few of your classic articles.

This one was particularly amazing: (article link).

One thing, though: a link in the post wasn’t working. Looks like the site moved.

No biggie, just wanted to let you know.

Actually, I just posted an article that covers the same topic (article link).

As a huge fan I’d be honored if you’d consider replacing the bad link with a link to my content. If not, it’s cool. I’ll still read your stuff!

Thanks,
(your name)

Along the process, we will also experiment with different email templates, and will let you know whichever we find more effective.

Final thought

Now, these are just three of our main link building strategies. We have two more that we want to share with you as well. But, that’s not the best bit of it. Over the next few weeks and months, we will share with you the actual results of our strategies to help you identify which of these strategies is most helpful and effective, and above of all, to answer the most controversial question, “Is link building really dead?”

Stay with us as we discover answers to this question!