The Cost-Effective Method of Building Links : For Beginners and Bloggers
Building links is one of the important white-hat strategies of SEO.
Big brands can pay huge money to SEO services to come up with solutions for this problem.
But can individual bloggers and small-time bloggers, gain links with very less money?
Recently I found a simple method of gathering backlinks to your website, using SEMrush.
This method can be called as the ‘Backstabbing’ method of building links in 2015.
Why to Populate Links to your Site from other Competitors?
SEO Things have changed from 2012 to 2015.
There have been lot of dynamic updates from Google to protect their “program” from link spam. Penguin is one of them.
So if you start paying your competitors to progress links to your site, you will end up on the wrong side. Probably instead of your rankings going up, they may tumult down.
In 1997, Google started the page-rank method of their algorithm. In this, some sites, if they found any useful article or content, would link up to that great article in their content or blog. As a result some link juice is passed down to the receiver site. As time went by, spammers started impeding this concept and started artificially building links.
But if you think, you can write great content and wait for Google to land your page on top rankings, that’s a dream!
First of all, it’s very difficult to write such great content within very less time. Next, expecting Google to rank your article on the top, is a myth. In 2015, the competition is very fierce and big brands are churning content like anything.
The only hope for individual and small-time bloggers like myself is expect Google to produce a lottery of chance to rank your article well.
Till now, I followed this “Trial and Error” of ranking articles. But I got bored up. So I wished to find a strategy, to gain more traffic. In that way I can increase my online income.
What is SEMrush?
It’s a SEO service that provides very tools and products to find competitor data, keywords, ad data and backlinks. In summary, you can say that it’s a club of services. I have already written an article on how to make money with this service, which is useful, if you want to both earn and learn from this product.
The basic package (Pro) of this service costs around $69/month. You can also get some discounts from time to time.
There is also a free trial of 14 days using some of the coupons found on the Internet.
This will give deep insight into your competitor’s data like organic search, paid search, backlinks, display advertising, organic keywords, ads keywords, keyword position distribution, main competitors, top keywords list etc.
Why SEMrush to Build Links in 2015?
There are lot of free tools in the market that can provide some “intelligent” data on your competitors. For example, you can use Google Keyword Planner to do some basic research.
But they do not provide the basic ingredient of backlinks to a particular site. Even if you go to other professional services like Ahrefs.com, OpenSiteExplorer you need to pay up good money.
Also the data you are getting from such services has to be authentic. Otherwise, you will waste money and time.
Another point in choosing a correct service for this back-stabbing method of building links is simplicity. If you can find links to your competitors within very less time, than the next process become very easy. You will save lot of time. That is another important element in this whole activity.
Also SEMrush spits data very easily and you can get a stylish report within very few minutes. You get an Excel sheet of data which you can use for later analysis. Also the spreadsheet is formatted properly and you won’t waste time arranging things.
So the final saying is that, “You will salvage lot of money and time”, if you use SEMrush.
Now the Back-Stabbing Method in short –
Using SEMrush, you are going to find the referring domains to your competitor. You can download this data, if you want. Just take a single entry and type in the URL. On the home page, search for “Contact Us”.
If you don’t find a word like that, search different methods of contact the admin or support of that website. Now prepare a nice email, explaining the quality of your article and the writing skills you have.
The first and foremost principle is, being honest in your email. So that the other competitor doesn’t think that you are spamming his blog. Now sensitively ask the competitor to include your content in his circles.
That’s it. That simple.
How to find Referring Domain in SEMrush?
Just enter the domain name of your competitor in the search field of SEMrush. You may get a doubt of how to find a competitor. It’s very simple. If you have Google Analytics data, just enter some of your queries or keywords in Google.
Find sites that are commonly appearing for your queries. These are your competitors. It may take a little time, but that’s useful. Since most of the keyword data, these days is “not provided” by Google, better use the query data in Google Webmaster Tools.
Once you enter the competitor domain, you will get lot of data. But that is irrelevant to our present content. So just do a search for “Referring domains”. You will land up on a small portion of data on the same page. You will find an “Export” button below it. Just click it and download the whole referring domains.
For example, I searched for “sevenforums.com” and I got about 5.000 referring domains. These are neatly placed in a Excel sheet already.
Writing a Great Email to Link Back to You?
As I said this before this second step is very important in this whole stage of building links. First of all finding the owner or support team of the website is the difficult task. So for that, you just search for “Contact” on the home page. Most of the good website owners, maintain a contact form or atleast give a support email to contact them.
Just for curiosity, Brian of Backlinko, using his Moving Man method of building links was able to have a conversion rate of 7%. That is, if he sends 100 emails, the response he got from the website owners was only 7. Even this method, requires the same time and effort, if you want to reap benefits.
A typical email could like this –
A simple email containing honest and authentic information about you and your website to get content promotion
Wait and Watch?
Now just wait and see if any of your competitor responds to your email. That is a solid proof that you have got a link back. But some people reject your request. Don’t dishearten.
Since there are around thousands and thousands of referring domains to a competitor you can wait and see, if atleast few of them respond.
Also, it’s not the quantity of backlinks, but the quality of the links that better. So for example, instead of building 1000 backlinks from irrelevant and spammy sites, 2 or 3 links from authentic sites can be boon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FRNKEHsxbI&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Otherwise, you competitor would never rank well for a keyword that you are ranking below him.
Conclusion
Till now, I just recently found this strategy on my own. For a health niche, I tried this technique and the results are to come. So once I’m successful with this strategy, I’ll also provide the analysis details.
This can be a huge success because, the Back-Stabbing method is also in the same line of Broken-link building and Moving Man method concept. Only difference is that you are giving a different valuable resource in each method.
It’s not only important that you gain backlinks, but content promotion is also vital. Using this method, you can ask the competitor to share your article with his email subscribers, promote on their social circles etc.
This can be promoting on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ circles and in many personal promotion events.
In this way, you not only get important link juice back, but also significant promotion to your website.
Do you believe in my method? Do you like to implement this method? If yes, how far you are successful? How many domains did you contact on each day? What are your different ways of contacting the author of a competing website? Please share your statistics in the comments section!
