Growing Your Business Through Digital Marketing

When it comes to getting your site ranked on Google searches, the trendy advice you hear a lot is always just to create great content.

Which is great and you should be creating great content, but just having great content in and of itself is only going to get you so far.

So do you know what the number one factor after creating, excellent, relevant content for your target audience, when it comes to search engine ranking is?

It's links.

But links are really hard to build.

So how are you going to build them?

#1 Guest Posting

If you've never heard of guest posting before, it is basically you producing content for other people's blogs, and then they are linking back to your site in the author bio.

The way this usually works is that you find relevant blogs that are in your niche, and then you reach out to the blog owners, and you pitch them your idea.

Using special terms on Google combined with the keywords that you want to rank for, you can easily identify websites that allow for guest posting

Things like:

Are great ways to find sites in your niche accepting guest posts.

#2 Providing journalists with content aka Help A Reporter Out

When journalists need help producing a piece of content, where do they turn to?

They go to HARO and post questions for expert quotes etc.

If you can help them answer the questions they have, you can get some free press.

There are lots of big international websites like entrepreneur.com, inc.com, etc. that are using HARO.

#3 Using Side Projects to grow organic links

Side Projects can help you save your business (like Unsplash did for their mother company), but it can also get you a ton of backlinks when other people are writing about it.

#4 Broken Link Building

Over the years, websites come and go.

This also means the links that are included in pieces of content on a site.

This tip involves you contacting the webmaster of a website to report broken links on his or her website.

Of course, when you suggest a replacement, this will be a link to your website ;-)

#5 10x Content

If you create something epic, something so good that it is at least ten times better than your competitor that is currently ranking on number one of the search results page.

People are inclined to change the links they have in their current articles to updated with a better resource for their listeners.

Brian Dean coined this the Skyscraper Technique.

Subject: Hi [NAME], I just read your article “[ARTICLE TITLE]”

Email:

Hey [NAME],

I’m a long-time reader of your site, ever since I read “[OLD POST TITLE]”.

I just wanted to let you know that in your article “[POST TITLE](LINK)” you link to one of my favourite articles ever: “[NAME OF ARTICLE](LINK).

I absolutely love that resource.

You know what? I actually set out to make something similar: [YOUR URL].

It’s like [ARTICLE NAME], but more up to date and comprehensive. You may want to consider linking to my article from your page.

Either way, I’ll see you around at [SITE NAME] and I’ve also shared the post to our following on Twitter.

Have a great day,

[YOUR NAME]

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