What if I told you one post could earn 300+ links? And what if I told you none of those links were from outreach?

We create a lot of content. But we also do a fair amount of outreach. In fact, half of a content marketing specialist’s role here is to promote the work they wrote and built.

In the past, we considered a 5-7% placement rate a solid outcome, which meant our clients were seeing a cost per link of $650-$800 depending on the post.

Short term, this was great, but long term, some of our content performance started looking like this:

But wouldn’t you rather see a graph like this?

After some evaluation, we uncovered the ideal content type: the passive link earner.

In this post we’ll dive into this strategy and how we execute it for our clients.

Strapped for time? Watch our Director of Content Strategy Alex Heinz outline the full process.

What is Passive Link Acquisition?

Passive link acquisition is the method of acquiring links naturally through no method of manual link building.

Building links passively isn’t new, but most of the recommended tactics are using low quality methods of earning links (e.g. reciprocal linking, header/footer placements, badges, etc.).

Our new method focuses on three core steps:

Target keywords geared towards a link friendly audience

Build content around those keywords

Get it ranking

By focusing our efforts on these topics, it creates a natural link pipeline for our clients and frees up our time to not focus on grinding out links manually month over month. An example growth chart will look like this:

Months Post Publish

Number of Links

2

5-6

6

10

12

15

18

30

Our Findings + Methodology

To conduct this study we gathered 531 posts across a variety of industries (most notably eCommerce, SaaS, insurance, finance and home) and logged the following:

Cost to create the post

Total number of keywords

Links earned one month, six months, 12 months and 18 months post publish (using Ahrefs referring domains graph)

From this evaluation, we picked up on the following trends:

Links Increase, But Velocity Depends

Overall, we saw a general trend that the content created continued to earn links following the “active outreach” period in the first month. In some cases, that content earned only 1-5 more links over the course of the 18 month period, whereas others saw more explosive growth.

For content we defined as “passive link content,” the link growth over that 18 period time was as high as 900%.

More Keywords = More Links

At a high level, the content that saw passive link growth ranks for more keywords. Looking at the top 100 posts with the lowest cost per link, the average was more than 2,000. The bottom 100? A measly 4.

This may not be correlated necessarily as the more links a piece earns, the more Google sees it as relevant to rank for more queries. But it’s safe to say that the wider net you can cast, the greater chances your content has of being seen and linked to.

Domain Authority Implications

The next question you may be asking is, “how authoritative are these passive links?” If you’re not controlling who links to you, is it all just spam?

Looking at the top 25 posts with the lowest cost per link, the average domain authority was 21. This is lower than what we try to hit during manual outreach, but this type of natural linking activity is also what Google likes to reward so we’re less concerned about this as an...