How to Build Powerful Backlinks: A Discussion with 180 Marketing’s Founder, Jeff Oxford

So whenever we start a new link building campaign, there’s really two main things we’re looking at. The first one is, which niches are we going to go after? So like, you want, you want to brainstorm and see, like, Okay, we sell furniture. We can go after interior designers. We sell diamond engagement rings. We can go after wedding blogs. We can go after fashion blogs, you know. So you want to first brainstorm like, you know, who can we go after? Who’s kind of covering these types of topics. The next thing is, determine which strategy, which link strategy are you going to be pitch guest posting? You’re going to lead with product reviews, you’re going to create some content and promote it to them. Are you going to try to combine two into one? So if you really break down what a link building strategy is, it’s who we’re going after and how are we going to go after them.

Sure, and I’ll, you know, I’ll just get guest posting out of the way. Because, you know, guest posting is the only, like, one of the main tried-and-true techniques right now, where, if you just want consistent links, yes, you can write an article, publish it on someone’s site, and get backlinks. But it’s not the only way. So I want to focus also on, like, what are some other ways you can get links to an E-commerce site. One that we have a lot of success with is product reviews. So if you have, let’s say your product is between, like, you know, as long as it’s under $200 and your hard cost isn’t too much, you can just send it out to bloggers. They’re usually happy to review it because they get free stuff. They’ll write about it, include a link back to your website. So you get the benefit from the SEO side, where you’re getting some more link juice, but if the blog’s big enough, you can get some referral traffic and even some direct sales. So product reviews can work really, really well for E-commerce sites. Also focusing on scholarship links, where you just kind of, you create a scholarship. Typically, $500 to $1000 is a good scholarship prize, and it’s not like you create one scholarship, promote it to this university, create like another $500,000 scholarship, promote it to the next one. It’s just one scholarship, one time, and you can promote that to hundreds of universities. Now, I’ll be the first to say these links aren’t going to pass much relevance, and it’s starting to get a little more abuse, so it’s not as effective as it used to be. But in conjunction with an overall link building strategy, it’s a great way to pass some trust signals and some authority signals to the website. Another thing that works really well is just like discount code outreach. So, you know, assuming you can offer like a 10% or 15% discount, what we’ve had a lot of success with is creating like, audience-specific discount codes. So, for example, right now, with the pandemic, everyone’s talking about first responders. You’d be amazed if you just create a discount code for first responders. How many websites and blogs there are that are going to be looking to link to you? Same thing if you do it for nurses, same thing if you do it for like military—create like a unique discount page for each of these sort of, you know, linkable audiences. And there’s a lot of blogs, if you just do your research, for like, you know, military discounts or whatever, you can find these lists that are just linking the website. So that’s probably, as far as little work to most benefit, I’d say these niche-specific discount codes work really, really well. Yeah, and then the last one is content marketing. Which content marketing has the potential to be the most effective, but it’s also one of the most difficult, so I would never recommend starting with content marketing. I mean, definitely, if you can invest in making it a core competency, go for it. But if you’re looking for like, “I want to get links now, what do I do?” It’s going to be guest posting, product reviews, scholarships, and then kind of doing some discount code outreach.

you’re talking mainly link building or just overall SEO strategy?

Yeah, I’d say, I’d say content marketing has the potential to be the most effective. So if you’re in it for the long haul, right? You know, I think getting good, getting good at content marketing, is kind of the biggest payoff in the long run. It’s really hard to do. It’s really hard to create things that get links. There’s a lot of pitfalls that people make with content with content marketing, but it’s one of the most scalable things where, if you get good at it, you can create a piece of content and get, you know, dozens, or in some cases, hundreds of backlinks, if you kind of nailed how to accomplish that, whereas, like product reviews, it’s still one email, one link, one Email, one link, and so on. So I’d say content marketing has the highest potential, but kind of like we talked about before, you know, it’s going to take a while to get that payoff. So if you’re looking for something short term, I’d say, if you’re just saying, what’s the first, Jeff, what’s the first? I want to build links, what’s the first thing I should do? I’d say product reviews and even the discount codes.

Yeah. And for those listening like, you know, you there’s so much information online about content marketing, and I’ve been, I’ve made it my personal vendetta, little side story. Back in 2012 when I was working for one of my agencies, I came in and they did not have the best link building strategies. It’s like, you start All right, we’re going to get you listed on 600 directories. Then we’re going to use build my rank, got indexed, and all of our clients had huge, massive drops in the rankings, and all these links that used to help them weren’t helping them. And I had to be, you know, I was the manager, so I had to come in as the escalation point, like, try to keep these clients on. And I just remember after that, I’m like, never again. Like, I gotta figure out how, how to do this content marketing thing, so I don’t want to be in the don’t want to be in this position again. So it must be my personal vendetta. And I’ve tried a lot of things, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but there’s a kind of a few pitfalls that I can share with you guys so you don’t make the same mistakes I did, one of which is the topic. Choosing the topics, probably the most important part of content marketing, a lot of people creates things that are interesting to their customers because they want they want something that’s going to get links and get traffic and revenue, but that is oftentimes kind of a mistake, like you have to understand that the types of people that will link to you, that the blogs that have websites, are not your customers. They’re interested in different things. So when with our clients like we’ll create content specifically for the customers that’s going to drive traffic and maybe even drive sales, but we’ll also have another kind of group of content we create that specifically aimed at getting backlinks. So I know, for example, one of our clients sells refurbished computers, so we did a. Whole blog, long from piece about, like, electronic waste recycling. We got a lot of links from like, local county government websites that have, like, no recycling resources for citizens and other Go Green organizations. You know that did not appeal at all. So people looking to buy a refurbished computer, but it, apply, it worked really well for the people who can actually generate these backlinks, that’s like starting another point that can get you pretty far with content marketing.

Shane, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had that conversation with clients, the list isn’t going to drive sales, and you got to be like, Look, it’s not going to bring in sales, but it’s going to get backlinks. Your site authority is going to go up. All your pages will rank better, and you’re going to get a lot more sales that way.

I bet you do. So I actually built a tool called Link Hunter. You can visit at linkhunter.com. Link Hunter is great if you’re like a solopreneur, or you just have kind of one person doing link building. It’s just kind of one, you know, whether it’s an intern or a VA or what have you, and you just want links as fast as possible. So from all my years, all the mistakes I made, I basically took what works and kind of distilled it down to a link building tool. And it’s like when you go bowling, you got the bumpers on the sides where like it, you know, it doesn’t let you, it kind of guides you towards the past. That’s how Link Hunter is structured. Has like a step-by-step process that will, if you just kind of go through it, you’re gonna get backlinks. So it’s, it’s quick, easy, it’s cheap, it’s $49 a month. Has some cool tools. You enter a few keywords for the sites you’re looking for, it’s going to find a whole bunch hundreds of relevant websites. Will show you the SEO metrics of each one, so you can see how powerful that link’s going to be. It’s powered by Hunter’s API, so pull in the email details for every contact, and it integrates directly with your inbox, so you can actually send emails directly from Link Hunter. So quick and easy way to get started. But I’ll be totally honest, my team doesn’t use Link Hunter. We use BuzzStream. And the reason for that is, when you have 20 people doing link building, now you need something a little more heavy duty that’s going to have like, you know, user management levels and, like, different permissions and a lot more features. But if I was just doing link building on my own and I didn’t have like, a whole team, I for sure go with Link Hunter, just it’s designed for that.