No one will know about your blog if you don't talk about it. There are already more than 600 million sites, and even within your niche, the competition is already stacked so high. One of the ways to increase awareness and, at the same time, promote your blog and up the rankings is to grow high-quality external links. But anyone who has ever tried it knows it’s not a task for the fainthearted.

Still, getting your blog exactly where you want it to be is possible. You just need to know how the big blogs are doing it — the secret is to get all the best links and then more. But like everything else, there is a right and wrong way to carry out an effective link-building campaign. So, in this post, we will talk about the features of link building for a blog or publication website and review some tips.

The Reasons to Increase Link Profile

The main task of the site is to move to the top. It is equally important for commercial and non-profit blogs. In the first case, the resource is to make money through banner advertising, custom posts, and promotion of goods or services. Non-profit blogs are often author's channels where like-minded people hang out, as well as company blogs.

Let's go through the specific goals that link building covers:

  • expand the target audience;
  • increase traffic and time on the site;
  • create a positive link profile;
  • increase recognition, and grow the expertise of the site and the owner.
  • talk about the product/service;
  • improve the trust of search engines.

How to Prepare the Blog

You can promote almost any blog, whether hosted on a paid or free platform. For a third-party project to want to post a link to a blog, the author of the latter will have to try. It is necessary to bring the resource into a form suitable for such promotion. So, what do you do? The good news is the options are endless. You can do it yourself or find a creative way to outreach this task as long as you ensure that you only pick suitable sites.

The success of a blog largely depends on what topic it focuses on. Ideally, each blog should have its central theme. Statistics show that you can write about almost anything on the Internet. But hey, the audience will also not read just anything. And even more so, other bloggers or webmasters will be picky about the blogs they link to. So, relevance and usefulness are pretty important for a blog topic. This is the recipe if you want to produce quality stories.

For the most part, donors who post links to third-party resources try to ensure that the topics of both projects are as similar as possible. Bloggers who independently search for suitable sites must consider this factor.

As you know, great importance is now paid to the design of blogs. Some webmasters use ready-made design templates found on the Internet. Of course, this approach allows you to save a lot of time and nerves required to create a unique design, but there is no guarantee that there won't be a blogger on the Internet (or even more than one) who has used the same template. In other words, high-quality and original design also increases the likelihood that your blog will be linked to it.

Features of Link Building for a Blog

Building link mass for a blog, corporate website, and online store is different. The difference is in the target audience you want to attract to the site.

Visitors come to online stores to order a product or service. Blogs are populated by users who satisfy information needs. They are looking for an answer to a specific question, reading life hacks and instructions, and viewing entertaining or educational content. Therefore, the sources of external links differ. For example, for commercial resources, a mandatory element of getting links is directories:

  • business directories;
  • mapping services;
  • website directories.

They don't matter to blog linking.

Ways to Get Links for a Blog

These are six techniques that work for a blog:

Outreach

Outreach involves receiving links through guest posts and writing reviews. It also requires interaction with web admins and site editors. The essence of the method is to find a blog or publication in your niche and offer to publish your article, which includes a link to your resource. The link can be either in the article or on the author's card. Publication is possible for free or for money, as agreed.

Preparing helpful content in the site's style and observing editorial standards is important because guest posting is not only a link but also works on your brand.

Crowd Marketing

Crowd marketing involves links from social networks, forums, questionnaire sites, and blogs. You can leave links in the comments under publications of thematic communities, which is an effective tactic for blogs linking.

Press Releases

They are suitable for publications and blogs. These are presented in the form of small announcement articles about launched products or the results of research conducted by the owners of the article.

As press releases have to be published in significant niche media and partner blogs, the blogger's main task is to find a suitable news feed. An example of a press release for a blog is the launch of a salary rating for Internet marketers, which contains a link to both the company and the material on the blog with the results of the first rating.

Link Baiting

Link baiting involves creating content, detailed guides, and manuals packaged in an ebook or white paper with media outlets and opinion leaders. Materials are announced on partner sites with a link to your resource. It is also a working way to collect an email database for mailings and receive additional links from social networks. Competitions are article competitions or marathons in any business among an audience with blogs.

Expert Opinion

Have you become an expert in a niche? Then, always give interviews and comments for other blogs/publications, with the obligatory condition of a link to your project in the speaker column.

Link Building Strategy for a Blog

A quick and accurate way to get quality backlinks to your blog is to adopt the link strategy of existing top competitors. For example, let's say you are creating a publication about internet marketing. Accordingly, you need to analyze the link mass of leaders in this niche.

Step 1. Analysis of the Link Mass of Competitors

To perform a mass analysis of competitors' links, go to Serpstat and select the Link Analysis tool – Competitors. We enter competitors' domains and pick the top three regarding the number of referring domains and pages for the next step - collecting a donor base. You can also use other tools for this task.

Step 2. Creating a Donor Base

Look at who links to our opponents and choose sites suitable for you. To do this, download a report from Linking Pages by competitor domains and sort resources by Serpstat TR and PR indicators (page relevance and authority). The higher, the better. As a result, we get a list of sites from which we will extract links. Clear it of non-thematic resources and obtain a ready-made donor base.

Step 3. Compiling a List of Anchors

Competitors will again help with this. Check what ratio anchor and non-anchor links are used and what keys opponents use to enter the anchor. When creating an anchor list, actively use non-anchor links to avoid getting filtered by search engines for spamming the anchor list.

Step 4. Strategy Development

Draw up a work plan: the number of external links that will appear every month, under what anchor, and the schedule for their placement. The strategy depends on your niche, the number of links your competitors have, and the budget you have.

To develop a link building strategy from scratch, look at your competitors' link growth to understand how quickly new links to their sites appear. Calculate the median appearance rate of backlinks, for example, 6(12) links from unique domains. Next, use your donor database and anchor list to create a ready-made action plan for the next month.

Step 5. Analysis of Strategy Effectiveness

Once you learn how to get backlinks to your blog, the work doesn't end. Make sure to monitor the emergence of new links that appear naturally. For example, when another blog links to our article. It indicates an increase in the credibility of your project.

Track lost links, those that have disappeared for some reason. If these are links you agreed/purchased, then contact the web admins and demand that they explain the reasons for the loss of the link and its return.

Also, control the increase in traffic on new links. To do this, first, add UTM tags to understand which source works more efficiently. If you see that there are few conversions or the traffic is not targeted (a high percentage of failures), try changing the anchor or modifying the content to and from which they link. If all else fails, remove the link and look for a new donor. Otherwise, untargeted traffic will constantly spoil behavioral factors.

Free Ways to Get Links

Of course, you should not rely only on these methods. However, at first, they can help you get your first links and try out ideas for link building in practice.

Commenting on Blogs

The fastest and also free method. You comment on thematic blogs by placing a link to our blog. You don't have to worry too much about checking blogs for no-index and nofollow. Just leave 3–10 comments on different blogs every day. Let's assume you plan to receive 100 such links in the next three months; to do this, you can select a 10x10 square field on a piece of paper and put a tick after each comment left. You don't know how many links this will give you, but the goal is a good motivation. Don't rush to leave 100 comments in one day.

Blog Services

You can create mini-representations of our blog in various blog services; you can simply write any entries there and leave a link to our blog, and you can write full-fledged blogs in several services and earn extra money with them, whatever you have time for. These blogs can be used repeatedly when you create new sites, and you will need them again. Registering accounts and creating profiles will take a lot of time. Set aside a whole day for this, even if you make an account just for the sake of one link, try to hide it, create a couple of posts, tell the audience briefly about yourself, and set a link in one of the posts.

Link Exchange

Before you offer to exchange links in posts, you need to revive the blog. There must be at least ten entries, several readers, and comments on the blog; keep in mind that you have a "zero" blog, and look for those for whom this is suitable. After writing your next post, type "link exchange" into a search engine and look for blogs with paid domains.

The next step is to check if there is a blog for exchange. Be sure to read the terms first, then put a link and write in the comments that you place it there. Now, you wait for a response link, save the link to this blog, and check after a week whether your link has been published.

This is the fastest way, but it is not very reliable: your blog may not be suitable, you may not like it, the blogger may be dishonest, the promotion may end, etc. The second method is on thematic blogs. We look for an offer to exchange links; if there are none, we look for contacts and personally contact the blogger with an offer.

Profiles, Forums, Your Sites

Remember which forums and social networks you are registered on and insert our links everywhere. In forums, putting a link in your signature and communicating is effective. In this way, a blogger can gain some kind of link mass in the first month. You can read about it in more detail on Social Hire.

Conclusion

Link building is a multifaceted process that includes various actions. This article lists all the available and effective ways to get links to your blog. However, do not forget about moderation: do not buy irrelevant links or spam with the same text anchors. Otherwise, search engines will filter you. In addition, increase the authority of your site in the eyes of readers to receive natural links.