Link Building 101 for Solopreneurs (with Bonus Outreach Email Templates)

Your website is up and running and you’re publishing insightful posts on your blog regularly. You are proud of your articles because they show your expertise and they deliver value to your audience.

But there’s a problem. They’re just not ranking in Google!

You’ve tried everything — designed them beautifully with Thrive Architect, did your keyword research, added an attention grabbing title, etc...

… But something is missing.

What’s missing is the one thing that separates the big boys and girls from the rest on the content marketing crowd...

The pros are actively building links to their content.

The reason I know they are, is because I used to work for an agency who offered link building as a service.

That’s right, getting links is so important that people pay agencies to do this for them.

Now, I understand that this is not something you budgeted for, so that’s why in this post I’m going to show you:

• 3 Link building strategies that will start working right away
• How to find websites that might be interested in linking to you
• How to reach out to those websites and earn their links (including copy/paste email scripts that work)

Sounds good? Alright then, let’s get started...

When you’re writing a post about Siamese cats and you link to a resource about how to potty train them, you’re telling the search engines that the resource you’re pointing to is valuable.

The same thing happens when you get a link from another website to yours. That other website is giving your site a vote of approval in the eyes of the search engines, which in turn helps boost your ranking in Google.

When ranking websites, Google takes a lot of factors into account. The exact composition and weight of all these factors is unknown, since they're part of Google’s “secret sauce”. Still, SEO experts invest a lot of time and effort to find out what these ranking factors might be.

After analyzing 1 million Google Search Results, Backlinko asserted that the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor (see, I am linking to this resource because it’s valuable for me, so Backlinko gets a vote of approval from me).

But backlinks can be earned naturally and/or artificially by websites.

Well-known and socially established websites tend to earn their backlinks naturally. This is what happened when I linked to Backlinko in the previous paragraph; I found their content useful and trustworthy, so I linked to them (gave them a natural backlink).

Similarly, Wikipedia gets a ton of backlinks as a trustworthy, widely known source, and that is one of the main reasons it ranks so well in the search engine results pages (or SERPs for short).

But, not all websites are as well-established and trusted as Wikipedia or Backlinko. Since natural links don’t come easy for less authoritative sites, they need to earn their links ‘artificially’, and this is where active link-building comes into the picture.

Link building is the action of acquiring hyperlinks (or just links for short) from other websites pointing at your own website. This is done by reaching out to website owners in the hope of a collaboration to earn a backlink from them.

What is Guest Posting?

Guest posting is a direct approach to link building, where you reach out to webmasters to offer guest contributions for their blog. If they accept your offer, you produce a high quality piece of content for them, and in exchange, they allow you to include a link back to your own website.

Simply put, that’s how you earn backlinks guest posting for other websites.

Wait… Isn’t Guest Posting Dead?

Matt Cutts, the former head of the web spam team at Google, expressed his distrust of guest posting solely for SEO purposes. He claimed that SEOs redundantly abused automated means of guest posting to the point where it got too spammy.

Since guest posting had lost its credibility, it was considered dead (a.k.a. no longer valuable in the eyes of Google). Later though, he added a correction to his rant where he explained that some forms of guest blogging are still legit:

So take note: spammy guest posting should be avoided.

Being associated with anyone publishing spam will hurt your search engine rankings instead of improving them. So, when an opportunity comes up, ask the following questions about any website you're guest posting for:

• Does it have spammy good-for-nothing articles on it?
• Is the traffic low?
• Has it been penalized by search engines? (Look for sudden and consistent drops in web traffic… that's usually a good Google penalty indicator)

If your answer is ‘yes’ to any of these questions, pass.

But if you recognize it as an authoritative site with decent content and high traffic, go for it. If you do your best to publish quality content, and you partner up with sites sharing similar qualities, you’ll have nothing to worry about.

Remember that in an internet overflowing with bad content, quality articles are always sought after.

Moreover, some webmasters don’t have their own editorial team, but use platforms like Upwork to get articles written, which costs them time and money. Therefore, a high quality and relevant guest posts will usually be more than welcome. It’s a win-win situation!

Link inclusion is an indirect approach to link building, where you look for opportunities to get mentioned in an existing article on a quality website. You can do this by drawing bloggers’ attention to an issue or a missing piece of information on their website, and offer help to fix it.

Typically, you would try to get a link on pages like:

• resources lists
• comparison articles
• reviews
• ‘best of X’ articles

Articles usually become outdated after some time. 

If you manage to find an outdated piece of content or even a broken link on a website, it’s a good opportunity to reach out and ‘help fix the issue’. Partner sites also benefit from this technique, as you help the webmasters maintain and improve their website.

Go ahead and look for ‘mistakes’ on prospective websites in your niche. 

To help you get the hang of where to look for opportunities, here’s some examples of what to watch out for:

• Articles missing important information

• Articles missing a product/service

• Articles with broken links

• Articles with outdated or missing data

• Articles missing interesting facts that you’ve created resources for on your own website

Don’t worry, this technique isn’t actually about stealing anything.

‘Link stealing’ is another link building technique, where you’re looking for blog posts that have a backlink to a certain article, and then acquire (a.k.a. ‘steal’) that backlink. You can do this by providing a better source of information to bloggers than the one they have originally linked to.

There are 3 steps to pulling off the link stealing technique:

1. Find the best article in your niche with the highest number of backlinks.
2. Create a piece of content that’s BETTER than the original
3. Reach out to people who linked to the original article and ask them to replace the old link with a new link to your higher quality piece of content

However, know that this technique only works if you can really provide additional value over the original article.

In fact, here’s a few things you can do to outdo the original article you’re trying to replace:

• More/longer: If the original article is a list of 20 items, providing an article with 50 or 100 items might add value. Check out 8 secrets that turn your list post from boring to amazing for inspiration on how to make good list posts.
• Better organized/designed: Some articles just look ugly and are hard to read. If you notice this in the original piece of content, you have an opportunity to do better. And don’t just copy the content, but also provide some of your own original ideas to make the new post even more awesome.
• Newer/Up to date: If the original article was based on old data, creating a piece of content around more recent and relevant data adds value.
• New discovery: If there have been new discoveries about a topic since the original piece was published that’s not referenced, your can make a piece of content that does reference it to become the better backlink pick.

The content you create must be a better version of the one you’re trying to replace. And since there were several links pointing to the old post, you have a good chance to steal at least some of them.

Moreover, if the original content received a ton of backlinks, chances are that these were natural backlinks. By creating a similar, but better piece of content, you increase your chances in scoring those natural backlinks too!

Use Google to find the best and most shared articles in your niche. Insert your main keyword and pick the best one from the first couple of results.

You can also use a tool like Buzzsumo to find the most shared articles in your niche.

Pop the winner article into Ahrefs site explorer (a free backlink checker), and discover the pages linking to it.

Assuming that you chose an article ranked on the first page of Google, there should be a fair amount of backlinks pointing to it. This number depends on your industry, and gives you a good indication of how many backlinks your content needs in order to rank on that first page too.

The pages that are linking to the original article are the sites you will reach out to because they provide potential backlink opportunities for you as well!

The internet is full of potential backlink opportunities. So, how do you find them?

Check out some of these easy searches you can do to help yourself find blogs within your niche — without having to pay for pricey marketing tools.

First off, open an Incognito window in your browser to prevent search results from being biased towards your previous browsing data, then try the following searches:

You can start simple by searching for the bloggers in your industry. If you’re looking for fitness websites to target backlinks from, just type in “list of fitness bloggers” into Google and you’ll be on your way:

inurl:

If you put the “inurl:[word]” modifier in your search, Google will search for sites where that [word] is in the URL. By doing this, you can easily find specific types of articles. 

For example, you can type “fitness blogger inurl:resources” into a Google search to find fitness blogger resources pages, or “whey protein inurl:comparison” to find comparison pages of whey protein products:

Depending on your niche, different types of inurl: searches might work better for you. Some ideas that you can try are:

• inurl:resources
• inurl:comparison
• inurl:review
• inurl:best
• inurl:list
• etc…

This Google search modifier lists pages that have a specified word in the title tag.

Sometimes the words we looked at in the previous inurl: section, are not actually present in the URL. That’s when this modifier comes in handy. In this search result you can see that only the title tag contains ‘review’, but the URL doesn’t.

So, if you type “soy protein intitle:comparison”, you’ll get a list of posts about soy protein with the word ‘comparison’ is in the title:

“keyword”:

The "keyword" search modifier will show you pages where an exact keyword is mentioned on the page.

You can combine this with the previous search modifiers I discussed too. For example: pull up “strength” intitle:comparison. This particular search will then list all the pull up-related comparison articles that include the word “strength”:

After conducting these searches, you’ll end up with a ton of URLs which carry potential backlink opportunities.

In order to facilitate your outreach, you’ll also want to capture them in a structured way. The easiest way to do this is on a spreadsheet.

Create a spreadsheet with the columns you see in the example below and collect the URL, title, and niche data within them:

Quality over quantity — an old saying, but couldn’t be more relevant when it comes to link building. Backlinks from authoritative, relevant and trustworthy websites are what you want. It’s crucial to filter out low quality sites, because backlinks from these can be harmful.

So how do you determine whether or not a website is a good fit for you to pursue a backlink from?

Ask yourself the following questions for each of the prospective sites you’ve discovered so far:

None of the indicators we’ll cover in Questions 2 and 3 will matter if the page you’re targeting to get a backlink from is not relevant to your niche.

For example, if you run a website about new fitness trends, you’d welcome a backlink from sport, fitness, or diet related websites, but getting a backlink from, say, a construction-related blog might be more likely to harm you.

To help you increase your list of viable backlink sites, approach your niche from new angles.

For example, let’s say you wrote a fitness trend guide. There may be some great opportunities for you in unexpected areas like:

• Family magazines — ways to keep fit as a mom
• Lifestyle blogs — fitness trends for the new year
• Beauty blog — the sexiest sports of 2019
• ...

When assessing a potential partner website for guest blogging, check for other guest contributions, or even guidelines about guest contributions. Sites that already have guest posts are more likely to accept yours.

A nifty Google search trick you can use to look for specific content within a single website is the command “site:URL”. So by typing “Site:exampleurl.com guest contribution” in the search box, you’ll quickly find out whether or not there’s any text about guest contributions on a particular website.

Let’s quickly discuss a few important technical details about link building:

Domain Authority (DA)

DA is a metric Moz created to predict how well websites rank in the search engine page results (SERPs), on a 1-100 scale. The higher the DA, the better the chance a site has to rank well in the SERPs. This metric reflects the authority of the website as a whole.

Page Authority (PA)

This metric predicts how well an individual page ranks in the SERPs, on a 1-100 scale. The higher the PA, the better chance the page has to rank well in the SERPs.

PA is useful when you’re assessing an individual page — for example when you’re doing link inclusion or link stealing.

You can check what these two metrics are for sites and pages by installing the free MOZbar extension to your Chrome browser. Then you can simply click on the Mozbar icon and check these metrics whenever you visit a website.

A bunch of free tools on the web enable you to check bulk DA’s and PA’s, such as this one or this one.

Go back to your list of the potential backlink opportunities, and copy/paste the URLs into one of these tools. Export the data into a sheet and sort the URLs based on DAs. The higher the DA, the better.

You can ditch blogs where the DA is lower than it is on your own site, or anything below 30ish (as a rule of thumb). However, if you think a site has the potential to grow, it’s smart to get the backlink from it now and then reap the rewards from that investment later.

So now, go back to your URL list, and fill in your spreadsheet with relevancy, PA, and DA metrics to see which sites are the best fit for you to pursue backlinks from:

After this, collect the best contact email addresses possible from the sites you’re looking to establish a collaboration with. You can use Hunter.io, which will find you up to 100 connections/month for free, or any other tools recommended from this Ahrefs blog post.

So now that all your research is done, it’s time to do the hard work of actually reaching out to these websites...

I know it’s scary, but don’t worry, I’ve got some great tools and suggestions here to help you with that too! Onward...

After you complete your research phase and find some trustworthy sites with backlink potential, it’s time to reach out to their webmasters to inform them about your intention to collaborate.

When you reach out to a website blogger for a backlink, ensure that the collaboration will bring value to them as well. This value can be exposure on your social accounts, or even a referral link.

It’s a common approach, to offer a backlink for a backlink. Let’s say, you own website A and B, and you reach out to a blogger who runs website C, in the hope of getting a backlink from C to A. Inform them in your outreach email that you are working on a post on website B, so they can get a reference from there, if they are interested.

If you’re not sure how to go about all this, you can use these templates for inspiration:

When your outreach list of quality blogs you'd like to guest post on is ready, you can start the process by sending something similar to the following email template:

If you don’t get a reply immediately, don’t worry — send them one or two follow-up emails over the next few days. However, do not keep bugging the poor blogger forever!

After 2 or 3 attempts, assume that they are not interested. Send them a final parting email that leaves the gate open for a potential collaboration at some point down the road:

If they do reply back to you at some point, you can negotiate what type of content they want, and then work out how to make it a win-win opportunity for the both of you.

Similar to our previous example, your link inclusion outreach email has to be personal. 

Something like this template:

Again, send follow-up emails once or twice. If you don’t get a reply, say goodbye with a note that you’d still be looking forward to a future collaboration — just like I showed in the previous Guest Post outreach section.

After your well designed, comprehensive and detailed backlink magnet is ready, you can start reaching out to those blogs that have links to other articles you want to 'steal'.

You can use this email template for inspiration:

If you don’t get a reply, send a follow up email once or twice, and then move on. More than likely, they will link to your article if it’s truly better than the original one.

If you’re ready to start bumping your placement in the Google search engine rankings, these link building strategies are there to help you get some extra backlinks besides the natural ones you’ve already earned.

I am not going to lie, link building is a lot of work. But as soon as you get the hang of it, it becomes a natural extension of your website management duties.

But now that we’ve covered how to get started, the rest is up to you!

What do you think about these link building techniques? Do you have any questions? Leave them in the comments section below for me.