Succeeding with a startup blog is hard. Especially in our day and age where pretty much everyone is trying to start up something. The markets can get pretty saturated, and the competition is enormous.
It can be even harder for bloggers since setting up a website isn’t really that difficult or costly anymore. Just get a host, install a template, and you’re pretty much good to go.
If you’re looking for ways to grow your site, increase traffic, and find new audiences, you should consider link building.
Of course, it’s not like you will get some backlinks and your blog will instantly explode (although that could easily happen). There are way too many factors that can have an influence on your success.
But, it is a reliable way of growing your online presence if you really put effort into it.
So, What Is Link Building?
It is the process of securing inbound links that point to your blog from other blogs or any other online resources. It is mostly done through outreach, but there are lots of other ways of building links that don’t involve this.
Although the highest-quality backlinks that bring you the most value will probably require you to do outreach in one form or another, we will return to that later.
How Exactly Does Link Building Benefit Your Blog?
Link building is very good for your online presence in a number of ways.
- First of all, it is an SEO ranking factor. The more links from big, respectable, high-authority websites with large audiences you have, the higher your own DR grows.
If you get links from authoritative websites, Google will start viewing your blog as a trustworthy resource and that can help you improve your rankings quite a lot, which will, in turn, boost your visibility in search results.
- Also, the website that’s linking to you is basically redirecting a percentage of their own audience to your site which is always a good thing. Of course, the amount of traffic will vary greatly from website to website and from link to link, but the potential is enormous.
- Finally, link building can even help speed up the indexing of your site. For example, if a crawler sees a link to your site on another resource, it will follow it. That’s also why you should interlink your own pages and posts.
It can take up to a couple of months for a crawl bot to index your site on its own, but if you upload a sitemap or use a tool that informs Google about each time you modify your pages, crawlers will know exactly when and what to scan.
So, it is well worth investing your time in building some links.
But How Do You Do It?
There is a number of ways you can go about link building, but let’s start with the ones that don’t involve any outreach since it’s usually much simpler.
- First of all, you can repurpose your own content and turn it into a different format. Convert a blog post into a YouTube video, for example, and put the link back to the original article in the description section. It’s not exactly Forbes levels of importance, but it is a place to start, and it is definitely a backlink.
- Look for questions relevant to your niche in places like Quora, Reddit as well as other message boards and forums. So, if you run a bakery blog, you can answer questions like “How do I make pumpkin spice whoopie pies” or “best frosting recipes”. Give a genuine, informative reply and plug your content while doing so.
What About Outreach?
But the juiciest links you will ever get definitely involves outreach. Let’s start with the simplest and then scale up the difficulty with each way of securing backlinks through outreach.
- Unlinked mentions. Sometimes it just so happens that someone mentions your blog or brand but forgets to turn that into a real link, or doesn’t do it for one reason or another. It will most likely be enough to send that person an email asking to turn that mention into a link. Just be polite and clear about who you are and what you want.
- Broken links and inferior websites. You can look for websites relevant to your niche and look through their backlink profile. You can do that, for instance, with the Ahrefs SEO analysis tool. Look for dead links that point to now-missing articles on the same topics as your own content. Then, email the owner of that website, informing them about the 404 and offering your article instead.
It’s pretty much the same process for links to inferior content, except this time you’re looking for backlinks to articles on the same topics as yours, but worse. Shorter, less informative, etc. Email the site owner and offer your content in place of it, but be clear on how exactly it is better and why it will be beneficial for them to link to you instead of the other blogger.
- And finally, guest blogging. This is the surest way to build quality backlinks, but also probably the most time-consuming. It is exactly what it sounds like, and you’re basically exchanging a piece of content for a link back to your own blog.
The Best Way to Get Backlinks Is Through Quality Content
This is true for absolutely any link building strategy. You need to write something that’s worth linking to and clicking on. So, until you feel like you have written a solid article, you probably should concentrate on doing that before moving on to building links to it.
Link Building Will Help Your Startup Blog Grow Faster
Link building is not a thing that you do and instantly win the attention of the entire Internet. You have to take tons of stuff into consideration, including your search engine optimization, competition, etc.
But, remember that in order to build some real links, you need to have great content. Content should be always at the forefront of your attention and you need to know how to write it well and who to market it to.
Once you’ve secured that, through link building, you can boost your traffic, metrics, grow larger audiences, and establish connections with other bloggers and companies.
