“Where should I start from?” is a pervasive question when it comes to link building. Link builders put more emphasis on particular tactics when advising on a conference presentation or blog post. Most will tell you here are the pain points, go work on them, and you should be good.
However, that should not be the case. There is more to specific questions when on a link building initiative. And by the way, if you cannot build links effectively for your business, we offer the best link building services to customers via content marketing. Some of the incredible features we provide include lifetime post, not-sponsored label, and do-follow links. With our services, you can be sure backlinks to your site will remain active in the lifetime of the website posted.
The following are vital questions you have to ask before diving into the campaign.
1. How Am I going to Achieve My Goal?
Having a goal is just the initial step towards link building. The second step is determining what is going to help you achieve that goal. If you aim at getting links from ten new authority websites, an article on your blog is not the best way to accomplish that. But if you desire to get references from influencers from your niche, then blog posts would do just fine.
Here what you do is determine what blog post to create and how the influencers will easily see it.
2. What is My Goal?
It is a fundamental question yet overlooked by many. Several businesses just draft content and put it out there to generate links. The truth is links alone do not mean your business is going to be successful. You should know:
- How many links you want?
- What type?
- If the links are to send traffic?
- Are the links going to come from distinct sources?
- What if you get only two links and 10,000 social shares?
For you to actualize a successful campaign, you have to know how a successful one looks like.
3. What are the interests of my target?
Before even the process of link building, you already know who is your target audience. Now it is time to recognize what they are into.
- What does my target like?
- What does my target share with friends?
- What do they fancy writing about?
- Who are the people they socialize with most?
- What could be the similar denominator in that group?
By collecting information about your target, you have the upper hand in coming up with a product or commodity they will like. Make good use of Klout and Followerwonk to compare the target and know what they are really interested in.
4. Who will Get Me to the goal?
In link building, you have to have a specific target audience. Create something that interests them, and you can be sure your chances of being picked will be higher. Focus on the target group, and you could even grab some of their information, such as:
- Websites
- Names
- Social Profiles
- Emails
The following tools will help you find the above information:
- Buzzsteam Email Finder
- Rapportive
- Citations Labs Contact Finder
5. How does my target want to be communicated to?
I attended a conference some time back where one speaker said, if you needed to get to them, you had to find a less noisy medium. For the speaker, Google+ was too noisy and, therefore, hard to attend to. But his Twitter account was hushed, and it was easy for him to know someone seeks his attention.
In link building, you should know how your Audience prefers to be communicated to. Websites offer the best avenue to contact people. It could be via the blog post or a contact page. When attending a conference, for example, I usually connect on Google+ and Twitter. I avoid mentioning LinkedIn and Facebook since I never use them for networking purposes.
You can determine how the Audience wants to be communicated to by looking at their social feeds and contact pages.
6. What are my Assets?
Ask yourself, what do you have to offer your target that will bring them closer to you?
Take a keen look at what you possess. Look at the analytics and determine what has worked best for your business. Determine what content brought in the most referrals. Take a look at Majestic to see what resources drive the most significant number of links. Make good use of BuzzSumo to see what content has the most shares.
7. What could be the ideal time to get the Audience?
There is this one error I made some time back on a campaign that still haunts me to date. We came up with a blockbuster campaign that fetched some good money and was lots of fun except for one thing we did wrong. We inaugurated the campaign at a very inaccurate time.
During that time, several other contests were running. A trade show for the ‘big dogs’ was underway, which meant that was a congested time for our target audience. Had we waited for just another week, I’m sure the campaign would have performed much better. For your campaign to be unique look out for holidays, trade shows, and any meetings to avoid.
8. What Kind of Assets Should I design?
It is a crucial part of the link building process but manageable if you answered all the other questions right. Before answering this question, you already:
- Know your ambition or the end goals
- Know your Audience
- Know what you require to get to your goals
- Know what your Audience like
- Know how you can get to them
- Know materials that worked perfectly for you there before
Be aware of the assets you need to run the campaign, whether it is via mailer, video, blog post, or email. Then identify what assets you will require for the campaign. You might be required to post status updates, tweets, images or graph tags.
9. Who is going to execute the campaign?
We have all been in a brainstorming meetup where fantastic ideas were thrown from all corners but left without assigning any role to anyone. Assign roles on:
- Who will create the posts?
- Who will email the Audience?
- Who will follow up?
- Who will do the tweeting?
10. How to roll out the campaign?
Come up with a stringent plan on how the entire program should happen. Are you going to target a specific group of people first? When and how will you contact them? Is the Twitter team going to follow up, and if yes, after how what time period?
It would help if you planned out such things to avoid bombarding people with hundreds of campaign messages every hour. People hate lots of campaign messages.
While there is a plethora of unanswered questions during a link building program, these ten questions will direct you to a successful link building campaign. Please have in mind that not every campaign will be a walk in the park, but try and ask yourself the right questions and push it through.