Like any other campaign, it all starts with determining the objectives or goals of the campaign. A few words on this and then we will have a look at what link building can look like. This article talks about some of the ways of starting a link building campaign.

Keep in mind that although what you are doing is called link building, you are actually involved in a kind of online marketing, for which planning always starts with objectives or goals. Your objectives should be first of all realistic and relevant.

Realistic meaning that they should be achievable in the kind of time frame you have in mind and with the resources you already possess. Relevant means that link building should, preferably, not be a goal in itself but rather lead on to the bigger road to achieving some form of success or progress for your business, organization or individual you are promoting. This article talks about some of the ways of starting a Link Building Campaign. Follow me as we will look at that together in this article.

For example, get links from 15 popular blogs, sounds like a nice goal to have,but will this have an effect on the overall growth of your business or organization? Do you have the content ready to convert this new traffic into users or customers, or to maintain a long-term relationship with these new visitors? Suppose you have 200 new visitors during the first week, but your website had no content in that time and most of the visitors had a quick look and left unimpressed. Did your goal achieve anything in the bigger picture? It actually did some harm,

because quite possibly most of those users will not come again even after you improve your content, because they will think, ‘Yeah I remember the site, I was not too pleased’.
So setting objectives is key to starting out right, because if you do not, anything you do after that might be effort, time and resources spent in the wrong direction, a direction which might even do you harm.

Lastly, remember that although linkbuilding is a part of online marketing, it is different in the sense of the time span of its results, which are not going to be instantaneous as opposed to putting up an online advertisement or a television commercial. This does not mean that your campaign has failed. Neither should you promise instantaneous results for any website that you do perform linkbuilding for.

What are your assets?

Like barter in old times, if you are going to get links from other people, you need to have something that they are interested in as well – the reason that a blogger or a website owner would care about what you have to give; something that attracts them enough to put up a link for you. That reason is what we call an asset and it will differ from one website to another, and it also depends on whether you are a business, an organization or an individual. Assets need to be relevant for the people you want to attract. Below are a few examples of what an asset could be:

• Data
• Content
• Products
• Services
• Community

Lastly, remember that money is no longer an asset you can offer in linkbuilding. Although some might say it never was a preferable one to begin with. Google actively penalizes SEOs, websites and/or individuals involved in buying links.
Links come in many flavours.

Next, you will need to plan what kind of links you need and in what sort of mixture. Linkbuilding offers the opportunity to implement many kinds of linking, depending on the needs of a campaign. From deep-linking which involves making links to pages deep within a site structure, to a specific product or piece of content, to brand-linking which means creating links that contain your brandinformation/the name of your company.

You can come up with a sketch of your requirements after you do a complete analysis of your website and link profile. Be on the lookout for areas of improvement and innovation. Here are a few examples of the kind of linking to choose from:

• Links to your homepage/mainpage
• Deep linking
• Brand linking
• Links that contain target keywords
It is good to build a campaign with a diverse linking strategy for optimum results and a more comprehensive link profile.

Social links

As long as we are discussing types of links, we have to mention so-called social links. These are the links from social networks. Even though they are not as relevant and powerful as links posted on other websites, it is speculated that social links do have some value in determining ranking, as they can indicate the level of quality of a certain page.

If a certain page is shared a lot of times on social networks, it means that it provides some kind of value, and this usually indicates high-quality or original content.

This is one of the reasons why social media marketing has become an important part of online marketing, and thus it can be related to search engine optimization.

Besides being present on social media and engaging with your followers, another why to encourage social sharing directly from your website is to use social sharing buttons, which can be installed as a plug-in on your website.

Looking for your people

Now that you are on your way and ready to start your campaign, you will need to think about the type of people you will be contacting to ask for links and attract as linkpartners. It is best to make sure that whomever you reach out to is someone who is interested in whatever your content is, since reaching out to people randomly leads to a low response rate and even lower ratio of success.

One of the ways to ensure better responses is to place ‘hooks’ in your content. No, you will notneed a hammer for this.

A hook is something that makes a potential linker interested or committed to giving your content a fair chance, an element that makes the viewer stay put and wants to finish what you have to show, share or say. Here are examples of a few hooks:

Interesting news

• Ego-bait
• Humor/Funny
• Controversial/Edgy/Brazen
• Data visualization
• Competition
• Audiovisual content

Social mediawebsites, like Facebook or LinkedIn, are great places for you to get a feel for how people are spending their time in virtual spaceand how what they are sharing with others.

Identify patterns in the content being passed on and try to work those elements into hooks, which you place in your own content.

Once you feel you have come up with a potential list of people who might be interested in linking to your website, you can search for that list creatively on a search engine.

So, for example, if one of the target linkers you have identified is a travel blogger, you search for a list of travel blogs and then use a tool like the Scraper plug-in on Chrome to get all of those URLs copied off the results page in one go and paste them on to a working page on email or a spreadsheet.

Use a tool like URL Opener to open all the sites with one go. Look for any contact info on the sites, which could be email address, Twitter or LinkedIn account, Facebook page, etc.
Tools like Followerwonk will allow you to search Twitter bios and accounts for keywords of your choice.

So, if your website is about cigars and pipes, offering products and reviews, you could look for keywords like cigar aficionado with blogger or pipe enthusiast with blogger or just tobaccoblogger or cigar blogger to get a list of people with Twitter accounts who have blogs related to your own content. You then download these results into a spreadsheet.

Next, you will want to find out as much as possible about these potential link partners you have come up with to help you craft a message that is as personalized and relevant as possible.

Do not send out emails that seem like automated messages with a template. Think of this as SEO for a person rather than a search engine. You will want each person to like you as much as possible if you are to entertain hopes of having a high success rate with your list.

It is also efficient to sort the link targets in the order of priority when doing your outreach. Of course, they will have varying importance and priority in terms of how much Page or Domain Authority they have.

Secondly, they might be sorted based on how many followers they have on social media. Lastly, their relevance to your specific field may also be a factor in prioritizing.

An advisable minimum Page Authority for your targets would be 1 and for Domain Authority a figure of 25. They can be lower or higher depending how long your list is. Use MozBar tool to determine the Page and Domain Authority of a website.

Also be very careful when using generic greetings like ‘Hi Webmaster’ or ‘Dear Blogger’. They might associate your email with automated spam that they are used to receiving.
A good message will contain the following if possible:

• The other person’s name
• A great subject line
• A detailed or specific comment about their work
• The use of an authentic email signature
• Disclosure of your own current location

It is also best to avoid using one of these famous, free email addresses from Google or Yahoo! as they are also mostly used by spammers unfortunately.

Lastly, remember to follow up with the bloggers and website owners you are targeting as they probably receive a lot of emails, making it difficult to keep track of them all.

Do not let negative responses get you down and instead, ask for feedback about your content. A blogger might not like your current content but they might like something in the future.

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