Link Building Through Creative & Smart Outreach

Key Takeaways

hi everybody this is lauren baker founder of search engine journal with me today i have bb the link builder hey bb how's it going hi it's friday and and i'm tired but i i'm really happy to see you lauren because we've never seen each other face yeah we've never talked only on facebook or whatever so it's uh it's cool yeah i realized like i think i've i was uh during lockdown i tuned in to a couple of those like seo pubs or whatever that was going on all those meetups and stuff but never uh never got a chance to talk in real life so it's a pleasure to talk to you and to your pet chicken what's your friend's name oh i haven't given her a name do you want to give her a name [Laughter] i'm going to call her hilda hill let it chicken all right hello is that okay yeah so um yeah what app are you using to do that by the way uh it's snap camera you can just download it for free and you can use it in any video conferencing tools you that you use and just instead of your normal camera feed you select snapcam and then you could do a lots of cool stuff and you can become an anime character can i show you real quick yes let me see oh wait now i get lost where am i oh here uh so i can become this kind of chicken hi [Laughter] cartoon let me see um no wait not this one everybody's like we're here for the legs we're not here to play with your toy oh that's awesome yeah that's cute right and the last one this is also really cute yeah that's like ridiculously accurate yeah but my favorite one is still a chicken so i'll put hilda back on yeah cool cool so yeah it's a pleasure to finally meet you uh to finally talk um just uh let's get started uh if you could tell our audience a little bit about yourself your background what you do from a link building perspective and stuff like that and how you got started a little bit too yeah so um i'm dutch i'm from the netherlands i don't do a lot of dutch link building though because it's way more work than english and i started as a social media marketer for a company that was selling trucks worldwide they're called client trucks and they were really ahead in their digital marketing for that niche but anyway i was doing social media marketing and it was going really well but then i wanted to make my own money and i googled how to make money online and that's how i found authority hacker and all those guys and i started building affiliate sites and i formed a little mastermind with a couple of friends of mine and i was able to get a lot of visitors to the site but i wasn't able to make a lot of money out of it because i didn't really understand how to monetize it and then they asked yeah that was stupid i think i could do it now but anyway but then they asked me if i wanted to do their link building because they hated it and they were gonna pay me good money so i said yeah and then i had a business and i got on facebook i connected with a bunch of people and for some reason you know the leads just kept coming so my business kind of exploded and now uh yeah i think everyone i think you know in the world of link building i've done a lot of linking over the years and a lot of digital pr and stuff like that and it's one of the things where first of all there's very f it seems like there's very few people that get link building right so many like seos especially people that have started after the rise of the tools the rise of the machines so like everyone's like oh you have to get a da of this or you have to have a dr of that or you have to get a whatever um this tool's uh metric is of this and and like whoa what that has nothing to do with anything really like it's good from a quality indicator but there's no formula if you get more links from d.a sites of 60 plus that's necessarily going to help you it's just a vanity metric at the end of the day right um there's i mean there's things there but it just seems that to me that a lot of a lot of linking is very metric driven and not necessarily oh what's the relevance of the site what's the audience size of this site what else do they do besides just putting a link on an article type thing yeah that's my philosophy as well and i think it helps that i come from a social media background because when you do social media marketing you know it's not about broadcasting or about the amount of likes necessarily but it's about well what what eventually converts right so the engagement and if you just focus on the metrics you lose track of your why which is actually getting people to your site that are going to convert and that's where people uh yeah they lose track of of the the thing that matters so they just look at the a but then they don't realize well the a doesn't say anything about the quality of the audience you know right so the author who's who's linking to you right in their background yeah and everything else yeah i i do understand why they they want to focus on metrics because it makes things very straightforward and simple and you don't have to deal with people that much you can just you know build based on metrics alone but yeah it doesn't i don't think it really works to just focus on that so um what type of link building do you do how would you define kind of what you do at the end of the day and what differentiates it from uh other types of link building out there and then also my understanding is that you work a lot with teams and training of teams training of in-house as well so could you kind of go over that a little bit on that side yeah um i'm not sure where i'm different than other link builders because i i don't really know exactly what they're doing but what we do is that we focus a lot on contents or very content driven and we do a lot of guest posts so guest post sounds horrible because there's a very negative association with it with the spammy guest posters but we guest polls where we pitch to prospects as if we were writers so we don't care about the link you know when we're writing the outreach emails but we care about the quality of content that we're pitching and that means that we really do a deep dive into new prospects and we offer something that helps them engage and sell to their audience and that's where i think i'm i'm different from a lot of link builders although i believe if somebody would just spend 10 more effort in that focusing on the prospects um everybody would be able to get way better yeah yeah you know it's interesting i i get to see things from well a lot of people on blogs but we get pitched a lot at sej and i even get pitched on accounts where i don't even know what kind of site they're pitching me for right like um but there's a certain formula out there and i think you know i've hosted webinars and stuff like that in the past with like link builders are like oh you have to reach out to this many tens of thousands in order to get this much of a response and i'm like whoa like what if we just reached out to people that are likely to respond because we take the time to actually build a relationship with them right exactly and and it's the same uh i do with my clients as well as i do with prospects i filter them out before i reach out to them you know i look at their side do they have right for us then then i don't go for them because they get you know they get approached by every other link builder out there um and in my subject line i usually do make clear that i'm pitching something so the people that aren't interested they're not going to open the email and it's only fun you know i get it maybe a lower response rate but the people that do respond they're already interested and they know what they're in for well it's funny too because you know there's pr right and then there's link building and sometimes they get grouped within the world of seo but they're quite different at the end of the day and most pr agencies that i work with and you know my company would do quite a bit of pr and stuff like that too when when they're reaching out to journalists they're very like like hey i'm reaching out to you on behalf of my client we have this thing that's coming up i'd like to pitch you on this or or you know how would this work within your editorial calendar or something like that and then i look at the pitches that i get from seo link builders and it's like wow i read your blog best blog ever like this one post on your blog link amazing like i stumbled oh no i stumbled on your blog best blowing posts i've ever read in my life ever if you were to add this link it would make it even better than anything else just like what like like you can tell like yeah like it's just you know someone put together a merge email with all the different fields in there and they're just shooting it out based upon like they're doing the same thing that everyone's doing and linking and just the ability when i get pitched with someone i mean i get you get a lot of things now where it's like somebody like they'll shoot a quick video right five second video hi lauren at search engine journal like i just wanted to tell you about this this thing that we're launching and a lot of the time it's not the greatest thing that that we really want to link to at the end of the day or cover but at least i took the time to do it i know a lot of it's automated and something like that but at least it's different you know what i mean so besides like being transparent in terms of like hey we are actually pitching you yeah what else have you found kind of cuts through the noise um with bloggers or journalists well the formula thing it used to work well right so i'm not going to pull on that but it just it doesn't really work anymore but what does work though is you can use a template so you can use something that you use over and over again but then you have to segment your prospect list way more narrow than you usually do so instead of reaching out to digital marketing sites you should reach out to sites that only talk about mobile apps or something right and then when you've done that you you really research the niche you see what their pain points are what are what the use cases are what's what the trends are and you theme your templates accordingly so in your subject line you mentioned something about the industry in your intro you talk about you know how how developers deal with clients when they're developing mobile apps and that's the way you make an instant connection with someone or by segmenting the prospect lists and then theming your templates it works way better now you may have a school of thought saying hey you know what i don't have time for that or i don't want like two links i want a hundred links but at the same time if you take the time to develop that relationship right and they're covering you once chances are they're going to cover you again so is there like a compound benefit to spending the time that building that relationship or shoot everything at the wall and see what sticks um i guess a little bit of both but we do have we do have sites that you have to have a good team behind you not not just the people who do the data analysis and all that stuff but i hire copywriters so there's i don't hire link builders i hire copywriters so they're already all like content heroes and um what was your question now i forgot um i guess it was kind of a statement question so do you find more value in taking the time to build that relationship with the publisher as opposed to trying to hit multiple publishers at once yeah it's it's the it's you have to find a balance you know you you have to do things at a certain scale but the more you scale the more generic your your uh campaigns get the lower your conversion gets so then you need to scale more because your conversion gets lower and yeah then you have awesome awesome maintenance at all but then all your all your emails are hitting such a high number that you're hitting the spam filter so you have to have a whole separate system to take care of that and you know i have a friend who does that he sends like hundreds of thousands of emails and it works for him but he likes having the system you know all the robots and stuff and he lives fine with that but that's just not my style maybe the predictability some i know yeah well numbers people like the predictability component yeah he loves crunching it and he doesn't care about burning all those email addresses and you know having all the systems in place um so everybody has to find their own balance but sometimes they do forget they think that scaling is everything but version is another thing if you write bespoke emails where you spend a lot of time writing a unique email for a specific person then your conversion rate is so high that you probably only need to send 10 emails a day you know to get those 100 links at some point so when you're sending those emails are you usually targeting say the the marketing person at a company one of the bloggers at the company i know like i'll have like a ceo forward an email from someone saying oh wow look this company reached out to us about doing a guest vlog should we do this sometimes that can be like the most impactful right because it's the person that owns the company or slash runs a company like excited about something right so like how do you typically target the prospect in terms of where they are at the company or publication that you're targeting yeah so i do a max of three email addresses if we can find them and the first one the first priority is the editor-in-chief and then there's a marketing manager and then there's ceo and then if we can't find any of those emails it could be a contact form or or just the generic email i've got links to support you know it's not it's not great but i do sometimes forward things and and sometimes there's somebody at the help desk and i really like your email and they start talking to you and you go back and forth and they forward it you know so you never know how the cookie crumbles um sometimes i also think about i heard one time i used to work so i i used to work in structurally right and every sales guy had his own region of um of the world so if one guy was specialized in russia the other one was specialized in venezuela and the guy from the nigerian uh area he told me that nigerians you gotta talk to the to the nephew of the boss because he'll get you the deal but you can't talk correctly but you have to talk through somebody else so that you don't always have to talk to the big person directly or the best person but it's yeah preferable if you have three emails and then kind of work your way through it nice nice oh just as a reminder to all viewers and listeners today's episode of the search engine journal show is brought to you by ahrefs and ahrefs webmaster tools so if you go to a h r e f s dot com slash wmt and we'll be sharing uh this a little bit later um with more information about ahrefs webmaster tools but it's a-h-r-e-f-s dot-com a-w-t you can give webmaster tools by ahrefs a spin for free um really robust information really robust backlink information broken back links which is one of my favorite components of ahrefs and just an overall like some of the data that they provide through their free tool set and some of them are more robust you can find even from from companies that you have to pay so check them out you don't need a credit card uh to check out the webmaster tools from ahrefs for free you can just go sign up um find out your site information and oh i love the broken links tool there like i find so many like old campaigns where people like have done like podcasting tours or been covered by the press and then like you go through a site migration and all those target um locations have broken and i just like download the hs reports i gotta hit you up about it i've never done a broken link campaign oh i love it that's that's some of the stuff i do the most advice i do have another thing i really like now is creating statistics pieces but then i just borrowed them i'm very lazy so i have a writer research and then compile them all in one thing and then journalists they they make a story and they use it as a background and they link to it yeah it's nice yeah i've done a four client now a couple of times i think i've done 10 or something and five are picking up passive links continually a lot of fun are dead by the way hey 50 is better than 10 success so like some of the most successful campaigns i've ever done on the client side is where uh we'll just basically run a simple survey question every month right like i had a client that was in the educational space for colle it's like class notes for college students or whatever and so like we just run a question every month or do you feel safe going back to school with covid right yes no right suddenly like you know 85 percent of college students say they do not feel safe going back to school and then we just put it out there it's all based on on on the client side all the data and information and most journalists for a study do tend to link back and the ones that don't you just email them afterwards asking thanking them and asking for a link but just like the study and the survey stuff is some of the most uh impactful i've seen on on the linking side do you feel that um clients or sites need to have that kind of content on the site that's linkable are you good enough like getting links back to money pages and home pages and stuff like that um ideally yes because i i do think it's good to do all sorts of link building to your site because you never know you know what what's going to stick or what's going to work the best but also you get a very varied backlink profile so if google at some point decides oh i don't like these statistic links or whatever you know then then you have all the bunch of other links that work well for you nice nice did you go a little bit into the training side you said that you worked mostly with copywriters um that you found uh success with on the linking side which is which is cool it makes perfect sense um when you're training like in-house teams or even agency teams or consultants um in-house do you do you do do you talk to them about hiring copywriters about identifying people at their company that would be useful for link building like how does that typically work on that site yeah so it's been uh it's been so different for every agency um i i did for my first agency clients i recruited the hire as well and uh fortunately there was there was a huge success they really loved her and they kept her uh in the company and now she's the head of seo or something so there's she's not a link builder anymore so i'm link building again for that client um but for other companies they already have people in house and they usually have the funny thing is that they usually have everything they already need as far as far skills go because a lot of times these people are already pretty good but they don't have the time or they don't have the they need somebody to step aside and and pull them out of the corporate box because like you say they're all following following the same uh formula so when they get an email i have to go this is to link billery this is to link really or this is to sales copy or you're trying to convince a person don't try to convince them don't pressure them don't beg don't you know don't lie people are still saying oh i think this article would be good for your site i'm like that's an empty statement why do you think it's good for them people aren't giving any arguments or they're doing the the fake flattery thing where they say oh i stumbled across your side and i've been reading all your blogs and all the things it's just nobody's falling for that anymore unless they want money of course and they go like yeah sure what percentage of pitches do you typically get a response with publishers asking for some kind of money or gift card or something along the way it's something along those lines yeah they're they're always in there of course um but when you when you change your approach a little bit you get less but i don't know what percentage is i'm really it's so funny it's almost like every campaign is a unicorn and i find it really hard to track you know what the replies are i thought it would be really easy to track everything but in the end uh it's really hard but they're in there don't be surprised if we get those paid responses if you get a lot of them back yeah start tweaking your campaigns for sure i um i did a campaign uh about a year and a half ago and basically it was uh i don't know if there's a word for this it was like a movement moving on up campaign with listicles so like basically there was a lot of listicles out there top 10 top 15 top 20 that had our client at like number 17. number 11. number 16 right so the idea was we got it moved up to like a number one or number two position on one of them and just started seeing like not just like the links are good but we started seeing traffic and revenue come up from that right if you notice anything about google in the past year suddenly google has become a listicle search engine and not a site search engine so you search for anything and it's like best 10 of this best 12 of that best 15 of that like google result now it's ridiculous so but we're like hey you know what if they're not going to list affiliate links they're going to list natural ones there which most sites do list affiliate links now so google's becoming an affiliate listicle search engine but if um if they're listing natural links and we're they're in there or we're trying to get in the list why not ask to be in the top three right so i was amazed by just sending an email and asking right and i was expecting these authors to get back to me yeah just send me a gift card just like you know just here's my here's my dogecoin uh address right send me some dogecoin or something like that but uh no like many of them just moved it up like oh yeah that's great oh i checked it i checked the site out again you're right it does belong in the top three like whoa wow and just like taking the time to ask for something is so like it can be so underrated in the world yeah outreach and link building like ask a favor or ask something like not just the whole hey what you linked to this we do this we do just something different right out of the box it gets kind of people thinking and i was surprised uh through that um i'm sure have you have you run into any scenarios where you just kind of ask something that you always think the answer's gonna be no and they get back to you with a yes um yeah i've had a couple of times where they didn't add the link or they removed the link and in the beginning i thought oh no we lost the link you know panic and then i thought i already lost the link so why not ask for them to put it back and it almost always works so i think that's that's something that people definitely shouldn't be afraid to ask when somebody removes something yeah also also also on the like the link request like when they when you have an unlinked mention and just like i always tell people look if you have an unlinked mention the authors read about you there's a reason why they included you in there they probably didn't link because of some editorial rules internally where they're supposed to link to like only public companies or only companies they've talked about but if you just email and use ask for it right thank you so much for covering us you know really appreciate it uh this is amazing just wanted to see if you could like link back or you could link to this uh this follow-up post that we did that like has a little bit more data or information and the response is usually very positive and it's positive in two ways um one they might write back saying yeah we link to you right or two they might write back and say i can't necessarily do that but thank you for writing me right yeah and then suddenly now right you have that trusted relationship we're not trusted but you have you have some sort of relationship yeah um because you reached out to the individual they've written about your client or your company once are probably going to do it again don't burn bridges being mad because they didn't link to you right oh ego ego is the worst thing to have you lead in link building you should leave your ego at the door i mean don't be a doormat you know but don't get pissy if somebody doesn't do the thing that you want because you don't know what's going on in their life or in their work or whatever yeah exactly and don't like hit them up every three days with a response email right yeah i think people are afraid people also don't like link building because they don't like the rejection because you're putting yourself out there you know and i don't like to get rejected or negative replies or something i love rejection it's like in my comfort zone i don't mind that at all i don't i don't get negative responses often but when i get them i'm just i don't know i'm always amused by them because yeah i've i've seen you share some i know facebook and stuff like that it usually is amusing some of the pitches i get i'll share from time to time um usually not a rejection but uh we have some questions so before today's uh episode we reached out to a lot of different scj uh readers and fans and stuff like that um asking for questions to go over today but before we get started i wanted to tell you a little bit more about ahrefs and hrs webmaster tools so if you're an if you are an seo you might already know about ahrefs site audit which can help scan your site for seo issues and then of course ahrefs site explorer which gives you data on backlinks and keyword rankings but you may not have known that both tools are now available at no cost for your own website and the newly released ahrefs webmaster tools it's a completely free tool that allows you to analyze your site's seo performance and helps you identify issues that could be holding your website back to getting more search traffic you don't even need a credit card to sign up it's one of the coolest tools out there there is just go to ahrefs.com that's a h r e slash awt to give ahrefs webmaster tools spin for free all about rhyming i love hrefs great people they sent me this shirt as well yeah they sent me the chicken they sent you that chicken yeah so um i love them they're good at marketing i really love ahrefs for their uh for their content because they really write great tutorials they make great videos but i also look for the reverse engineering of content that's already successful so i don't know if you guys know this but you have the content explorer and there you can see it's kind of like uh what's that on the toolbox sumo or something yeah yeah where you can see which content did really well but you can uh if you put a topic in you can filter it on social shares and then you can see for instance what was re-pinned a lot on pinterest this is what i used to do and pinterest is kind of like a library for blog posts and you can see which ones work really well so if you filter it on 10 000 or a hundred thousand weepings depending on the niche you get all these uh pinterest uh posts that that did so well and it's for every niche almost uh a great way to reverse engineer and another thing is when you take certain breadcrumbs so when you go into the content explorer and you type in how many so it's not a specific topic but it's a word that surrounds a lot of these data studies and statistics and surveys so you do how many and then you filter on referring domains you can see the statistics that got a lot of uh links in hrefs but then it's not depending on what niche it is you just get inspiration i found the site that way that's that's how many people are in space right now.com it's just the one page click on it you just see the number of people that are in space there are now 10 people in space and it has about i think 3 000 links or something i love those sites i love i love i love those sites like wait it's a really cool url and you click on it like just the answer is like no or something like that yeah because it's christmas um yeah it's a christmas snow and then it's like says yes one day can i tell you my idea that i had for them but i'm not going to do it so i help somebody else i wanted to do a a dogs versus cats thing and people could just vote if whether they like dog or cats and then every time you could see who's winning the battle right so you can see the numbers but people are also creating the content themselves because every time you vote you know you're you're continuing the battle and then you can check yeah every month you can see if the cats won or the dogs one i like that yeah i like yeah and it's just so simple and it it it makes sense to everybody out there so i like those ideas a lot so how many questions do we have here we have quite a bit oh my god okay um and we have one question that i'm not even sure what this language is and i'm pretty good at languages so i don't know is it that you try to read it read it in the way you think it's supposed to sound no no but there is a google translate thing here no no it's just uh eventually possibly yes it's some it's it's either it's italian or some oh right different form of latin based but it's doing completely wrong um okay so let's go so we talked about how people get overrun with requests yeah um okay let's let's look at this okay case study style example an e-commerce site they sell furniture right they're not sure where to get started from a link building strategy let's say they sell office furniture or maybe home office furniture so um where would you get started someone comes to you they're like bb yeah lynx we have all this furniture so we need links what can we do any ideas yeah so there are a couple of routes that you can go um i would i would definitely research your audience and see what's living there you know what's current with home offices and all those things but you can also look at businesses that are in the same customer journey or that target the same audience so you could reach out to um companies that deliver computers for home offices or apps for home offices and that way you uh you reach out to prospects that's not that other link builders aren't reaching out to and you can get unpaid links so that's something i would do the other if you look at statistics i would definitely create some content about home office or about something else that's related maybe something about back pain or about stress or burnout or parenting even you know because it's related to everybody's being at home with their kids and that that's another angle to get links for so yeah i would uh try that but i would definitely make my life more easy and create more content on the side and a lot of more sites do that now so i don't think that's a problem but look at other businesses because they can you can they can give you great links uh for free and you can build up some sort of relationship so that could always uh be of more value later on i like what you just also talked about about different themes and you can tell i can tell in my head that you're thinking about different types of blogs and different types of locations right so you're thinking about the parenting at home well there's so many different parenting sites out there right you're thinking about back health and stuff like that it's perfect for maybe a health site exactly exactly um even like entrepreneur oriented sites things like that like what are what are the main uh issues that people have that are workaholics right and just like going through all of those uh styles of injuries related to working from your desk too often um just getting it like you know what's the history of lumbar support for your back why is it important like all of those different things right um even you know that like um i see this a lot it's like it's like early man uh primates neanderthal and they're like over time they're like over and they're getting stiff again and then like it goes like to the 2000s and they're starting to get hunched over like all of those little graphics and just like doing out your own and having it on the site you never know people may really link to that graphic as well oh but that yeah people should follow stacy mcnaught because she uh is the queen of image link building you should invite her for the show and um i'm now following her course on image link building and we're making some images for clients that are open to experimentation it's not a shortcuts just like any there's a lot of research involved but it's so interesting because you can get links from really big publications and they have policies where they have to link out you know to where this image is yeah that's a plus um you know for one for one client i work with i work a lot of beauty schools and uh we were doing like infographics for a long time and stuff like that of course client was a was a beauty school nation i love beauty schools um and they're cool like so anyway um i kind of stopped doing that i'm like do beauty schools really need do you guys really need infographics on your site here beauty school that's like it's it's cool to talk about beauty from a data perspective but why don't we just like put together some really simple tutorials on how to do like an ombre hair dye or how to do this or how to like different eyelash extension tips and like hire a photographer and hire a model and it doesn't cost that much to do and put this like together some really really really top-notch content and i haven't revisited a lot of that stuff in the past year and i was going through it the other day employing the data and the amount of links that they've acquired not from an outreach perspective but from people finding those images and linking to them is outstanding also you kind of brought this up a little bit earlier pinterest is the most overlooked and underrated search engine there is dudes pinterest is the bomb like in certain types of industries yeah and it's a traffic machine to traffic turn on and just keeps going because the your your content gets regurgitated throughout pinterest so everybody's re-pinning it and then everybody they know is repeating it so at some point you don't need to do anything anymore it just keeps the traffic just keeps coming i got like i think i was like almost hundreds hundred thousand a month in traffic from really when i had an affiliate sites it's amazing so yeah it's amazing and it's just like for some reason it's always grouped within social media so i don't think it's seos we always have like pinterest as top of mind but it's not social media it's a visual search engine at the end of the day yeah and it drives traffic directly to the site which most social media mark networks do not do at all and google doesn't google doesn't you know google doesn't even come into play they do have they do have their own updates so they have banned a lot of accounts around essential oil content so you have to be a little bit careful about what you do on there the other thing i really find interesting about pinterest is that i think they have a lot of sophisticated image image recognition software behind it because they have to recognize they don't just judge the the article by the title that's in the pin but also by the image so if you if you talk about chairs you should use a chair as an image because pinterest will rank you higher and sometimes people also use chair and then they write the word chair in the image because then it will even be more higher so i found it interesting it is really interesting um one of my big tips for like you know every year it's like what should you do this year focusing on seo my big tip is to throw stock imagery out the window and start hiring photographers like because i think google's has this figured out 100 too um you know with the way that google clusters similar images and image search results and things like that i think at the end of the day we're going to run into stock imagery being one of the most detrimental forms of duplicate content out there and people are going to start to see things this is going to start to start losing traffic because of stock imagery and not taking the time to put together their own images and stuff like that and it also differentiates you from the group do you want to be one of a thousand different sites utilizing these images that anyone can access or do you want to do something special on your own so yeah that's really my yeah i don't know if there's anything to that i'm usually right so we'll see um so modest so humble yeah okay no data behind it it's just like it's just an instinct um if you're if you say you're usually right you're probably right a couple of times at least i'm also i'm also projecting to projecting this positively so it's good law of attraction of rightness um okay the next question comes from cedric at from marty's gymnastics club um cedric asks how does google identify if a backlink was paid or not is it backlink acceptable if the exchange they give with another site owner would be for a free trial or free use of the services does google find out about backlinks through their algorithm or mostly from people telling on you from user submitted posts so first of all how can google identify that the link that you have pointing to you is paid or how can they identify that the publishers pointing to you except paid links right um well you of course you have the tag sponsored that if it's a paid post but i think i think it means when you don't use the tag when it's not labeled i don't know if they can identify if it's paid but they do see patterns with specific publishers or specific link buyers and as soon as your pattern you know becomes too sharp and too clear that's that's to me that's a risk uh where you have to think about it whether you can take it or not but i don't know how google identifies that this individual backlink is paid i think it's more by association with other links or other writers and now what you think about that what kind of patterns do you usually see what what pops up to you as a red flag um so i look at outgoing links where they're linking out to um if it's a lot of commercial pages you know they're probably accepting money i also look at their content if it's actual real content or every every article has some kind of promotion in it or yeah some commercial aspects um and of course they might have a media kit but that's that's that would be really obvious you just start recognizing it at some point you know that they're said that they're only there for selling things and this is also why i advise for the furniture company to look for other businesses because another business isn't interested in monetizing with their contents necessarily they're more interested in selling their products or services whereas if you reach out to a site that's ranking on a specific keyword and they have content and that's all they do then they're making their money with advertising or maybe selling links so i would avoid those content only sites except if they're really established brands or really good sites or somebody who's very passionate about something so when you said reach out to other businesses you mean that reach out to other similar businesses like e-commerce oriented businesses or brick-and-mortar businesses that may reach the same audience yeah yeah so that that's thing yeah so other uh it could but it could also be apps or sas or or consultants or something else you know not just other e-commerce businesses but either they have the same audience or they're in the or your audience is in a similar customer journey so maybe people that are interested in gardening are also interested in chickens or there's a correlate correlation so if you have it's a little bit stereotypical but cyber security experts they might be interested in gaming right so you might reach out to gaming sites that's where the relevancy gets a little bit stretched so you have to make sure that your article is relevant to uh to your target page do you ever match clients together like if they hit some if they're in similar markets but they don't compete do you ever match them together how does that typically work out for you if they're open to it i might match them i'm a little bit careful because i don't again i don't want to create some unnatural network or or show a very clear footprint but sometimes it just makes sense you know one one site is about silver coins and the other one is about antique jewelry and to me that's very related to each other so why not you know help each other out yeah yeah they're still they're still attracting the same target market at the end of the day right yeah so if they're not competing maybe they're competing over that dollar but they're not competing in terms of like ones or so like yeah exactly so i like that yeah there are a lot of different you know typically i'll go through some of the most recent posts on a site and see if there's any awkward links that shouldn't be in there awkward links that's a good term yeah just like you know awkward yeah so like the beauty schools that i work with we've established their blogs to be kind of like publications in their own right and i'll get links from time to time was like oh we'd like to contribute a post to your your site about uh i don't know about like um about different lip styles that you can do to make your lip look bigger or whatever and then like um i'll look at the post and i'll see that it has a link to like a wikipedia entry on like lips and then like a link to like uh cosmopolitan magazine piece on lips and then i'll have like a link to like a plastic surgeon about lip implants and i'll just write back oh this one actually this specific example yeah from someone saying that they're a student they're a journalist student they want to get in the freelance writing and they want to build out their own network right yeah i'm like i've heard that one before so um and i'm like well you know there's this one link to this uh plastic surgeon in here we might have to take that out and they'll reply back oh no you shouldn't do that because this is you know i put together a lot of time researching this content like well are you are you building links for this plastic surgeon like you can tell me it's it's totally fine you can just tell me that oh no no no no no then so then i went back to that that author's like profile i did a google search for like articles that were either contributed by that author yeah or like uh inbound links to that plastic surgery site there was so many and i just went back and forth and she kept on denying like what she was doing and i'm like you know what if you at least told me i would have probably said yes or created it in a different way or something like that but don't don't don't lie to me at the end of the day yeah i have so with my team and and people i train they get these replies of people that are saying hey why are you actually doing this right or and they just freak out and i'm like you can be honest you know you can just say hey i'm trying to increase your online visibility and and this would help um you don't need to be it's a business thing so they'll they'll understand that it's totally fine but this whole shop story of a guy that's students and trying to make some money that's i don't like that at all no i'm not a big fan of that oh good oh go ahead i had another idea for the image stuff that you were talking about um if you have if if you know of a site that adding a lot of image links then you should uh i think you can in hvac you can filter on um file extension so if you look at the backlinks and you say i think you say external url or internal url and include dot jpeg you can see what's getting the most links so yeah the image files and then also the pdfs right because i'll see a lot of inbound makes the pdf files as well that's another i didn't think of that one that's really good yeah on the content site we'll do like pdf checklists like how to clean your bathroom here your 10 steps to cleaning your bathroom like where you can actually check it off the idea is that like someone might print it out what they put on the refrigerator and like actually use it or whatever right but i'll see those getting linked to all the time just like picking up natural links which are like the best kind um because you don't have to do anything to do it but yeah let's see that is a good that is a good tip on ahrefs for looking at your inbound links to images because again if people are linking to you naturally that's always something that you can accelerate by investing time in it to push right so if you see that publishers are naturally picking up your images maybe they're all going back to the furniture thing maybe maybe there's a lot of chiropractors that are picking up that graph you did on how like sitting at your your chair for more than three hours at a time ruins your back so like perhaps like you're like well if i would take this image and you know make sure that the page that features the image is something that i can reach out to more chiropractors because i've seen that 10 of these people have picked this up what about the other 900 chiropractors out there let me go down that route so it's just like building on top of the organic and natural uh wins that you've gotten already yeah a lot of links that you just that are on the table already so definitely look into that so i had a lot of questions coming in um from b2b uh oriented sites all right um one is responsible for the content on a b2b assass startup where they don't feel that their field is very popular and they think it's harder to get links from a b2b perspective another question that came in how do i build quality links in b2b marketing and how can i track and get visibility of the link building uh and the possible traffic that it generates this is a two-part question yeah i'm pretty confused yeah so first off yeah is there such thing as a boring vertical to build links in so it's boring if you're not in it but if you're in it then you might you know if you're not if you're not an accountant you might find accountancy boring but accountants don't find accountancy boring most of the time so you gotta put yourself in the brain of an accountant and start just looking into what what like i said before like what their pain points are what the trends are what maybe there are big scandals or big statistics or whatever that you can use for for your own content or for your outreach um about the guy because i do remember one part of the question though you said something like a really small a small they didn't have a lot of number to reach out to or something yeah yeah the b2b sas uh there's like this hardly any blogs or sites in their space yeah um really low search volume etc etc so you have to you have to start think is it is it when people say thinking laterally where you start seeing more connections between things maybe yeah i had this with a client that was into non-destructive testing which is very very niche it's about the way you test a certain matter like concrete or something in a way that doesn't actually damage the concrete and in the beginning we thought like we can't find sites that rank on that because it's just so niche but then we looked at all the applications of it and all the all the use cases and all the different businesses that were involved in that and then it opened up a lot so even if you're in a boring or small b to b nice you're sharing some sort of space with other businesses or or just one two steps further you will find a lot of prospects so i would love to know yeah it's interesting like if anyone that's watching right now is in a boring niche that they're having a boring type of business they're having a hard time building links to drop that here in the comments because it like learn a little bit like the accounted thing too like it's it's easy also when you're on the inside to think that you're in a boring niche right you're like oh no one wants to write about accountants like you go to dinner and everybody's complaining about paying taxes right so like like it's not boring because it resonates with everyone yeah it's just oh i paid this much oh oh why do i have to pay this on top of everything else why is gas so high it's an ongoing it's an ongoing thing so sometimes yeah then you just have to think outside the box a little bit yeah and you publish a survey around this is the write-off that nobody uses everybody's gonna link that right so then you make it sexy yeah exactly exactly or it's surveying in general like you know i don't know do you think that you pay too much taxes for gas or do you think that your taxes are being utilized properly for building roads or whatever and then everyone's going to say no and then you have something to talk about right yep right so it does it does work at the end of the day um i had a client years ago they did like plastics fabrication so they made like they made molds and they thought they were the most boring thing ever and it's like no no no no first of all if your business is there and it's established you have you may not have a lot of clients but you have the right clients right so the answer to growing your business is not to go after the search terms that have like 20 000 monthly search volume 100 000 monthly search volume because it might not just be there anyway right you have to go after the people that are doing those queries and searches that are going to buy your service or product at the end of the day what are they searching for how many is there there might be 10 there might