6 Easy Ways To Build Backlinks For A New Blog

Whenever I build a new blog, I follow a specific routine of backlink building.

My link building strategy helps me in building Google friendly links to my new blog.

Today, I reveal my link building formula that strengthens my SEO and will help you generate some decent amount of backlinks to your blog.

1) Expert round-ups:

Expert round-ups are when you ask questions regarding a topic related to your niche to a group of people (experts in your niche). Expert round-ups are easy ways of getting backlinks to your new blog. Here is how it works.

When you ask a question to experts, most will give a positive affirmation and would answer your question. This is because the expert would get a chance of showing his expertise and increase his reach.

Now most experts link to all the pages (that had quoted or interviewed them) on their about page. This way you get a link from them.

The method:

1. Make a list of influencers in your field.
2. Check out their about pages for finding out if they link to content they have been quoted on.
3. Contact them for your next round up. And congrats you got your new backlink from an influencer.

See how I crafted this wonderful round-up post here on BloggerTipsTricks

Links of interviews and round-ups I found on Erik’s About Page (NoPassiveIncome.com)

2) Through blog commenting:

Blog commenting is the genius solution to many of your blogging problems.

Commenting has been the key to my networking with other bloggers.

Apart from networking and creating brand awareness for your blog, you can also use blog commenting for quality link building purposes.

Read: How to Build A Community with Blog Commenting Strategy?

The method:

1. For this, you have to search blogs with commentluv enabled. If you do not already know Commentluv is a plugin that tracks the latest post of the commenter and places it after his comment on the blog. Here is a guide to search commentluv enabled blogs.
2. For more added benefits, some blogs have the settings to give you a dofollow backlink after you have passed a certain number of relevant comments. Now this is something that can give a LOT of link juice to your brand new blog.
3. Leave relevant comments with appropriate length on those blogs.
4. Try to add value to the post you are commenting on and you will get added benefits of attracting their readers to your blog too.

3) Link exchange can give you a LOT of dofollow links:

Want to get linked by fellow bloggers?

Who doesn’t want?

Linking from contemporary blogs can increase your rankings too because Google will see it as if your content is valuable.

Question:

How fellow bloggers will link to you even if you are a newbie?

This trick will help you get backlinks from fellow bloggers easily. But, nothing comes free.

If you want to get link backs, you have to be one that would get noticed.

For that, you have to create awesome content. Content that is epic and one that would tempt others to link to you. More on awesome content later.

The Method:

1. Write content that is problem-solving and epic.
2. Link out to fellow bloggers who have relevant posts on the topic.
3. Beware to link only well-recognized sites, not just any newbie site like yours.
4. Email them and let them know you have linked them. It’s not wise to wait for them to recognize you’re linking.
5. After they see some good activity from you, they will also start linking to your site and this way you get link backs.

4) Use ‘Ask & Get’ Formula

There is nothing wrong in asking something.

Most bloggers will agree that asking for a backlink to a piece of epic content actually does result in backlinks to it.

At least I am a living example of it.

This method is called blogger outreach.

Blogger outreach is contacting other bloggers (both fellow bloggers and influencer bloggers) to check out a piece of content that you wrote. You can ask them to link to it in a future article they write.

Beware: Your content must be worth every word you speak in your outreach message or else the recipient might tag you a spammer and never would visit your emails whatsoever.

The method:

1. Write an awesome piece of content.
2. Find out bloggers or influencers who write about similar topics.
3. Mail them telling them to read it and share the content with their peers and followers. Additionally, suggest them politely to link it in their next posts based on the subject.

PRO TIP: This trick works even better if you have linked a piece of content written by the influencer blogger in your article. Mentioning that your article has a link to their content can give a positive boost to their ego and they will approve your request as a sign of courtesy.

Not all bloggers you email will reply or act on your email, but something is better than nothing.

Here is a template you can use to email your influencers:

ANOTHER PRO TIP:

As you can see the email contains an incentive for linking to the infographics in the article. You can also offer a free incentive to all those who link to your content.

This tactic will increase the rate of positive response to your email outreach campaign.

CAUTION: Do not include the incentive topic in the emails sent to pro bloggers or influencers. They are way above your small temptations and will only link or share based on your article.

5) Interview Pro Bloggers:

This method is similar to the one I wrote in the first point, except for the fact that it focuses on one single influencer. You can contact the blogger to check if he/she is free to answer a few topics based on your theme.

If he nods positively send him the questions else rinse and repeat.

The various working interview themes are:

1. Ask the blogger to describe his journey so far.
2. Ask the blogger to answer a few questions based on a topic in your niche.
3. Ask the blogger his opinion on a trending topic in your niche.

PRO TIP: Here too you should look if the interviewee blogger does link to his previous interviews anywhere in his blog. If not you would want to consider someone who does.

The next trick will give you the most number of backlinks from all of these methods combined.

6) Master the art of writing nothing but awesome content:

Awesome content is said to be one that solves the reader’s problem, or gives a new perspective to something that has not yet been discussed in the community.

For example, my article on getting traffic from Google Plus solves the blog traffic problem of my readers and gives a new insight on content marketing. People writing about content marketing or driving traffic from social media would obviously like to link to my blog post.

My article got a link from David’s Blog (http://outsourceblogcontent.com/this-month-in-traffic-march-2015-google/)

PRO TIP: You could also include infographics and other visuals to make your article branded. Then you can allow your readers to use that infographics in their blogs in exchange of a backlink.

Click the image below to read guide on writing content that actually attracts links.

Over to you:

So this was my post on how you can get quality backlinks to a brand new blog.

While there are other opportunities of building links like guest blogging, broken link editing from Wikipedia etc.

I have not included them as it requires time for you to learn and practice those methods.

I would suggest you to first focus on these link building strategies and then I will be writing about them in an upcoming post.

How to Write a Successful Blog

Blogging Tips and Advice

I am no expert at blogging but probably the one advantage I have is that I have been in the business for longer than most. There are no secrets or magic wand that will bring success in the world of blogging but it is a combination of good luck, hard work and consistency.

1. If you are on Blogger or Tumblr or another blogging platform, do your blog a favor and move to WordPress. The process isn’t complicated and will definitely help you in the long run, especially from the search perspective. Blogger is powerful and easy-to-use but the big drawback is that it blocks everything from bots that’s not a page or a post. The other concern is that Blogger is a Google product and they have killed products mercilessly in the past even ones that had a substantial user base. Remember Google Reader?

2. Content is king but you also need to develop a good and interesting writing style to attract a global audience. Good writing is a gift that comes naturally to some of us but if you happen to be in the other half, get some books.

The Elements of Style,  Stephen King’s On Writing, and On Writing Well offer good advice on writing. Compose the blog drafts in a proper editor – like Microsoft Word or Google Docs – as they will highlight all the typos and grammatical errors that otherwise convey a bad impression. You can also get a style guide from The New York Times or the Associated Press and they’ll help you develop a consistent writing style. These guides have accepted writing rules for journalism and you can apply them to your own writing style as well.

3. Do not imitate someone else’s style. You have your own personal style and your readers are following you because they love your style. You need not imitate someone nor do you have to write as if you are writing for a news agency. Make your writing personal.

4. The most important part of a blog post is the headline and suddenly everyone is trying to do Buzzfeed style headlines. “This is why the Apple watch is not round.”  “You’ll never believe what Facebook will unveil next.” With such headlines, you raise the expectation level of the audience but when they read the actual article, they are often disappointed. Write boring headlines that may not be cute or clever but are accurate. Your readers should be able to guess what the article is all about by looking at the headline itself.

5. There’s lot of noise in the blogging world and there’s a mad rush to report something new. Take a step back and think – are you really adding any value or just contributing to the echo chamber? It is probably the job of the mainstream blogs to publish news as it happens but for the rest of us, blog only when you have something interesting to say. You won’t lose much if you aren’t among the first few to report something.

6. Avoid guest blogging. Yes, it would help raise your profile if you manage to write for a reputed and authoritative site but 99% of the guest blogging is done with the sole purpose of gaining links and that’s just waste effort. Also, as your website grows popular, you’ll find that big sites are approaching you to for permission to republish your stuff. They will promise you eyeballs in return for your content but that won’t actually happen – people will just read your content on their site and move on.

7. Always use good images or screenshots with your blog posts. This helps for two reasons – one, when people share your content on social sites, your story may stand out in the crowded news feed because of that image thumbnail. You can also use images to draw the visitor’s attention to any part on the story that you want to emphasize and if your articles are long, images can work as visual break points. And it goes with saying that you should only use free images that are in the public domain or under Creative Commons.

8. Search is definitely important but none of us really know how Google works. They use 200+ factors to decide the organic ranks of pages and we only know a few of them. The fact is as long as you have the basics right, the cream will automatically rise to the top. Here are a few things that I would suggest as far as SEO is concerned.

1. Read the webmaster guidelines from Google and Bing to know the do’s and don’ts for SEO. Follow the refresher course at Webmaster Academy and also read this starter guide (PDF) from Google.
2. Have an HTML sitemap so that all your blog pages are no more than 2-3 levels deep from the homepage.
3. When writing blog posts, always organize your content under sub-headings, use anchored headings (similar to Wikipedia) and your images should have titles and captions.
4. Interlink your content so that both human visitors and search bots can find the gold hiding in your archives.
5. The post excerpt is important because it will show up in the search snippets and social news feeds where your articles will be shared. Do not auto-generate the excerpt, write it on your own.
6. Keep track of all the missing resources on your website (404 errors) and either fix them or redirect them to something related on your site. Xenu is a good tool to find the outdated links on your website.
7. Use breadcrumb menus because they will help the search bots understand the organization of content on your site.
8. Focus on typography because the reading experience matters. You can use Google Fonts like Open Sans and Roboto as they look good on both mobile and desktops.
9. Any page on your site has two parts – the main content (the article) and common content (sidebar, navigation, footer area, etc). As far as possible, the main content should be above the common content in the actual HTML source.
10. Make sure that your web design is responsive and that your site passes the mobile-friendly test. Work on improving your site speed score, load ads asynchronously and remove all the bells and whistles (like JavaScript widgets) from your pages.

9. Do not use an RSS to Email service to prepare your daily / weekly email newsletters. Instead, create your email newsletters manually and always put a summary in the email subject – this will vastly improve the open rate of your email newsletter.

10. Think of the reader first and the revenue later. Advertising is important but if you only focus on the commercials, it will be difficult to build a loyal audience. AdSense, BuySellAds, BlogAds are good ad networks but stay away from networks that allow scam ads. Remember, you are responsible for what ads are shown to visitors on your website.

11. Good and useful content will spread on its own but, occasionally, you can also pitch other bloggers in your niche. The other set of people who you should pitch are your blog commentators and people who have previously shared your stories on social sites. They love your blog and will happily evangelize your content again.

12. Your “about” page is your chance to convert a new visitor into a regular one. Show off your best stuff,  link to your popular stories, make it easy for people to subscribe to your content and include mentions in the mainstream media – this will make your bio more credible to someone who doesn’t know you.

13. Lists, or listicles as they are better known in the world of blogging and journalism, are the easiest way to generate traffic. They are easier to scan and hence people enjoy reading them. Lists are easier to create too but if all you do is publish lists based blog posts, that may repel your audience.

14. Keep updating your old articles so that they stay relevant and up to date. If something is useless, it can be  removed permanently. For instance, I had a few Orkut related posts on my blog. They were relevant when I wrote them years ago but now that Orkut is gone, I got rid of them and directed all the juice to something related but more relevant.

15. Google is no longer sharing the search queries with you but the internal search data – that you can download from Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and Google Custom Search - will help you understand what kind of solutions are people looking for on your website. You can then go a step further. Use the annotations feature of CSE to automatically highlight important pages in your internal search results.

16. You can attract attention of other website owners by linking to them – your blog posts will show up in their traffic logs, they may check out your site and help spread the word among their audience. Like the BBC, you can also add depth to your posts by linking to other sites that have written on the same topic but may have a different perspective. A web page that cites sources and links to research may also be seen as more authoritative and trustworthy by search