Dale Davies
Hello, and welcome to our Friday live stream. We’re here to talk about digital marketing, but in particular today, we’re going to be talking about backlinks and how to earn them for your website. Going to be running solo today, so please do tell me in the chat where you’re watching from. I’d love to know. Also, it’s good to know that I’m not doing this on my own and that I got a bit of company as well. So, please, do tell me where are you watching from. Cool. Going to get straight into the action because I have 50 free ways to earn backlinks for your website and we have 60 minutes in which to do it.

So, if I want to get some questions answered, in the end, I need to get cracking straight away. So, let’s do that. Daniel watching from London. Ciao, Gabriel, from Vanessa. Lovely. Jealous as always. Sono Geloso and also a show-off apparently. Samuel from Derbyshire. Super. We have a… Is it Darach Croft watching from the West Highlands of Scotland? Lovely jubbly. Freddy from our marketing consultancy team here at Thinkplus. Lovely to see you too. It’s great to see so many people joining. I was going to say us, but it’s just me. Cool. Let’s get right into this. I’m just going to click a few things and get everything set up and then we’ll get started. Okay. Let’s change the banner to this one. So, hit like, subscribe, and all that jazz to make sure that I know that you’re still with me.

Excellent. 50 free ways to earn backlinks to your website. We will handle questions at the very end. I just keep saying we. It’s just me. If you pop them in a chat, I will bookmark them or maybe Jess will who is moderating today and I’ll pick them up at the very end, and if you are active in the chat in any way, shape or form today, you’ll be entering for a prize draw for our book, How To Get To The Top of Google, which has been refreshed for 2022 and now includes free SEO checklists such as keyword research, SEO auditing, page, titles, description, optimization. All that kind of stuff is all in there, so make sure you grab your copy by staying active in the chat.

Here we go, Jess. Sneakily in the background, indeed you are. Oh, lovely to see somebody joining us from Lagos. Lovely. I always wanted to go to Lagos.

Super. So, the first idea for earning backlinks for your website is to use JournoRequests. So, if you’re not familiar, there’s a hashtag that people use on Twitter as well as a few other places called JournoRequests. What it is is a journalist or a content marketer or somebody doing content creation for a publisher. If you’re lucky, it could be The Guardian or Independent or something like that or something specific to your industry.

They’ll put a tweet out saying, “I’m looking for cool off-grid sustainable holiday ideas for roundup, new eco results, and so on,” looking for information. They’re looking for somebody to give them a sound bite or a quote or something they can use in their article or some kind of thought or sentence, words, a quote. I don’t know.

They’ll put that out there into the Twitter-sphere and then you can reply to it and say, “Hey, I know loads about sustainable holidays. Here’s a quote from me that you can include,” and this happens all the time.

So, this one, do you own a vegan company? Are you transparent about where your produce comes from? JournoRequest, get in touch.

Here’s another one. Any industry experts about architecture, construction, or engineering sector who can comment on sustainable eco-friendly solutions for the future of new build homes? There is bound to be a JournoRequest on Twitter, somewhere about the industry that you’re in or in a related industry that you can comment on. So, first place you can start is JournoRequests. Go and search for a hashtag now on Twitter and then you’ll be able to see, okay, I can comment on that one. Maybe you won’t find anything today. Maybe not tomorrow, but I guarantee you will find something this week that you can comment on.

A few more examples as well. So, looking to speak to a sustainable packaging expert, and we have a packaging client. This would be perfect for them to be mentioned in, and here’s an article from last year.

Want to update it or sharing it around the hashtag. You can find people who or journalists who are writing about product, sustainable packaging, or sustainable clothing, whatever it is, something related to sustainability. You can be a part of that conversation and get your brand mentioned in there as well. So, search for that. Maybe you’ll find a journalist who regularly writes about sustainability or your industry and see if you can follow them. Use the notification settings so that if they tweet at any point, you’ll get in your notifications and you can just double-check, “Okay, is there anything that’s relevant to me?” No. Skip it. So, really simple way of doing it.

Affiliate linking. Now, this is something that a lot of eCommerce companies do already or when they get to a certain point. I think it’s really underutilised by service industries as well, but the basic premise is this. Find people who are talking about your industry or your products or your services and see if they’ll reference you and link back to your website. Now, you can do this in two ways. You can use a paid incentive and say, “If anybody comes through to my website using your link, I’ll pay you 10 pounds per person that comes through,” or if it’s only if they complete a sale, you can have a commission, 10% of what whatever they spend, and this is how companies have gotten so big. In some cases like Casper, they’ve gotten so big because of affiliate linking. People are getting paid to mention them in their articles and they create their website. So, people go absolutely bananas and just put out as much content as possible about mattresses and what have you and link back to the Casper website.

So, that’s one way of doing it. You could just try and work something out that you don’t have to have much of a paid incentive. You can start small. 3%, 5%, but there’s generally some kind of cash incentive behind it.

So, in this example, somebody’s talking about Casper mattresses. They have a link back to the Casper website, but they have a UTM. So, it’s unique. What’s it called? Unique something rather. A way of tracking this affiliate code. So, in there, you can see here, it says here UTM content, CLI reviewed. So, somebody has reviewed it. There’s all this kind. You can have plugins added onto your website. They can set all this up for you or you can use an affiliate company to get it set up, like Affiliate Window, or is it Awin now? I remember it’s been a while since I did affiliate stuff myself, but you can use affiliate system to build up links that way as well.

Awards. Enter them. So, we’ve entered a whole bunch recently. So, we at the end of last year won the UK Search Awards 2021. We also just won the UK Paid Media Awards last week as well, as well as the Northern Digital Awards in quarter one of this year as well. So, whenever that happens, obviously, it’s great for our team because they’ve worked so hard and they deserve those kinds of wins. It’s also good for backlinking because wherever you can mention that you are an award-winning company on any other website, you can use that as an opportunity to link back to yours and earn backlinks that way as well. So, you can enter them.

There is an award for everything. So, we have constructors’ awards, apprenticeship awards, HR awards, packaging awards, employee wellbeing/wellness, finance awards, outdoor awards. There is an award for your industry. Just have to go out there and find them.

There will be some companies that reach out to you to see if you’re interested already. So, they might find you before you find them, but I guarantee, if you look around, there will be somebody that you can use, or you can just go and create your own instead. So, I remember when I was travel blogging way back when, like 2013, 14 onwards, companies like Lonely Planet… Oh, there’s a whole bunch. Hostelbookers. All those companies that have gone to a growth stage now where they’re huge, or in some cases, like booking.com used to do this a lot. They’re listed on stock indexes around the world. This is part of how they got there is that they created their own awards and awarded them to people. Those people link back these badges in their sidebars and their footers and stuff back to your website. It’s a really cost-effective way of building links to your website.

So, if there aren’t any awards that people are going for, you can always create your own, or as you can see here, it doesn’t matter how many travel blog awards there already were. There were new ones being created by other companies. So, every company started to have their own one, so you can do the same for your industry. I know that this might not apply to every industry. What is going on over here? Urgent tracking module. Yes, useful tortoise module. Yep. That’s what it stands for. Useful tortoise module. Super. So, yeah, you can create, as you can see in some of these other examples, like packaging awards. That might not seem glamorous to some of you who don’t work in packaging, but I think people in the packaging industry might actually find it quite interesting especially if there are lots of websites talking about packaging. It’s just from a sustainability point of view.

If you have an award for the most sustainable packaging or sustainability in packaging industry and so on, you could be the owner of those awards and dole them out as you see fit with your own criteria and earn links that way as well. So, you could definitely earn awards, create your own awards.

Best ofs and top 10s. So, best laptop bag is not necessarily on your website, but it could be on other people’s website. So, this is a rundown of the best cheap laptop sleeve, best laptop bag for travel, best laptop bag for your budget, best laptop backpack for everyday use. You can earn links this way by getting your product or your services or whatever it is that you offer listed in top tens or best ofs. So, if you offer products, you can do it this way. You can reach out to other companies doing reviews of products or you could reach out to the travel websites and get your backpack featured there or just review websites like expert reviews, but it also applies to services.

It also applies to software as well. So, you’ve got companies like Capterra and G2 who do this kind of thing, like the best content management system, the best customer relationship management system, all these kind of things. There’s basically going to be a best of or top 10 for whatever it is that you sell, products or services, and you just need to get featured in there. So, there’s two ways to do that. You can either reach out to them and say, “Hey, can you include me in that? I think that we’re good quality and we’ll happily have a chat with you, send you the product, or you can try our service for free,” or work it out that way, or you can suggest, “Do you know what? You haven’t got a best laptop bag for 2022 article. I’ll write it for you and you can just publish it straight away.” So, you’ve got two options. Either has to be included in one and you can either add some form of incentive into that or you can write it in yourself and send it across.

Blogger outreach. Excuse me. Really simple and the great thing about this is that you can just narrow down into niches as well. So let’s say you offer cakes. Let’s say you do home delivery cakes. You could speak to only a specific target, audience or group who are more likely to be interested in that product. So you can earn links that way. Send your products to people and say, “Hey, give us a review on your website. Just tell us what your experience was of the product once it arrived. Did you like the packaging? What do they taste like?” Stuff like that, and then include a link back to the website. So, there’s no cost to the blogger. You can say, “Hey, I’ll send you this stuff for free, and you can earn a link.” I’ll say, “You can eat our lovely delicious cakes and then we get a link back to website.”

Sometimes there’s a cash incentive as well. Maybe you have to sponsor them if you want to put it that way. Happy Friday, Rain. Happy Friday to you indeed. You could do it that way or you could do it for services or you can do it for products. I don’t know. Depending on how your business is set out, you could just say you did a lawn care service where you go around to look after people’s lawns. Get rid of Japanese knotweed and all that kind of stuff. You can do that for somebody maybe at a 50% discount or whatever you want to agree with that person, but do that with a few people. Get your name mentioned in the right places, on the right website. So, you’ve got plant and gardening bloggers talking about your business, perfect, because the right kinds of people are reading it, but you’re also earning backlinks as well.

Browser extension. So, this depends really on what kind of service/products you sell. If you’re working as software, this obviously can tie in directly to what you’re selling. So, in this case, detail this website, which is about SEO, and it talks about which websites you want to be featured on, which industry websites are performing well. You can use this as a way of tying it into what is you’re offering, but having people constantly use that app essentially because it’s so useful. They always have your brand in the front of mind. So, my Chrome is just absolutely crammed back of extensions when I used to do SEO on a daily basis.

Now, a lot of those brands, I’m super passionate about them because they’ve been so helpful to me even if I’m not necessarily a subscriber to their services. So, for example, I’ve got one extension called Link Redirect Trace by a company called LinkResearchTools and it just checks your redirects and just is always there. I will happily say that they’re great because they’ve been so useful to me over the years just for a free extension. So, if you work in software, this is perfectly for you, maybe not necessarily so useful if you don’t have a software, but there’s always some kind of tie-in that you can do. So, I’ve got an extension, which tells me the reading time of the page I’m on. If you’re selling translation services for example, there might be a tie-in that you can do there or some kind of… Let’s say you do transcription service that it isn’t software-based. Let’s say you’re rev.com.

You do have automated transcription captions, that kind of thing. You could tie that extension into your business and just build up brand recognition, but also backlinks as well by getting your browse extension mentioned on list of essential browser extensions for copywriters for example or transcribers. I need to breathe. Somebody remind me to breathe. You could just drop that in the chat.

Right. Brand mentions. Love this one. This is especially great if you are doing a lot of digital PR for example. So, you do digital PR and you get your brand mentioned in various places, but not everybody links up your brand because that’s just how the internet works. Sometimes they’ll happily mention you, but they don’t want to link back to your website because of the policies they have on their company websites.

If you get mentioned on the mirror or Daily Mail or something like that, they might have policy not to link to you. The BBC, they don’t just link to people immediately. They have a policy, but they only really link if they have to or if they think it aids the article. So, if other people then copy that BBC article and say they just do a version of it or duplicate it or something like that. If you’re monitoring your brand name using your service brand mentions or you can do it via Google and I’ll get onto that soon, you could look out for that, and every time there’s a brand mention that you know is not linked. You could ask them to link it. I’m just saying just to make things easier for people so they don’t have to google the name after reading your article, would you mind linking it directly? Because that will just make the experience for your reader better.

So, simple. Costs nothing to set up. Brand mentions. This one might have a price tag, but like brand mentions, you can do it without a cost.

Chart and graphs. Now, Jess who’s moderating at the moment will tell you that charts and graphs can actually be fantastic for helping you with link building. In particular, when you are writing a really great piece of content, which just does on a weekly basis, you’ll be grabbing graphs and charts from other websites to help your story or whatever it is you’re trying to communicate, whether it’s a white paper or blog article or guide or whatever. Pull those in and then you should attribute the people you’re taking it from a link and back to them.

If you have fantastic study or data or information displayed as charts and graphs, you can then put that on your blog post. Then people search in Google for the latest statistics about TikTok users in 2021. They may very likely see your graph if you’ve done image search engine optimization probably at the top of Google Image Search, and they’ll come through to your website, grab that image, and then link back to it. Interesting. Jess, would you mind having a look at that? That’s the second week in a row. Interesting. Come over to YouTube and hit subscribe because this is our new Thinkplus live YouTube channel. So, don’t miss out. Cool. So, yeah, create charts and graphs. Doesn’t matter where your industry is. There’s data that people are looking for and they really want to link back to it. You ask any content marketer, any content creator. They’re constantly looking for information. They can display an image form just because it’s more accessible to people.

Community forum. And breathe. Community forums are fantastic because you’re not only giving people somewhere where they can ask questions, but they can also learn more about your service or your products. Now, this applies to both service-based businesses and products, so you might want to create a community forum about your new lip kit for example. Like you sell beauty products and you can have a forum for where people help each other, learn how to apply their makeup better, for example, or service based. It might be a financial advice for him. So, accountants can hang out together in a forum asking each other functional advice.

I’m in 20 communities for marketers, product marketing people, analytics people, data people, like you name it. There’s a community out there for you, and by joining them, you can learn more about how to be better at what you do, but also for troubleshooting as well. If you have problems or sometimes do what you do, you can go and ask other people. I’m in one called BigSEO where they talk about SEO. Would you believe it? In BigSEO if I have a problem with my analytics aren’t making sense or with my page not ranking as I would expect it to, I can go over to them, ask them if anyone’s experienced the same or just to double check the page. They will do so and not only help me, but it helps them to build up their brand and their particular instances to help them promote their subreddit.

So, in the case of Demand Curve, they have a Slack community where they’re helping content and SEO people, B2B, analytics. It’s all covered in here and then when it comes to people who are more familiar with demand curve and more likely to recommend a newsletter, which is going to lead to them recommending their services as well.

Competitor links. I love this one. This tool is called Majestic. It’s fantastic. Go and use it. There are other tools you can use instead, but I really Majestic’s way of doing it. You can replace your competitor’s link. So, this is a little bit sneaky, but your competitors are trying to do the same to you as well. What you do is you search your competitors and you can see where they’re linking to… sorry. Where they’ve got backlinks from that aren’t linking to you. So, in this instance, I’ve added in four different websites and it shows you where all those links are coming from and then it tells you if there’s a website with… if there is more than one website with a backlink that you don’t have from a domain that you’re not linked from.

So, three of them will have a link from dalesbestbacklinks.com and my website doesn’t. Then I know that I need to go and get that backlink from there. So, you can go there and you can earn. You can go and secure a backlink from there, or if you’ve got some content that’s better, you can get them to link to yours instead of your competitors’. So, let’s say three competitive websites have a link. Go back to… I’m so complicated. Thanks again. Anyway, let’s say we’ll have links from backlinko.com for example. You can go over to Backlinko and say, “Hey, Backlinko, I’ve got a better article. You should link to mine instead and do that,” and just go through all of your competitors links and see if you can do that. Create something that’s better. Obviously, don’t just steal links. Give people a reason to link yours over others.

Semrush (which you can try for free by going to thankyouninjas.com*) has another way of doing it. Basically, you’re finding and replacing the link, which is what I was just talking about there, but that’s the Semrush way if you want to do it. They have forms, which specifically… sorry, forms. Reports, which is specifically I want to look at the backlink for this company. How I can look through and see which ones have the highest value and get a link back that way, and in fact, you can see here.

So, this is Semrush. You can see all the kinds of different backlinks. Let’s just make that bigger. I see all the different backlinks in there and which websites are coming from, how many links we’re talking about, which ones are text, which ones are image, which are follow, which ones are no follow, and you just see which pages have authority, which the ones I want to go and replace that link with our own link instead.

There’s a bit more of a breakdown so this shows you that you can just narrow it down with the form fields, all these filters at the top there. You can narrow it down by if it’s follow, if it’s an active link, if it’s a lost link and so on. Hey Phil. Sorry, it’s raining. I agree with you, Gabriel. I do need Jess. You’re absolutely right. So, this example, so I filtered this down as best as I can.

So, I looked for any of the lost links to the Vegware website. I only want to see follow links. I want the link to be in the content, not in the main menu or the header. I want the platform to be a blog, not a forum. I want the language to be in English, not in any other language because my website is in English. That wouldn’t make any sense if it wasn’t in English and mobile-friendly pages because I know that mobile-friendliness is something that Google pays a lot of attention to.

So, I could do that way. Just narrow things down a lot to only the websites I want to be linked from. So, great way of earning backlinks for your website using links that are already out there. They just need to be replaced. You can do the same thing using SE Ranking. By the way, you can use… Yeah, there we go. Jess is on it. You could try SE Ranking to do the same thing using bestninjatool.com. We also have the same free trial for Semrush, which I prefer just because I think it’s such a strong tool and I think that the UX is just super. Etsy ranking though, also great.

We use that client side for all of our client campaigns, and here’s the lost referring domain report in SE Ranking. So, you can just go into there. See which backlinks have been lost for your competitors. Go in there and see if you can have your domain or backlink added in instead.

Competitor mentions. So, I was talking about this before, how you could use brand mentions to find links for your website. You could do the same thing for your competitors. Adding your competitor names into Google Alerts. So, this is google.com/alerts. I can put our competitors in there and then whenever they’re mentioned not somewhere on the web, I can go in there and say, “Hey, you talked about X. Would you like to talk about us instead? Or perhaps our article on the subject that X covered is better.

Content hub. Yotpo, a really big marketing software company if I remember correctly. I love their content hub. So, their content hub is basically like a collection of articles, a collection of guides, and in this case, it’s really well-designed that it reads like a book, like of chapters.

So, the first page is brand fundamental. Second chapter is purchasing experience, stuff like that, but I’m linking to this because one, it’s designed really well and two, it’s written really well as well, as well as well as well. So, what you can do is the same thing. Doesn’t matter if you’re selling products or services. You can write a content hub about your services, your industry, your niche and make it the best place on the internet for that subject. So, if you work in translation, there might be common translation problems. You could be writing about that. Property, for example, content hub. A great one could be everything you need to know about selling your home, buying a home, renting out your home, help to buy, all that kind of stuff.

So, create all of your content around that and make it the best on the web and people are going to link to that over your competition or anybody else because you put the best piece together. You don’t have to do it overnight. You can build it out over time, but start with just one sector. In this case, with Yotpo, you could just create the brand fundamentals area first. Spend the next month writing that out. Next month, write purchase experience and just gradually increase it and add to it when you can.

Content repurposing. So, you could just take the content you’ve already written. Let’s say you’ve just done a content hub. You can reuse it or repurpose it into blog posts on other websites.

So, you can use Medium to share it to get into in front of other people. You can turn it into videos, which is something we do a lot of. You can turn it into podcasts, which something we do a lot of. you can turn it into infographics. You can turn it into TikTok videos. You name it. There’s a content medium that you can use with content you’ve already done. You put all that research in. You put all that writing and creation time in. Don’t let it go to waste. Reuse it. Going to breathe now. Maybe a little sip of caffeine and you can enjoy the music.

Content resurrection. Now, what does that mean? Content resurrection means bringing content back for the dead, and in this case, we found some old articles linked from Wikipedia, which are no longer available. So, in this case, somebody’s linked to a list of music awards winners. It’s no longer available because that website is dead or that page has been removed. Archive.org have archived that and then linked to it in the footnotes of this Wikipedia page.

Now, that website, no longer available, but we can use archive.org or Wayback Machine by the Internet Archive to find the original content. We can go and recreate that content, go back to the original linking website and suggest that ours is linked instead.

So, let’s say this wasn’t Wikipedia, but another website. We could actually take the link from Wikipedia from one to two, put it through majestic.com or Semrush or any other website, which tracks backlinks, but we can look for that URL. See where it’s linked to. Sorry, where it’s linked from and then suggest to all of those linking websites, hey, that website isn’t available anymore, but it’s still worth having that link. Let’s say something a bit more important than these music award winners. Sorry. To those musicians that you link to our website instead. So, let’s say in digital marketing, if there was an old marketing blog that’s no longer active, I could find the dead links, recreate it on our own blog, reach out to all those websites and say, “Hey, that website isn’t available anymore. That URL isn’t available anymore. You should link to ours instead, and you can just basically take this copy and rewrite it rather than doing rather than a copy paste, but basically the foundation of the piece is there for you to work from.”

The next thing you can do is create a curated swipe file. The swipe files are really common in copywriting, but they’re also used in other aspects of digital marketing. You could do the same thing for your industry as well. So, in this case, this is a swipe file of well-written ads. So, copywriting direct mail.

You can find one by Marketing Examples, which shows you really good copy for headlines, for ads, all kind of that stuff. People link to this, which is basically one person just scraping stuff and instead taking screenshots and adding nice highlights on them, but just putting them all in one place makes it really useful for somebody else and they’re more likely to link to it.

So, we have the same for abandoned cart emails. So, if you work in eCommerce and you’re thinking, “I need to improve my abandoned cart email. Oh, if only there was someplace I could find some good examples.” You can go to this website and look through them. So, there’s something that will apply to yours as well.

This is another one. This is emails. This reallygoodemails.com. If you work in email marketing in any way, even if you don’t, if you’re a business that sends emails, I would still recommend going to this website and finding out how your emails can be better, but anyway. There might be something within your space where people are looking for this kind of information.

So, let’s say you work in beauty, and I’m trying to think. Like the beauty ad copy or beauty sales or beauty photography or let’s say beauty photography for social media or something like that. You could create a swipe file of beauty ad campaigns that people can go to to look for inspiration or in property. What does a good property page look like? What does a good… I’m trying to think. Yeah, let’s say good property page look like. How much information should be included? You could create a swipe file of those and say, “We looked all over the web. These are the best-looking pages and we find that they convert better because they have this information included.”

I spent a lot of time looking at property pages recently. I can tell you that some estate agents, they don’t bother with much information. It’s copy based on their own website, really tired, really boring, not useful at all, and there are some companies that go the extra mile and have fantastic pages. I can tell you they most definitely will be converting higher. So, you could do something similar for your industry as well. If you’re looking for ideas, just tell me your industry in the chat and I’ll happily think of some swipe file ideas for you. It doesn’t have to be a swipe file necessarily, but some kind of area where people can link to. So, these are the marketing examples I was talking about before.

Discount and coupon code. So, this applies more to eCommerce, but I’ve seen it done for services as well, like Groupon famously does discounts for everything. They do discounts for services too. So, you can do the same for yours. If there’s even like a 5% discount, 3% discount, it’s still useful, and you can get onto all these hundreds and hundreds of discount coupon codes websites. Now, I’m not saying that coupon and discount code websites have high authority, but if you’re looking for ways of getting free backlinks to your website, this is an approach that I would go.

eBooks. Love eBooks. This Growth Handbook by intercom. I think is 10, 15 years old. It’s just been redesigned in the last couple of years. It’s super because not only are people reading it. They’re also linking to it and saying, “Hey, this is super helpful for my own growth journey as well. I highly recommend it.”

So, it ends up in book lists. It ends up in recommendation pages. It ends up in interviews. How did you grow your company to X million per year? Stuff like that. And as I said, it doesn’t have to just be that.

HubSpot have loads of ebooks about how to do Instagram for business, customer service, any form of marketing. People are linking back to this because they’re useful. Plus you can use them within your content to earn leads as well. So, they have two benefits.

Semrush. Again, they also offer ebooks too. Sometimes, they’re collaborations with other companies, but they mostly work off their own data. If you can do a co-partnership with another company, you can take out some of the work necessary to do it to put it together. They might handle the design once you handle the writing or the reverse.

Just as rightfully pointing out that we do have a free ebook, which I can get to in just a second, or you can enter the chat and be able to prize draw for it. In fact, I might have even added a banner in for that already. Hang on. Hang on. There we go. Look at that. You can get a free copy of a book, How to Get to the Top of Google by using that URL, which I fixed just last night. Jess, when you get a second, please do take that back off again. So, yeah, you can create ebooks. You can create an ebook about anything and people will find it useful not only for lead generation, but also for link building as well. You might just have to let people know that that ebook is available. You just have to go out there and tell people and say, “Hey, I wrote this ebook. I think it’d be really interesting to your audience. Would you mind including it with your next article about X?” Or I can write an article for you in which I… and then you just drop it into there as I mentioned.

So, for example, we use it on our website, create this one, last month, the month before, which is the “21 Things You Need To Know Before Choosing a Web Design Agency“. You just drop it in into any relevant content, but then I can go out there and create links to this by writing 11 things you need to know before you’re choosing a web design agency and put down another website. Another article, five things you need to know. Another article, seven things you need to know. Spit out all those different things. Send them to as many places as possible and where possible, link back to that ebook. So, they can be really useful and again, with the Intercom example, that book has been around for years and is still getting mentions today, and breathe.

Events and conference recaps. So, this one is from Deepcrawl, which is a SEO software company, and they go to BrightonSEO. They often sponsor BrightonSEO as well, which is an event in Brighton. They write recaps of what have happened on the various days or from various sessions and every industry has some kind of event or conference. Translation has industry events and conferences. Property. You name it. You can put pick up any industry and there will be an event conference. You can go there, record notes throughout the day, and then share them at the end, and just email them around to people or just share them in forums or groups that you’re in and say, “Hey, I’ve recapped everything from that day, all the important points from each speaker. I think it’d be really useful for your audience. Here they are. Please link to it if you find this useful.”

Expert roundups. In a similar way, you just speak to the right kinds of people and say, “Hey, I’m putting this article together. I’d love your opinion in it.” Include their quote and then they’ll more than likely link back to it at some point either in their related article or they might just share it on social media, which is fine. At least if it’s going out there on social media, people are seeing it. They might then reference it as well. So, there’s an example from ContentKing who recently sold to… Who’d they sell to? Salesforce or Adobe. I can’t remember. A big company. Somebody can search for that and tell me in the chat. That’d would be great, but yeah, ContentKing recently acquired. They built their way there through sponsorships of that, but I would say not being an insider because I don’t know, but I’m going to guess that it’s off the back of their content hard of their content base, and a lot of what they did, and a lot of how they got there was by speaking to the right industry experts, getting them into the actual pieces themselves, all these, as these quotes you can see here and those people then re-share it with their network and people link back to them.

So, their robots.txt article in this instance has got loads of quotes in it from people that are respected in the industry people. People are then linking back to this because it’s the best piece about robots.txt. So, you could do the same thing no matter what your industry.

Fake products PR. So, this is from a couple of years ago, a digital PR company. I can’t remember the name. They created a… It’s coming home roller blind and put it on their clients website, which wasn’t actually going to be available, but it generated a bit of buzz.

So, it’s coming home blind. You register your interest. It doesn’t go anywhere. I’m sure that’s just used for remarketing. The product never was actually available, but of course, people linked to it, the Sun, the Daily Mail, and so on. In fact, here’s the Retail Times talking exactly about that piece. So, it generates a bit of buzz.

As I say, England is doing well in European Championships or World Cup. I know that sounds incredibly unlikely, but let’s say they are. This is timely and gets picked up. Oh, Jess. They are acquired by conductors, so a huge MarTech company. Just goes to show, content can really change around your future.

Guest posting. If you’ve seen any of our streams before, you’ll probably know what this is. If you don’t, this is how it works. You write an article, send it to another publisher or website to publish. They publish it. That’s it. That sounds simple. The concept really is it’s quite time-consuming, but it can be really beneficial if you get on the right websites. Now, don’t just reach out to any website. Make sure it’s related and actually going to be… Yeah, didn’t win it, did they? So, you reach out to websites in the industry that you know people are going to be reading, not just any website, because there are loads of websites that are really just there so people can publish sponsored content and make some money. You want to actually be published on websites, your industry, or people in your industry are actually reading.

So, yeah, I love guest posting. You search Thinkplus guest posting on Google, you’re more likely to find an article just about that, and if we don’t have one, I’m so sorry, and we shall fix that, won’t we, Jess? Okay.

HARO & Muck Rack. So, HARO stands for help a reporter out and Muck Rack stands for Muck Rack.

So, the way this works is that you sign up for these services and basically whenever there’s a… Similar to JournoRequests. Journalists put out a piece and say, “I’m writing about this subject. I need people to give me a fork piece about it, a quote, or something. I’m trying to develop this story. I need some help.” So, same kind of thing except you pay for these, but the opportunities tend to be better than JournoRequests because JournoRequests is hit and miss whereas people using these databases services are paying through their nose for it and the quality tends to be much better.

So, image or photo library is another way of doing it. I’ve seen this used plenty of times before. So, you’ve got Unsplash, which is a website or pixels, which is a website where they have free use images and people come along and use them in their blog posts and then you see the same photo in every blog post at that subject. Gets a bit annoying. So, people are always looking for new images or photos that are related to their topic. So, if I went on to Unsplash and searched for SEO, I probably would find the same images I’ve been seeing for the last eight years, or I might not find anything at all. So, one company created a whole bunch of photos about their products. In this case vaping, and they made them freely available just as long as there was attribution back to the website.

So, they put all these up on one page and said, “Use them as much as you want,” because you probably can’t find vaping pictures for free use on Unsplash or Pexels or anywhere else. Use them for free. Link back to the website and that’s exactly what they did and what they also did was they searched Google for their images and whenever they found anybody that hadn’t attributed them, they’d just send them an email and say, “Hey, please, can you attribute us or we’ll take down or we’ll contact your hosting and say take down that website,” which I’ve seen happen. Excuse me. Would anybody mind if I had a little drink? I’m going to take that silence as that’s okay.

Industry histories. So, I know we talked a lot about digital marketing SEO. So, the first place I thought of was a search engine journal. They have 20 years of SEO, so the history of search engine optimization, which is also timely when it was published because I think it was the 20th anniversary of Google’s first search or something like that, but you can do the same for your industry, and I know some people are thinking, “This doesn’t sound exciting to me and I doubt that people are going to be talking about my industry.” Well, you’d be surprised.

This company Digimarc had the history of packaging. It doesn’t sound particularly glamorous, but what would you know? People actually really like it. It’s really well put together and it’s interactive in some ways and it links through to other parts of their website and people are linking to this for two reasons.

One, it’s interesting. If you’re in a packaging space, you don’t see stuff like this all the time. You’re probably going to look at it and go, “Hey, that’s cool. I didn’t know that about packaging or it’s just fun for me to look at because I care about packaging.” The second reason is that the information within it might also be insightful as well. So, if people are writing about the packaging industry, they might not have a lot of luck looking for the history of packaging and because you’ve been the one person or the one company that did actually go to the effort of creating a history of your industry, you’re going to get that link every single time. So, don’t know what the history of translation is Phil. So, in your instance, but if you could write a single page starting with just text content to begin with, write a single page about translation, you could then develop that later as your business improves into something more interactive.

So, your starting point might just be like a Wikipedia style history of translation, but in the future, when you have more funding for your marketing, you could create something that’s more interactive. It could be illustrations. It could be a fun game. Who knows? But I think any business can really do that. There are loads of digital marketing agency websites with algorithm history for Google. So, Panda update happened this time. The Penguin update happened this time. Medic’s happened this time. There are dozens of websites with that on, but they’re all doing different ways and they all learn links back to them as well. So, just even if your history or did I say it was history? Yeah, industry histories. Even if it’s been done before, you can do it in your own way and still make it work.

Cool. Infographic. So, I’ve covered this before with graphics and charts. Infographic’s a little bit more interesting to look at. So, these can be done really well. You can do them in Canva, which is a free tool, pretty simply, but if you have a really strong designer like we do, the pieces not only look better than if you just did them in Canva alone. They’re also more likely to be linked back to because they look stunning compared to cheap done infographics.

So, let’s say you do a study or you already have some data available about your industry that not everybody has access to, you turn that into some kind of story. Turn that story into an infographic and then publish on your website. Then you can go out there and you can tell people about it. You can go and say, “Oh, I’ve written this piece about, but I want to create an infographic. I think you’d find it really useful in your piece,” or people just find it naturally by searching for that story.

So, translation data, number of translation businesses in Japan 2021, or average cost of a translator in Japan for example, and you could have that data going back years and years and years, and you get that on your website. Make it as interesting to look at as possible, not just as a chart, maybe as a fun infographic like that as well. Well, Phil, I think if you’re tweeting about it and people are engaging with it, you could probably do some videos about it as well and that gives you another option. So, you can start there. Do tweets. Do videos. Include them both in an article and make something that is multimedia and interesting and likely to be shared more rather than just putting tweets, which don’t have much evergreen value to them because once the tweet has been tweeted… If a tweet happens in the dark, does it really tweet? It’s better to have something more evergreen like an article. Jess is giving me funny faces. How dare you? I see you. You think you can hide.

Interactive assets. So, there’s another way of doing this. So, you can either create something which is factual, which is databased, and people are like, “I’m looking for statistics on the TikTok users per month in quarter four of 2021. You can do something else, which is just to make something that’s interactive, but just fun to do. So, this is an example from a friend’s agency at least when he worked there.

This is for a glasses eCommerce store. So, they were selling glasses and contact lenses. This interactive asset spanned a 24-hour period looking at London, and you could change the time of day and then see what London looked like in high definition because they did a deal with Canon or Nikon and got the equipment for that, but it got a lot of coverage because people found it really interesting.

It got covered by the Sun and the MailOnline. You name it, all the places that people read on a daily basis and related to lenses and camera lenses, the verbage, all that kind of stuff helps to build them links that had slight variation on lenses, but it was useful for them. More importantly, it got them links back to their domain because X company has created this asset. When it says X company, that’s a link back to the website from high authority domains. So, the fun thing about this is that you could change the time of day and you could zoom in and I found these people having a cigarette break out four o’clock on that day. So, you could just Zoom into anywhere on this image and it would be super high quality.

So, yeah, but it was really, really fun and obviously got a lot of coverage from it as well.

Another way of earning backlinks, it costs you nothing as to do interviews. So, this one is about the chief marketing officer of Grenade. At least the CMO at the time. It’s actually one of the co-founders of Grenade, and they did an interview explaining how they were doing the marketing for Grenade or how they got there as well. So, it had a history marketing beforehand. You could do the same kind of thing. There people are always looking to do interviews and they never really go out of style: people looking to read about a day in the life of a marketer, a day in the life of a translator, a day in the life of an estate agent. There were different variations on an interview, but interviews are still interesting to people and property mags, Property Week, websites like that, they’re always looking to fill that gap.

I’ve got the next four weeks worth of interviews organised. I need someone for the week after. Put your name into the hat and see that they request you and you can put your name forward or hope that they come to you. The best thing to do is to put your name forward.

Local events. So, this is what we did a few years ago, quite a few years ago. Now, I think it’s when I first joined EN. That’s Thinkplus, EN. One of these days, we’re going to change our name to just EN. I forecasted it. It’s going to happen. Like GE, General Electric, we’re going to be EN. I’m going to own en.com. Local events. So, this one, we were working with the hotel and we put a local event on with Lush as well. So, we brought Lush, one of their reps into the hotel, in a room they weren’t using, invited a whole bunch of local bloggers, and they wrote about the event in exchange for coming and attending for free.

And then those bloggers wrote their articles and their links back to the hotel. The point of doing it locally is that when you’re trying to do local SEO, which is highly dependent on links from local websites where they mention your location name or have a geographical closeness to where your business is, it’s great. If they say, “Fashion blogger in Bath,” or, “Beauty blogger in Bath,” or let’s say a location named Bath because it’s right there in front of me. That really helps with SEO and it costs you the cost of bringing a rep in or photographing, but the best thing about inviting bloggers is that they do their own photos. You can just use those instead if you make that part of the deal. We get to use any of your photos, but you can attend for free. I don’t know. It’d be better if you can add a financial incentive for people instead and pay them for their time, but you work it out however it works for you.

Jess, are you suggesting that the word bath isn’t in the last sentence of that paragraph? It’s going to be a spa day in Bath. Bath, Bath. Either way. Yeah, do something locally. I thought you meant the city of Bath, Phil. I certainly, certainly did. Yeah, you could do something locally and bring people in and in return, they write about you and they link it back to your website.

Local press as well. So, if you do something that is worthy of the press. They’re trying to fill… Well, they used to be they’re trying to fill column inches, but today, they’re trying to fill web pages. If you do something noteworthy. So, this case, an accountancy firm in Edinburgh finds a silver lining taxing year. It’s not much of a story, but if you’re a reporter, you’re an editor trying to fill the gaps, you’ve got a quota you need to fill for the day, then you might have a story that can fill that gap.

So, I don’t know what it might have been that you’ve done recently. It might be a charity event. You might have sold a thousand cupcakes in 37 minutes. I’m not sure. I’m sure if you don’t really have no ideas, you can reach out to us and we’ll definitely brainstorm a couple for you. You can do it in our Facebook group. So, just search for Thinkplus Dojo on Facebook and you’ll be able to join that group there and we’ll help you out, and yeah, just a little bit of local press. Again, local journalists are always looking for stories because they have quotas to reach. Don’t be afraid that your story isn’t big enough because I can guarantee they will consider everything.

Newsjacking. So, this is a recent one. So, if you’re not aware, Elon Musk has used these billions and the billions of other people as well to collectively try and purchase Twitter and this has cost billions and billions. So, obviously, a lot of people are commenting on it, writing about it. Journalists covering it as much as they can because that’s viewers onto their website. There are businesses like Affise. I think that’s Affise. Affise. Affise. Who’s Sam O’Brien, chief marketing officer of performance marketing platform, Affise, suggests Twitter could introduce ad subscription changes, et cetera. What they’ve done is they’ve either responded to a JournoRequest or they’ve contacted the journalist after the piece has gone live and said, “Hey, I see you’re writing about this. I know about this a lot because I work in X industry and I work at X business. I’ll happily improve your content and give you a quote that you can use.”

The journalists can say yes or no, but a lot of the time they say, “Hey, yeah, that’s going to help my piece.” Especially if you have an audience that you’re then going to re-share it with, if you have a large enough audience, you can re-share it with and get more eyes on that piece as well. So, newsjacking, I’m a really big fan of. I’d love to see more people using it. What is going on in the chat? I’m not going to get involved. Yeah, newsjacking is super. You can go reach out to a journalist who’s already published something recent and say, “Hey, I know about this. I’ll give you a quote,” or you can just send the quote over immediately and say, “This is what it means for people.” Let’s say there’s a lot of talk about recession at the moment.

Property Tortoise. Tortoise Property. Sorry. Property Tortoise sounds like the beginnings of a cartoon for YouTube kids or something. Property Tortoise. You could reach it. People are talking about recession and property prices, housing bubble, all that kind of stuff even though I’ve been saying housing bubble is there for years. You can just pay attention to the right journalists on Twitter and say, “Hey, I saw you publish this article. I’ve got an extra thought you could add to that,” and just jump straight into the piece. How are we doing for time? Oh my goodness. How many do we have left? This is slide 70. I have 93. Let’s get cracking.

Cool. Newsletters. You can write one. All right. I’ll take longer than that.

So, newsletters. So, everybody’s big on newsletters at the moment. I’m going to give you a really big reason in just a second, but this one is from Marie Haynes who has a consultancy company in North America. Marie and her team regularly talk about Google’s algorithm changes or just changes in SEO space. You could do the same thing for your industry, or even if you’re eCommerce, you can talk about your products, your niche as well. I got some really good examples like Morning Brew. They send a daily email about tech, marketing, business, and they have thousands of thousands of thousands of subscribers.

I don’t think they have services or products they sell. They just curate this newsletter and get money through sponsorship and affiliate links and stuff like that. One really big example of this is The Hustle who’ve been selling. I’ll get that in a second. They do a daily newsletter about business and technology and startups and all that kind of stuff and they sold to HubSpot last year for a fee between 25 and 35 million because they have 2.5 million subscribers to their email. So, you might not necessarily want us out to HubSpot, but you might have the opportunity to create a readership for your industry.

So, let’s say you work in property, towards this property. You can have a daily email, which helps estate agents learn more about being better estate agents or you could create it for people who are interested in buying and selling their home or help to let or help to buy, help to whatever. You could create a newsletter for those people and help them learn more about the business and when it comes to making a decision about who to go with for their property services, they’ll choose you over somebody else. So, I highly recommend newsletters. In fact, we’re going to start an additional one for Thinkplus sometime soon as well as the other 50 million things we want to do.

Podcast. Open up your phone. There’s an app called Anchor, which is owned by Spotify. You can record a podcast in the next 15 minutes. If you’re thinking about tweeting something, record it as voice instead. If you’re thinking about sending a newsletter, do it as voice instead. If you’re thinking about a blog post, do it as voice instead. It’s so quick to do. I’m surprised more people aren’t doing it. I know we have had a huge increase in podcasts. There’s new podcasts in the last 36 months, last two and a half years, three years. There’s space for more. As long as yours is relevant to people, they’ll listen to you, learn more about your business, and learn more about your industry, and when it comes to making a decision on who they go with, they’ll go with you, we would hope, but it’s great for link building as well because you can create a space on your website about our podcast and get it included in best podcasts about property care, best part how podcasts about estate agents, best podcast about translation, best podcast about you name it.

There might even not be podcasts about what it is that you sell yet and you can be the first person in that space and the first mover is always generates the best growth, but also promotion, link building, all that kind of stuff. So, definitely want to consider.

Pro bono work, this is something we’ve been doing more of the last couple of years. So, in this example, Black History Walks is a website that needed revision and we did that for them, and we weren’t really looking to earn links for it because that’s not the purpose, but we have been fortunate enough to earn some links from it because other people have been talking about that work that we’ve done.

So, they’re linked back to our website, talking about what we did for Black History Walks. So, that’s like putting a press release out there and hoping that people do. It’s just stuff that naturally works, but you could do that. You could do your pro bono work and then reach out to local press and say, “Hey, we’ve done this new website for black history walks and we think that other people should see it because it’s a really great charity,” and the journalists will jump onto it hopefully and give you the coverage and you earn backlinks that way.

Product outreach. Again, working with bloggers. Send the products to people and ask that they review them and you can either ask that they send the product back or you can ask them to send it to the next blogger in your list. I’ve seen that with tech space happens a lot. They send a new mobile phone to someone. They say, “Can you review it? Great. When you do review it, can you send it back?” They send that again to another person. They just have them going factory reset it, send it to the next one. Factory reset it, send it to the next one. So, you can do the same with yours. You can just send it to people and see if they like it. Send it back again. Pay for the delivery and all that kind of stuff. Give people a fee for their time writing about you. Compensate them in the right way, but that’s definitely one way you can do. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling.

You saw earlier there were cakes being sold, or in this case, it’s a cat scratching post.

Publishers. Work with the right publishers for you. So, you can do guest outreach, but you can actually work with the publishers and do stuff regularly. So, this one is for the negotiator, which is for residential agents. You could just be a regular contributor of articles for this website. The same for… Well, that’s what I was going to next.

Regular contributor. So, HRZone has regularly published pieces by the founder and CEO of Clear Review, which is a company that we’ve supported for a number of years, but they regularly have pieces published through HRZone because their pieces are well-written, but also get good views on them as well, so you can do the same.

Find a website that talks about your industry or your products and become not a thought leader. I guess you could say thought leader, but a regular contributor of high-quality content to them. If you’re thinking about writing an article for your website, think about sending it to someone else instead. I hope nobody minds if I had a little sip of caffeine. I’m surprised the battery on these lights hasn’t gone off yet. I thought I’d be dead by now. Super. I am going to answer your questions really soon. Where are we? Slide 78. Come on now. Race, race.

Retailer links. So, people who sell your products, ask them if they are linking to other brands to link to you too. You can ask them to link via your logo or for mentions. So, the actual the words of your brand itself and the category pages, product pages, stuff like that. They all help and it costs nothing to just reach out to them say, “Hey, you’re already selling my products. Would you mind just adding this link in as well? Thank you very much. Goodbye.”

Reverse image search. So, Backlinko created this graphic on the right-hand side of this chart a number of years ago. They put it out there. I’m not sure if they went out and reached out to people and said, “Hey, can you use our graphic?” But people have naturally looked for that information when writing their own articles and then use the infographic and then linked it back. So, if you do reverse image search for that graphic, there were not… For this one in particular, 952 pages using that graphic, that chart, that graph. I can’t decide which word to use. You could tell I do keyword research. I’m thinking of all the words. They have used that chart graph thing and you can reach out to all those people, finding them via reverse image search and say, “Hey, I saw you linked to use my graph. Would you mind linking to it as well just as attribution? You don’t have to mention me or anything. Just link the image back and do it that way.” Big fan of that, but it means that your images have to be really great quality or the data it’s coming from has to be great too.

Skyscraper content. So, this is a really well-written piece by Jess. I published this month about optimising your website sales funnel. That’s been skyscrapered. What does that mean? It means that Jess has looked at all of the available content, ranking for how to optimise your website’s sales funnel, then created this conglomerate deluxe long-form piece, which includes all of the best bits of all of those pieces as one piece. So, you go into the search results, look for all the ranking pieces, and just take all of the best bits and put them into one piece rather than somebody having to read six or seven or 10 different pieces to get all of that information. Huge fan of that. Search skyscraper method and I’m sure you’ll find plenty of articles about it, but all of our content is written that way. Highly recommend it.

Social media templates. So, you can create social media templates that people need to use for their own social media marketing. If you make them industry-specific, so let’s say beauty social media templates will be a great one to do because people can just come in and use them even if they’re hosted on Canva if you have a page on your website, which says 20 fashion social media templates you can use for free. People are going to love that and they’re going to link to it if they find it useful.

Public speaking. Every time our founder Tim Cameron-Kitchen speaks, he gets featured on the website and that means a link back to our website. So, if you can spare an afternoon to go and speak to people about something in your industry, that’s something you would care about that you have a lot to say about, then go for it and you will earn links that way as well.

Statistics. This is great. You can turn all of the information into a table, into a graph that looks great, into an infographic that looks great or just into a table, and I can tell you when we’re doing research for blog posts, we’re always looking for data, and stuff like this can be really, really useful for helping us build out a blog post.

So, the same in any industry. Doesn’t matter what your industry is. All of the data about property sales in 2021, how property… You might have property data from across the last two years or longer from your own sales and purchases that show how the market has changed or fluctuated in the last couple years that people are looking for that information for their own content that if you have already, people will link to your website instead.

Supplier links. This is the same too as retailer links, but upwards. So, instead of people you’re selling your products to or services to, you reach out to people that supply you and say, “Hey, would you mind linking to us as one of the people you sell to?” You can just give them your logo to link back to or as a mention within a relevant piece of content.

Templated docs and spreadsheets. So, more templates. If there’s documents or spreadsheets you use on a daily basis that you think other people in your industry would find useful, create templates. Put them on your website and you will earn links.

FreshBooks, they sell invoicing software within their thing. Their whole business is finance. They have free templates you can use for invoicing. So, you can download the template or use their tool to create a free invoice that looks better than just blog standard one on the right-hand side. So, that one page has earned them thousands of backlinks.

Tools. If you can create tools that people are going to use on a daily basis, that might be just a calculator of how to cost up property services like legal fees, conveyancing, and all that kind of stuff. If you have one tool that’s a really simple-to-use tool, you can have that on your website and then people will link to that because hopefully you make it rank at the top of Google. So, in this instance, Merkle have a whole bunch of SEO tools that people use all the time. At least I used to when I did SEO daily. I used to use these tools all the time. I always link back to this. It’s the first place I think of.

Training. You can do the same thing. Like a content hub, you can have a training area full of content about your… So, Twitter’s property, is it the advisory that is like the number one ranking website for anything when it comes to property? You could do the same kind of thing. Train people how to buy, sell, look after their property, all that kind of stuff, have on your website and set up on other people’s. So, you think of all the search queries that people are doing. Instead of them being on five different websites, you have them all on yours and have a fantastic training and knowledge area.

Tutorials, same thing. Just teach people how to do a specific thing. So, in this case, how to use Google Data Studio. Tools property, you might… I’m trying to think. I’m trying to think of some tutorials you could do. How to do conveyancing, maybe, but it might be something to… Oh. I think we just lost the battery. I’m not sure. You could create a tutorial about pretty much anything and have that on your website. Do it as a video. If it’s easy, just a screen share and do it that way and then embed that on your website with a text explanation of how it’s done and yeah, send, and let people know that it’s available. Email other websites and say, “Hey, I think that you could do a tutorial. This tutorial will be useful to your audience. Why don’t you link back to it or write the first lesson? You can have it on your website and the rest of the lessons could be over here, or I could do tips on how to do this process and you can go to the full tutorial of it on my website here.” There are loads of things you can do. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in.

University alumni pages, which I think means we’re near the end because that’s the letter U. Reach out to university if you went to university or college, whatever it is, where they may have alumni pages or in this case, where Sarah from our project management team, our account management team did a university course and they wanted to do a write-up about how that course went. That’s a great opportunity to just say, “Hey, this is what I’m doing now, and I work for X company,” and they will link back to your business website that way. So, any of you here went to university, if your university does have an online page, you can see if you can get mentioned there or you can sort out even better that you will go and do presentations or speaking stuff or training afternoons, training evening, training nights, sponsor group, that kind of stuff. You can do that in as well, but get mentioned that way.

Cool. Questions and answers. I know we’re over time. I’m going to first of all make sure the giveaway is actually working on stream or not because I haven’t set it up because I normally set it up whilst the other person is talking and there is another person talking right now. So, let me fix that right now, but yeah, we’re going to do questions and answers. Super. Jess, thank you so much for starring these up for me. So, Gabriel, does me linking to a powerful website bring any value for my SEO or is it only the powerful website linking to me that counts as a backlink? It’s incredibly useful and it helps because Google learns more about what your business does or what your website is about if you link to related websites.

So, if websites are only linking into you, that really is helpful for Google to understand what your business is, but you then need to link out again. So, if you think of a mind map, you do a mind map of your industry. You might have property in the centre, which then leads to estate agents, which then leads to Airbnb, which then leads to holiday lettings, which then leads to rentals, and then the holiday letting then links to Airbnb, then links to a whole bunch of other stuff. You want to be one of those little circles in the middle where you link out to other people to help Google understand how those industries are related to you as well. So, it’s all about relations and mapping this stuff out. If you link to the right website, it helps Google make a better estimate estimation of what you are doing and what your website is about and what it is you’re selling. So, I highly recommend linking out to related content. Hope that’s helpful.

Are all backlinks good? Are there some that we should avoid? Paid backlinks. So, if you go to Fiverr… Sorry, Fiverr, you got a bad rep, but no smoke without fire. If you’re buying backlinks like 500 for five pounds, dollars, whatever, they’re generally junk and they’re not going to last you very long. Payments are expected when it comes to backlinks, but in a different way. You might sponsor an article. So, payments are done that way. Google really hates paid links. They prefer natural linking, but sponsored backing is part of how our industry works and they understand that. They just expect you to mark it up or the other person to… the other website to mark up their content as a sponsored link, but yeah.

The worst you could possibly do is just spammy linking from cheap websites. Can we specify what exactly is a backlink? I know links in social media are backlinks, but not really. Is a backlink only when it’s cited in the text? A backlink is any link. So, [inaudible 01:16:37] social media is a link. However, social media links have no weight whatsoever. You can quote me on it. Google doesn’t use social media links at all. I always go as far as they don’t use links within YouTube either. So, if you’ve got videos linking back to your site, I don’t think they have any value to them. They do have the huge social media linking for discovery as far as I’m aware. So, if they want to learn about new pages on the internet, they need to be crawled so they can index them.

They’re using social media to learn about them where if there are 5,000 tweets all mentioning one website or one page of a website, it’s not going to lend any domain authority to that URL because they just don’t count in that way. They’re only using it for to learn about new pages, new websites. So, the best backlinks are those from related content. So, if you’re working property, if other property websites link back to you whether that’s a news or magazine about property or other estate agents linked to you or a letting agency links back to you or a holiday letting agency links back to you or a property care company links back to you or in just property [inaudible 01:17:59] company links back to you, they have way, way more value than if, I don’t know, Betty’s Brownies Shop in Bedford street in Edinburgh links back to you. As valuable as that link may be, it’s nowhere near as useful as a property link or link from a property website.

Are inbound and outbound link count on a page still a significant factor when determining the value of the link you gain? Great question. Great question. So, there used to be a time where the fewer links you have on your page, the more link authority, I think equity, whatever you want to call it, would go through to that link. So, if you had a blog post with only one outbound link from it and you had 500 coming in, all of that link authority would go through to that website. It’s not exactly like that anymore. It’s way, way, way more complex. There’s a lot to do with the context of the paragraph that the link is in, the context of the paragraphs before and after it, the context of the actual page itself, the context of the page being linked to. There’s way more to do about the actual the words going on than how many links are coming in or out.

Can you sculpt… It’s called sculpting. Can you sculpt how’s that link equity spread out? I would say a bit fractionally, but less so than you would have been able to five, 10 years ago. Back then, it was like Wild West. God [inaudible 01:19:41]. How important is linking to other blogs from my website? Super important. Super, super important. Again, you’re helping Google to learn about the web. So, they’re learning about your industry, your subject matter, your topic. They’re learning what it is that you should be ranked for. So, by linking to other blogs was some… I know in the past, some people have thought that as, “I’m helping out other blogs. I’m helping out my competitors. I wouldn’t think of it like that. I think about what’s most useful to people reading your content and add the link,” like it’s just better reading experience for that person to link to a competitor website than it is to not have that in there and Google finds that useful too because they then understand the context of what it is that you’re talking about. So, yeah, link to anything. I mean, we’re a marketing agency and somebody might suggest a link to other marketing agencies. Why? It’s better that we inform people and they make an educated decision and let our expertise help people to understand that we’re the better agency for them.

There are some great agencies out there than to not link them and not include their information. So, just think what’s better for people and how that helps Google at the back of your mind. Just write what’s best for people. Cool. Recommended tool for reverse image searching. Just Google. Just Google. Yeah, so the one yesterday, I added to the slides last night. I just used Google’s Google Lens. They changed it from image search just recently. So, if you’re using Chrome, if you just right-click on an image, it will say use Google Lens or something like that. What is it? I can’t show you because I’m… Search image with Google Lens, and then you can use that to search Google for the image and that’s how I came to that that screenshots. That screenshot was just from last night.

And if you do have any images that you think will have been used by other websites, you can just use that to find out what they are and open them all up. So, no additional tools needed there. It used to be the case you used to have to use other tools, but not so much anymore. Cool. I think that’s all the questions that were bookmarked. Phil, I heard that reciprocal links between businesses used to be encouraged, but that at some point Google started to punish it. What’s the current status? Link to whatever you want. Seriously, I would not overthink linking at all. The only thing you need to think about linking is that you need more of them than you had yesterday. That’s it and they need to be from high quality websites. Avoid low quality websites. Avoid websites that you don’t think people are going to be using.

A tip that I gave to someone this week was to go to Semrush or SE Ranking or your tool of your choice and see how well that website is ranking. So, if there’s an opportunity to rank on a website and you then put them through Semrush, they don’t rank for any related keywords to you or any related keyword words at all, then why would you want to be linked on them? If Google doesn’t value that website, then nobody else is going to either. So, at least you can be doing just double-checking that any website you want to be featured by is ranking for stuff and it’s not [inaudible 01:23:24]. Give me a second. [inaudible 01:23:28] live streams. If you’re linked to an external source, is it worth reaching out to those publications you link to then inform of your content in hopes of getting a link back from them? Why not? You might even just use it as an opening part of a longer conversation about maybe writing a guest post for that publisher.

So, you say, “Hey, I read this piece. I mentioned you. You don’t have to do anything.” Oh, somebody’s knocking my door. This is not good. I’m going to hit the… I’ll be back thing. Bear with me a second. Be right back. Sorry everybody. I deeply apologise for that. Normally my partner is here to pick up delivery stuff that. Yeah, by which point, I’m sure you’ve all checked out already. Sorry. If you link to an external source. Yes. So, what I would suggest is reaching out to them and say, “Hey, I wrote about you. Would you mind sharing with your audience,” or something like that and say, “Hey, I actually wouldn’t mind. I could also create a similar piece of content for you that might be useful for your audience as well.”

So, yeah, definitely, definitely let them know that it’s been done. They might just retweet it, which is a few more eyes on it, which is always helpful. I think this might be the last question and I’ll do the giveaway. I need to have a drink. My throat is hoarse. Okey-dokes. So, top three factors that determine a high quality page to link from. Cool. One, that Google is ranking them for stuff. If they’re not ranking them for anything, then there is no use to you either. If they’re not ranking for any high quality search queries, then there’s absolutely no point of them linking to you. Second for me is page speed. I know it shouldn’t pay… You wouldn’t think it’d be important, but I’m thinking in the same line as Google. Why would I rank this page? Is it high quality content? Is it a good user experience? Does it run fast and is it mobile friendly?

So, I always check ranking, page speed, mobile friendliness, and if I think that Google would like that website, then I’ll choose to be ranking. I would choose to get the link back from that website as well. So, those are three things I check. You can go further and see if people are linking to that website, so you can add them into Semrush, SE Ranking, Majestic and see how strong their backlinking is and factor that in as well, but sometimes just keeping it that simple can be all you need to earn links from high quality websites.

Tortoise Property. I believe you might have had a copy already, so just in case I’m going to hit redraw anyway. If you haven’t, no problem, I’ll just send two copies out today. Phil Robertson, you were drawing the other day. Phil, I did see your message about having a new address. Send it to me, your new address, and I’ll get that sorted. So, it’s dale@exposureninja. Send me a postal address, confirmation, phone number, and I will get that sorted. Dale@exposureninja. Gabriel, fantastic. Tortoise Property, no copy over there for you. No problem. Email me, dale@exposureninja, and I will get that sorted. So, I need your postal address and a contact phone number just in case the people delivering it can’t find your letterbox. The same for you, Phil. Please do email me your postal address, contact phone number, and I will get that sorted.

I’m sorry today’s stream has gone a little bit longer than usual, but as you can see, there were 50 different ways and I have a lot to say about all of them. Thanks also to Jess who’s been supporting me in the background with all of the question bookmarking. I really appreciate it. I am going to disappear right now and if you would like to, there’s going to be a video coming up any second now in the middle here. So, watch my face. There’ll be a video. If you’re watching this on the replay, then you’ll be able to watch it next. Have a great weekend. I’m looking for the button that shows the thing. Where is it? This one. Cheerio everyone. Have a fantastic weekend and watch this video. This one here.