Basic Seo Link Building Tips That Works In 2024

Link building is without a doubt the hardest part of SEO. You know you can’t hack your way to the top. It’s based on reaching out to real people which can be intimidating and if you’re just starting out as a beginner it can be really difficult to get those initial 100 backlinks to build your domain authority.

That’s why in this blog article we’re going to cover the exact SEO link building tips and tactics that actually worked in 2024 and the strategies that I used to build over 3000 backlinks in my blog’s first year this in turn grew my traffic to over 500 000 monthly visitors and now I make over 150, 000 a month from my blog which I just started in january 19.

So we’re going to cover SEO link building tips and tactics in 2024 and exactly what you need to do but before we get started make sure to read my free blogging master class so we go over my exact content, my link-building, my SEO strategies and my affiliate strategies how I make over the 150 000 a month with my blog. Let’s get into the topic for today

The Importance of Backlinks or Link Building

First, let’s cover how backlinks or Link Building were extremely important in growing my blog’s traffic So here’s my ahrefs profile and you can see all of this stuff in the main profile. Here we have backlinks referring to domains’ organic keywords and organic traffic.

We can see the backlink profile and referring domains from when I started in January 2019 and this you know growth curve up to 2022. We can see all of this has a direct correlation with the organic search traffic that I’ve been receiving in my blog with over 500,000 monthly readers.

Traffic is valued at over a million dollars a month if I were to bid on it from an organic perspective. So getting these backlinks you know made my site trusted in Google’s eyes and scaling the backlink acquisition was one of the most important things anyone can write content and create content but getting a lot of backlinks is the key and you know the way that you can find success and get more traffic to your blog.

So if we look at my you know my referring domains these are all of the websites that are linking to my blog readmorr.com so we see if we want to sort it by domain rating to see the most authoritative sites linking to me we can do that.

We can see sites like Weebly, Wix, Dream Host, Calendly, HubSpot, Business Insider, big commerce, entrepreneur.com lots of you know really high authority sites. So in this blog article, I’m going to cover specifically how I got these links all these good links you know over 3000 active links that I worked for in my blog’s first year. We’re gonna go over the main strategies that you can use to get these links too.

The legendary website called simplilearn.com stated:

“Backlinks serve as valuable votes from other websites that tell the search engines that your content is credible and useful. So, the higher the number of these “votes” you manage, the higher your site will rank in Google and other search engines.”

The Problem with Link-Building Advice

First, we have to cover the fact that there is a major problem when it comes to link-building advice out there. I Google something like link-building strategies here and I see tons of different articles There are tons of you-know influencers here ahrefs, Neil Patel, Brian Dean at Backlinko, scmrush, Yoast and you know there’s a complete list of seo link building strategies here 170 plus link building tactic.

You know and everybody teaches the tactics they teach the way to do it with an email right like broken link building, the skyscraper technique, guest post outreach, do these things, and ask people for links in a certain way but there’s a real problem with those approaches because they don’t go into the human psychology of links.

What they actually are links are a value exchange, links are like the currency of the internet if you can get a link from a high authority site to your blog that has real value that has value in the real world that can boost your rankings. So simply asking for that for somebody without providing them anything in return is actually really difficult.

So the problem is there’s a ton of different individual link-building tactics but it’s mainly you know email outreach and things that don’t necessarily work if you don’t have leverage and you don’t have a relationship that’s why it’s really difficult they teach the tactics but ultimately it comes down to the real human psychology of link building and building real relationships.

Seo Link Building Tips and Strategies That Work

All right so we know that there are a ton of different link building tactics out there 170 or more but how do we actually do link building strategies that work in 2024? Let’s narrow it down to the only two real link-building strategies that I use and that is what I call guest posts are the engine and partnerships are the fuel.

So in order to get a lot of links to your blog you need leverage and you need the ability to provide links for other people. Remember this is a value exchange when we do our outreach when we send our messages and we want to be able to provide something of value in return. So I’m going to start you know showing you a little bit about how this works and how I specifically do it for my blog. Let’s start first with guest posts.

Guest Posts

So guest posts are a great way to build links from one site to yours by writing an article for another site and linking to your article on your website. So here’s an article of mine that I wrote a guest post on addthis.com. This actually wrote in 2019 five ways to increase your e-commerce sales with pop-ups and banners.

So if we go down let’s actually find where I link to my blog so here’s one that says uh back here’s anchor text back that with your email marketing software.

It links to my article on email marketing software.

So that passes page value from this individual article on addthis.com linking do-follow link to my article on email marketing software and that passes link value that helps that a specific article rank it boosts my domain rating overall and it’s a great way to get links. So you’ll see I also added another link to this
one.

On landing page builders and then I have my guest author bio at the bottom and it’s actually kind of funny this was back in 2019. So you can read that and see it says I’m a strategic partnerships manager for big commerce. I was working full-time at the time. It has a link to my home page.

So in a guest post, you can link a couple of times to yourself to individual articles on your blog in the content That’s key you want links in the content not just that home page link in the bio. Google is good at knowing the difference between what’s in the content and what’s in that author’s bio.

So you know an easy way a good way to get links to your blog is to work for them and do guest posts. So I want to get into the guest post strategy in depth right now because it’s really important that we understand exactly how to do this.

A recent article in Siegemedia said:

“It’s important that any guest posts you create for your brand have quality written content so you can best represent yourself on other platforms and potentially build your audience.”

Guest Posting Step-By-Step

So first there are a number of different steps when it comes to guest posts Number one is what sites am I actually going to write for Who am I going to reach out to?

1. Finding Sites You Want To Reach Out

So that’s number one finding the list of sites that you actually want to reach out to. An interesting way that I do that is actually with Ahrefs so again I’m going to look at my site what if I wanted to find a competing domain of mine?

So I’m looking at my competitors according to Ahrefs and seeing other sites that rank for similar keywords to me. Then based on that list I can see who’s actually ranking to them so something like bloggingwizard.com.

I’m going to use that as an example. So I’m going to go to Blogging Wizard great site I know them personally they’re cool and I’m always friendly with the competition too. You can do this specifically for your niche but you can look at their referring domains. So look at competing referring domains in your niche or some of the big players in your niche and then you can just go by you know domain rating you can see Dreamhost, woocommerce, wp engine a lot of great links here.

All you do is export that list so export the first 1000 referring domains from a competitor and that could be a good idea of sites to reach out to. You can sort it by domain rating filter it out get rid of some of the websites that aren’t coming.

There’s a little bit of manual stuff there but that’s a good way to initially build a list of targeted sites that you want to reach out to. So maybe create a list of 100 sites as a goal and start doing outreach. Now that you have a list of targeted sites you want to reach out to.

2. Finding People You Will Message

The next step is actually finding the right person to reach out to and message. So in an example, I wrote a guest post for flippa.com How I grew a blog to 500,000 monthly readers in under two years.

It’s an interesting one I linked to my homepage I link to a lot of things on my site and I can kind of give you an overview of how I found the right person to reach out to you at Flippa. So what I did was I went to LinkedIn and I typed in Flippa and I found the company page. I went to that company page and then I went to all their employees.

So I’m trying to find the right person and typically the person you want to reach out to is a content manager or an editor or something like that. So now we have the list of all of the employees at Flippa. I’m going to search for the word content and boom this is the person that I would probably reach out to at Flippa the content and marketing manager.

So that’s the person that I would reach out to. Now I can reach out to them and connect with them on LinkedIn and then I can send a message to them directly there. Also what I want to do is get their email address and you can use a tool like hunter hunter.io in order to find their email address. So you can put in a domain like flipa.com and it will tell you you know the structure of their email.

It might be the first name at flipper.com or first. lastname at flippa.com it’ll give you that structure, then you know based on their name on LinkedIn and the structure of the email exactly what their email address is.

So then next to that column in your spreadsheet with your domain rating and the sites that you want to reach out to. You can start adding in that contact information so that’s step two actually finding the person that you want to reach out to.

3. Sending an Email Message to your target contact

The third step in this process is actually sending an email message to your target contact. To do that you can you know send a kind of a templated approach but you want personalization in it as well you want a more targeted approach more of a sniper approach than a mass sending 500 emails based on a mail merge or something like that.

So here’s an example of one that I sent and How I lay out my email. I say hi becky my name’s Adam and I write to 500,000 readers per month at readmorr.com where I talk about XYZ. This is a personalized sent. I say great post on this and I link to the post that we read.

I always and then I had a couple of extra sentences Marketers are on the lookout for different things your art and your article share expert opinions. This was very helpful. Now here’s the key sentence right here I write 15 to 25 guest posts per month on high-quality sites in the sas marketing and online business space!

Boom there’s my leverage point That’s an interesting thing I’m not asking for a guest post directly I’m saying Hey it’s nice to meet you I write a ton of guest posts already. Maybe I can link to you so that’s the value exchange I can link to you I’m not asking for you to link to me yet. Then we say I wanted to see if we could talk about collaborating together via a link exchange and or contributing a guest post to your site.

Let me know what you think ps you can read about me and Forbes and entrepreneur. There’s social proof built in here five hundred thousand monthly readers forums and entrepreneur links. And I’m saying I can actually do a ton of guest posts. I can actually link to you so that’s where the leverage comes in and using links like a currency and saying I’m open to doing this but I can also link to you.

And that you know that type of outreach has a much higher success rate because I’m not just saying hey I want to write a guest post at high quality I’m saying I write a ton too and I can use these guest posts as link trade to get other guest posts so it really helps in your outreach and overall strategy. Now I have this now because I can say you know I write to 500 000 readers I’ve been informed an entrepreneur.

If you’re just starting out and you don’t want to say something like I write to zero readers here’s my domain I’m a brand new blogger. At this, you need to find your unique leverage point so that might be your professional experience in your career.

When I first started sending these outreach messages I didn’t say I’m a blogger with no traffic at readmorr.com. I said I was a digital marketing director at Big Commerce. I was using my career as leverage because that was more impressive than my blog yet was. So maybe it’s your career, maybe it’s something insider knowledge that you have maybe it’s a unique thing that you shared on your blog. You need to find your unique leverage point only.

You can identify that but that’s the part where you can really build the snowball effect of getting this to work because then once you start getting some initial guest posts accepted. Then you can start using that as trade bait using it to build these real relationships with other websites.

Show those as samples in your future outreach and it helps with everything so that’s kind of how I look at framing an email message. It’s actually going after you know providing value to them what do they want typically links?

After you’ve sent your initial message to your target contact. Then the question is do they actually answer?

4. Pitch a topic

If they do answer then it’s time to get right into it and pitch a topic. Here’s an example email of a site that was in the writing niche where I pitched topics for.

You can see in this email it says we I say we’d be happy to link to one of your articles in our guest post in exchange for writing a blog post so they actually answered because of the link value that I shared and said that I could link to them. They might not have answered otherwise I say What do you think about one of these topics

Here are the topics how to start a blog for writers how to market your nonfiction book online how to outline a non-fiction book and how to self-publish a book on Amazon.

I typically pitch three to four topics to this content manager and there’s clearly a formula for this.

1. one is you gotta make sure it doesn’t exist on their blog yet. It would be bad if you pitch something that already exists and they have already been published.
2. two it really should make sense for their audience. Their audience comes first when it comes to these guest posts. It’s not about you and what you want to write it’s about what your audience wants to read.
3. three it should be keyword optimized Make sure that you’re structuring this title in a way that makes sense. I like to add like x-ways because I like to do this or how to do this or you know make sure that it is based on target keywords.
4. finally, one nice thing to have is if you can easily link to your blog post in it.

Like this one for example how to start a blog for writers. I wrote a post on how to start a blog easy to link to. Then they can say she got back and said Awesome I think the first topic how to start a blog would be very interesting.

They want to edit and approve any guest posts so letting him do that here are the guidelines. Then they share the guidelines in thousand-plus words. Let me know if you’re interested so then you know that’s when you start the process.

You say okay yes I can write this guest post I’ll have it for you in a couple of weeks or something like that so that’s the next step pitching topics and you want to make sure that you do it for things that don’t exist on their site are SEO optimized and are good for their audience.

Who is going to write this guest post?

So now the question comes who’s actually going to write this guest post Because I published 80 guest posts in 2019 doesn’t mean that I wrote them all I actually outsourced most of them I wrote some of them. But this is the tricky part right it’s like man you’re telling me I have to write all these blog posts for my own blog now I have to write all these guest posts that kind of sucks.

How to write a guest post.

Well, there are a lot of ways to do this. Guest posting is beneficial for you to build authority and relationships with another niche site in the market. Here are some steps that

1. Outsource Hire a Freelancer:

You can outsource the writing to a freelancer so you can effectively find a good freelancer and get a 1 000 1500 word article written for maybe 100 or 200 so that’s a good way. Then if you get links in that article that are valued higher than that or maybe you trade a link in that article or you sell a link in that article whatever you do. You can make your money back on that.

2. Use An AI writing Tool:

Another way to do it is you know you can outsource it or now there are AI writing tools. You can write something from scratch with a tool like Jsper Ai.

Let’s say I want to use jasper jasper.ai and we can say something like I’m going to do this example of how to start a blog for writers and then I’m going to put in like this article describes how to start a blog for writers book publishers can do to improve their reputation online continue title.

I’m going to generate some ideas and see what Jasper comes up with on how to start a blog for writers that’s not a bad tip for book publishers I’ll use that one.

Intro paragraph I’m going to generate ideas to come up with an intro paragraph. So let’s see what they come up with if you’re a writer it’s important to have an online presence. A blog is a great way Boom let’s use that one.

Open the editor, This is pretty simple let’s see how quickly I can do this. Setting up your blog is the first I’m going to start writing. The first step in starting your blog is to get web hosting. Then I’m just going to compose a long thing and see what happens this will give you a place to store your blog’s files and make it accessible online.

Let’s see how long this is right now, If I go to the total words word counter we’re already at 345 words.

Maybe we need 1500 words so we could probably do that in a matter of 15 to 20 minutes by creating that content that we can add our headings in we can add our links in and maybe with our AI writing tool, we can actually write the guest post ourselves in about an hour or 45 minutes.

Now remember you don’t want to always you want to check this. Make sure it’s good writing but for guest posts, we don’t need to be perfect like we’re writing them for our own blog.

So with an AI writing tool or outsourcing to a freelancer, you can get the guest post written very quickly. Now the guest post is finally written you can see it’s published You might have to follow up a few times when you send the Google doc to make sure the sharing settings are optimized. They can easily see your links, and then you send them in the email. You say here’s my finished guest post please let me know when this will be published and what is a rough publish date.

Maybe you have to push this process a little bit forward to keep it moving. Sometimes it could take two days, sometimes it could take four or five months to get the article published. It’s completely based on that site’s content calendar.

Then the question becomes Okay I can do this guest post outreach. I can link to my own blog and then I can also trade those potential links like if I’m writing for a website and then I do future outreach. I can say here are five articles I’m currently writing I you want to link in one of those would that help me get a guest post on your site?

So all of this value exchange builds real relationships with these people and when you start providing value they show that you know you can get the links. They’ll actually probably start working with you more there are major influencers and people that are big in the marketing world that I actually linked to up to 20 times for free without offering anything in exchange before I did outreach.

I might have linked 10 to 20 times to someone like Smart Passive Income before I reached out for a podcast interview or a guest post or something like that. It’s a big value exchange and the more valuable you are the more links you can provide the easier. It is to get links yourself. then the question comes up well

What Do I Actually Link To?

What do I actually link to Then I have like say 100 articles on my blog or 50 articles on my blog. How do I choose what to link to?

I have this guest post I have these partnerships and other people writing guest posts what sites or what articles should I prioritize? That ultimately comes down to understanding the URL rating and how link value is passed. Here’s an ahrefs search for the keyword how to make money blogging.

This is one that I rank for It’s a pretty hard keyword to rank for and I rank number three between two and three usually for this and we can see that there are all these metrics on the first 10 ranking sites There’s Dr domain rating ur URL rating.

Url rating is really crucial when it comes to ranking and understanding authority on a website because there’s a domain rating just because you have your domain rating is going up. Well, each individual article’s URL rating also has to increase so when you publish something online a new article your URL rating is typically 10.

So it starts out at 10 and then the more links that you build to that individual article the higher that URL rating goes and you can see the URL ratings on the first page to understand the authority of all of these articles. When we look at this one we see they’re very high like every single one the lowest is 28 but that’s wix.com and there are a lot of them in the 30s 40s and even 1 in the 50s a couple in the 50s.

You can see all these domains there are hundreds of domains or 40 domains and 100 domains pointing to these articles. Now that’s not You know those aren’t all earned links a lot of the stuff in these SEO tools is the kind of random spam kind of general links that you get.

You can actually look in and see how many links there actually are we have to understand that URL rating passes a value from one article to another. So if my url rating on this make-money blogging post is 43 that’s very high. you know 10 is when you start getting up to 20 30 starts getting high 40s higher.

If I link out from my make-money blogging post with a high URL rating to another website that passes a lot of value. If this article only had a 10 url rating and I linked out to somebody that wouldn’t be as much value.

Url rating plays a crucial role in understanding the value of links that you get. So if you’re asking for a link or you’re doing a link trade you can try to find you know URL ratings that are high because when you think about it if you’re getting a link from a webpage to your blog how many links are pointing to that take a step further how many links are pointing to that blog post.

If there are a hundred links pointing to this authority post and you’re getting a link from that one that’s much more valuable than an article that doesn’t have any links pointing to it. So think of it as link juice as they say or link value passing from page to page so looking at the opportunities that lie in your niche is important.

If I was just starting a blog today I would probably say I’m not going to write this article on how to make money blogging or try to get links to it right now because it’s very competitive at this point. In time maybe it’s a little bit too late to do it but the key is if you could find you know websites that are ranking in the top 10 with a URL rating that’s lower maybe it’s 10.

Maybe it’s under 20 then that shows you that a lower authority page still has a chance of ranking on page one if it has good content so then maybe you start getting links to that article.

So you want to get links to your transactional money you know list posts as I talked about in other blog articles. It’s important that a good amount of your videos are a good amount of your articles are transactional posts. For example, another one I rank for is podcast hosting and when I look at that one I rank number one for podcast hosting which is the 15 best podcast hosting sites.

It’s a transactional post it’s a list post for affiliate revenue. Those are the ones you actually do want to get links to and people say how can I get links to them it’s really hard. It’s actually not there are a ton of different anchor texts that you can use.

For example, if I want to link to podcast hosting I would write something on a podcast-type website about how to start a podcast or podcast recording equipment or a guest post on podcast software or something like that and I would link. Use the anchor text something like When choosing the best podcast host or Here are the top picks for podcast hosting you don’t even have to include the URL.

Anchor text is not as important as it once was you actually don’t want to spam your anchor text with the exact keywords you’re going after the anchor text can be something like Choose from this list or Here’s a list of the best something that doesn’t even include the keyword because google is good at understanding context.

Nate Nead the writer of readwrite.com said in his article:

“Using relevant keywords in anchor texts helps to show the subject and context of the content that the user can expect when visiting a website from a link.”

But you can see this one also has URL ratings in the 40s and 80s there’s one that’s a 16 but most of these are pretty difficult to rank for.

Content assembly method.

What do you look for when you want to start thinking about what to link to on your own blog? The strategy of this is a content assembly method. What you want to do is publish content on your blog in a minimum viable format it’s not going to be perfect every time that you publish it. But you create a simple viable post maybe you start with just the five best options and then you can eventually over time build it to 15 or 10 or whatever you want.

Then you see your initial search ranking viability so the more authority that your website has the more links that you have the fir. The initial ranking will change so maybe when you first start your blog you see that you’re ranking on page 10 for things not getting any traffic.

Then you start building some links overall to a bunch of different articles your homepage links in the bio and then when you publish an article you’re on page four automatically.

When you first publish it you’re like this is good then sometimes maybe now you get more links in authority then you publish an article on a topic and that article goes to page two automatically or three. That’s where authority raises all ships basically and when you start seeing that you’re on page two that’s when you wanna start building links to that article.

Look at the URL ratings of the competitors you look at where you are ranking currently and it’s something that’s on page two maybe it’s gonna get to page one, maybe you need links for that one, or maybe you do need content updates but it’s a constant cycle of links and content updates to get your content to rank.

I would look at prioritizing transactional posts that can make you the most affiliate revenue in your niche ones that aren’t too overly competitive where the first page is saturated with URL ratings in the 40s and 50s something that you can viably rank for and something that you’re creeping up the rankings for.

Maybe it’s on page two or page three and some links will help boost that and then you look at your Google Analytics you look at ahrefs. You see what you’re ranking for and you see if that’s going up or down so it’s really based on data what you link to is never going to be perfect. But we want to push our links to the right areas to build the right knowledge graph in Google’s eyes.

When you’re thinking about what to link to try to link to just about everything that you’re writing at first to get enough data and start to tell google what you’re an expert in. Then hone in overtime on your transactional list post based on the URL rating of the competition and your current ranking to start to get to page one. You have to get to page one to make revenue.

Remember you have to get to page one to make revenue and that’s the whole point of link building. Building links in order to get to page one and then make money so we talked about guest posts the entire process of creating one and publishing one and then we talked about figuring out what to actually link to but guest posts are not everything. There they should really only be 40 to 50 of your link profile.

Leverage-Based Link Building

The other one is made up of other tactics. I want to briefly cover that one in depth as well and that’s what I call white hat link insertions. That’s basically getting links in older articles that aren’t guest posts by asking for them and how do you do that? Well, it’s based on leverage so let me show you an email example of that I reached out to a website.

Here they wanted to be featured in an article of mine so I had traffic to an article on landing page builders and a company reached out to me and said I want to be included in your list of landing page builders because mine was ranking. I was in the leverage position so they asked to be you know included.

Now I’m in the power position saying I can do that but what do I want in return sometimes you can sell spots in articles if they’re ranking really high for competitive valuable keywords sometimes if it’s not quite worth it then that’s when you want to ask for links in return.

I was asked if it possible to get a good position in this article and also in the landing page article and he said yes you can give me the link to a blog and our team will find the best match to link to you I said sounds good yep I can do that. We can also link. So here’s an existing stat and an article of yours that works once again I’ll get everything updated.

Then this is how I send white hat link insertion requests so they come to me or I reach out and say do you want to be added can you link to me then it comes to I’m asking for the link. So I’m saying link from this article so I found and I searched this website. I can do something like the site readmorr.com page and I can find any instances of something.

For example, if I want to try to find a link good link for my landing page builder. Let’s say I want a link from HubSpot I would do hubspot.com and search landing page. They have an article on landing page designs you can also use the ahrefs serp feature of the Chrome extension to show you the URL rating of that individual article. It’s a 55 really highly authoritative page I want a link from this one

I want to link to my landing page builder’s article from this one. When you’re asking for a link you ask here’s the you make it as easy as possible for them. You say this is the link on your website I want the link from. This is the existing anchor text that exists that will link to my blog and then here’s the article on my blog.

To ask for that is really simple but you have to get yourself into the leverage position in order to ask for that. In the first place I asked for it and they get added every single time because I’m doing something in return I’m typically adding their content into an article or doing something of value. The question then is do you always do these like link trades no I don’t.

I don’t think that’s good either but you can do a number of them if it’s a big company like HubSpot and their Dr’s 90 well then of course. I want to link for them and many sites in your niche have interlinking and will link together. Ultimately you want to ask for links in old authoritative pages and do your guest post links but this is all based on value you can start to see this is really based on value and leverage and building real relationships and having a backlog.

Again guest posts are the engine of link building and link trading and building relationships and then partnerships are the fuel. You can get links from other people’s guest posts. You can ask for links in existing articles but you need to have the value of backlinks in your repertoire. That’s the blog post on SEO link-building Tips and tricks that work.

I hope it was helpful to you to make sure to read my free blogging masterclass I go over this way more in-depth. We have a lot more content there and it goes over my content link building, affiliate marketing strategies, and how this all blends together because search intent keyword research what to link to how to do link building how to start ranking how to monetize the articles all of this stuff builds a successful blogging business in the 2024 and beyond.

Let me know what you think about link building. Was this post helpful to you Did it shed some light on that there are only a few real-know strategies that work It’s not about tactics it’s more about personal relationships and psychology.

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