Link building for beginners in 2023 | Become a backlinking expert

1. Introduction to this link building the course: Hi, my name is rest and servicing and I'll be your teacher in this course and how to make you an expert link builder. I myself have more than eight years of experience within a field. And I know for a fact that all of these tactics that I'm going to show you, they work. So in this course, I'm going to start by giving you an introduction on what is you and what backlinks actually are. Then we're going to jump into all the different tactics that I know work. And I'm going to put an emphasis on the Content Marketing way of acquiring links because that's the best one in my opinion. That one involves everything from creating a content piece, how to reach out to journalists, how to follow up with your list, how to pitch, how to write the pitch and much more smaller. I'm going to take you through all the steps. So this course is basically packed with tips and tricks on how to make you an expert link builder. See you in the class. 2. What is SEO and why is it important: Okay, so what is a zero and why is it important? So SEO is basically the process of optimizing your website toward the search engines algorithms in order to try and get them to rank your website higher. And you usually focus on three different areas. When you talk about Israel. There's the technical SEO area. There's the on-site SEO area, and there's the off-site SEO where the technical SEO era is, where you focus on things such as setting the right canonicals and making sure you have the right atrium flags set. The on-site SEO era is where you focus on things such as Meta titles and Meta descriptions, H tags to have one H1 per page, and that all your images have L texts. For instance. The off-site SEO era is the one that we will be focusing mainly on. That is where you basically try and get other websites out there to talk about you in a positive way. So that Google thinks, okay, if all these other websites out there talking positively about this page, then we should probably rank it higher. That is done by acquiring backlinks. So let's dive into it. 3. The role of backlinks in SEO: Okay, so now we know that getting backlinks is an important ranking factor. And it's basically a vote of confidence telling Google that, okay, all these other sides are telling Google that this side is good. So we should probably rank it higher. But having said that, it's important to focus on acquiring relevant and authoritative links. And what I mean by that is that let's say you have a website called host.com. So it's all about horses and so on. Then suddenly you get a lot of links from another side called sheep.com. That doesn't have anything to do with holes. That will not help you because Google will know that, okay? These links that are coming from shifted, come into Hawthorne are not relevant at all to your site, host.com. That will not be seen as a reg effects. That will not help you, which ranking higher at all. It might even be seen as being spammy because why would this other side called shipper come suddenly bring into host account the domain? It's important to focus on relevance and authoritative sites. 4. What are backlinks and why are they important?: Okay, so there are several reasons why backlinks and bold vaso. One of them is authority. So let's say you get a link into your site host account, let's say your side, it's again host account and you get a link from the New York Times. That's very good because New York Times has a huge brand. They have an old website. They probably have hundreds, thousands of backlinks into their site. So if you get a link from New York Times into site, you're basically, it's basically telling Google, okay, So nu times Martin bedded hope.com and saying that we believe that host.com is good enough to link to. And so that's a very good assign getting a link from an authoritative sites such as new times and other one is irrelevant. So if you can get a link from a very relevant side within your knees, Let's stay within the wholesaler it again, Let's say there's a site called horse expert.com and this is the top expert in the whole world within the wholesaler and he's suddenly link into your site. That's also very good because it's within the same area that you're within. That's also a very good sign you are giving to Google that will also help you rank higher. But then that's just the whole trust area, right? So getting back links from trusted sites creates trust, right? So it makes it look like, okay, if New York Times is linking into your site, and New York Times is for most people, quite as trustworthy side. It creates trust. That's also very important. And the last term is just traffic. So by getting backlinks, you will be getting more traffic, at least some more traffic for most of your Backlinks. Just because when users click on those links, there will be directed to your site. It also creates traffic and provides traffic into your site, which is also very good. 5. Internal vs. External links: Okay, so what is the difference between internal and external links? So an internal link is when you link within your own site from, let's say the homepage to your blog page. That's an internal link. And an external link is when you link from your homepage to the New York Times versus that's an external link or the other way round. So New York Times is linking into you. That's also an external link. 6. The 4 types of external links - Dofollow, Nofollow, Sponsored and UGC links: Okay, So there are basically four types of external links. They still do follow nofollow, sponsors and the user-generated content. They all look very similar, but let's go through them one by one. So let's start by the two. Follow one. That's the one that is the best one to get from other sites into your site is basically telling Google to follow the link and don't really worry about anything. So that's a great one to get from other sites that are relevant to your site or that are very authoritative. The nofollow one is one. That is actually also fine to get right, but it's just a saying that you should not really give it any, you call it the link juice to this side, right? You can still click on the link if it looks completely like a normal link, but in Google's eyes, is just not going to give you any value in terms of its yield. So this is not going to help you rank higher, but it will still give you traffic, which is still really good. Sponsored one is one where you may be paid for some advertising on some block or site, doesn't mean that. Let's say you get, you got a block to write something about you. And they added a sponsored rail like this, which is also fine, but it's again, it's not going to give you any, it's not going to help you with your rankings, but it's still going to give you a lot of traffic. And for user-generated content ease cut types of links are usually edit on forums. For instance, like if there's a comment section and you can link from that comment section into whatever. So it's not onto, it's not like being controlled by the owner of the website because every, everyone could just go in and write. Then you usually add this tag to these links, right? So they are also not really valuable. So the best ones to get the, to follow once. 7. Search Console - how to see backlinks to your site: An easy way to find out who's actually linking into a site, because you might be wondering how to actually figure that out, is to use a certain zone. So surgical soul is a great tool provided for free by gold. So you should definitely set that up. I'm not going to explain how to set it up in this video, but I'm just going to explain to you where you can see within certain things or what other sites are linking into your side, right? So if you go into Search Console, you had the overview performance, so on. But if you then go down to links, click on that one, then you can see all the sites linking into your patron. So here you can see external links, top link excited, go down to top Thinking size. Click on that one. You can see there's a total of 51. And you can then go through them one by one. You can see how many times they are linking into. So that is quite a, quite a good way to quickly see who's linking to your site. 8. Ahrefs - What it is and how it works: Another great tool you can use this average.com. So this is not free, but I do believe that I have a seven day free trial so you can test it out. But within every.com, you can also see what sites linking into your site. So here, for instance, I just added surplus.com and you can see the 27th referring domains as 76 backlinks. So that must mean that some of these domains are linking all that wants into surveys, the camera. So you can see them, proton and so on, right? So then you can go through here, it gives you more information than the Search Console to us, which is great. I first of all, you can quickly see if it's a two-fold link or not a two following, which is interesting. So you can see this side, this endian side, is linked in ten times and they all do follow links, which is interesting. But some of these sites, which they do look a little bit spammy, but they are also not to follow links. Here. For instance, in the hackers into hikers is only thinking out with nofollow links. So that can still be good. But it's not going to help a service which begging, yeah, there is definitely a tool you should check out. I'm pretty sure there's a seven day free trial, so at least check that out because it's definitely a great tool. 9. Domain authority - why it is still important: Okay, so domain authority or domain rating, as some tools call it, is basically used for measuring the credibility and the authority of a website. So the strength of a website compared to other websites out there. Here in AVS, you can see that there's a cnn.com and looking at they have a domain rating of 93 with a super high, right? So the highest is 100 and their scale. And that just means that you can then use that to quickly figure out, is this a strong website? Is it one I would actually like to get a backlink from OISE. It's a very weak website. So that's in a nutshell, what you can use domain rating for. 10. Whitehat vs. blackhat: Within the ACO world, you often talk about it being either white or black hat, whatever you're doing. So black hat is basically when you're doing something that is illegal in Google's or any other search engines. So that could be, for instance, buying links from whatever a link farm where you're paying someone and then you get a bunch of links into a website that you have to be careful about because you might get penalized by Google if you do that, wears white hat is if you basically follow the rules. You try to get links, but you do it in a normal way, like the natural way, right? So maybe you create some great content that some sites are linking into. Yeah, that's basically the difference between white and black hat. 11. Penalties - Manual & automatic and what to do if you received one: Okay, So there are two types of penalties you can get from Google. That is the automated and manual one. And you only get this if you've done something Black Hat style. So for instance, let's say you've been buying a lot of links from a linked file, then you might get a penalty. So the automated penalty is one where Google's algorithm, by itself, the texts that you've done something that is against the Google guidelines. And you will then see within Search Console that you will suddenly start to rank much slower on your keywords. So that's an automated penalty. Manual penalty is one where someone from Google and actually goes in and look through your site, your backlinks, and then decides if you should be penalized an arch. And you will then get a notification within Search Console with a timeframe for you to basically fix your mess. So that's the difference between a manual and automated penalty from Google. 12. How to disavow links: So let's say that you bought a lot of links from link farm. And that works fine at the beginning. But then you figured out that actually you don't want to be associated with those links anymore. But what do you do then? Because you are afraid of getting a penalty or maybe you already got a penalty. So one way you can to try and get rid of the links is of course, to reach out by yourself to all the webmasters one-by-one and ask them to remove the link coming into a site. That's of course very time-consuming. And it might not be possible in all cases, right? Because sometimes it can be difficult to get in touch with all these webmasters. Google does have a tool for disavowing links. That's what they call it. It's not removing the link is just not going to count in the algorithm. So basically you can just Google, Disavow Links spacey. All the information is here on how you do it. You should, of course, only do this if you are 100% sure that this is a link that you don't want to be associated with. But you can click on this, this evolving tool page. It takes you to another page and then you just select the property that you have associated with it. So let's console. And then you just upload a CSV file with the links that you don't want to be associated with anymore. Yeah, so that's one way that you can get rid of links that you don't want to be associated with anymore. 13. The different ways of acquiring links: Okay, and now to the fun part, how to acquire links in the following, I will take you through eight different ways of acquiring links. And then finally, we will jump into the content marketing way of acquiring links, which is probably the best one, I would say. So. Let's start with the first one. 14. 1. Exploring your competitors links and creating content that is better: So the first strategy on acquiring links is basically what I would call the identifying content and making a better strategy. That involves, as I was saying just before, identifying a concert piece, that you believe you can make much better than making it a constant piece better. And then reaching out to the webmaster and getting that guy to change the link into your content piece. Instead. What you would do with this strategy to begin with is to first identify the content piece that you want to make better at. And for that you can use alias.com. Again. Again, they have a seven-day free trial, so used to definitely test it out. But basically you type in a website, so I just put it in high peace.com here. Then you go to referring domains. And then it shows you all the other sites that are linking into hobbies.com. Okay, that's cool. I'll read it. Then of course you want to sort it on domain range because you want to get an authoritative link into your site. That's good. But okay, this is maybe a little bit too high actually because this is a site with a lot of backlinks. So let's just go to the fifth Patron. Okay. So Lamont, that's a French page. So actually let's just go one more step. Let's go to the seven, okay. Okay. Let's see what we have here. Billboard.com. Okay, so here there's a German one, news.com dot edu. That's probably a news article. And so you can click on this icon to see all the links, like those who see all the articles, the actual URL. So this is something about fluid. May the weather was looking poles. So that's super difficult to make better because that's a news article. So you'd have to find something that is a little bit different than that. What about this one? The Daily beast.com? Let's see what that is. There are 11 backlinks from The Daily Beast k. So let's see this one. What is this fashion giant shine? That's also a news piece, so that's very difficult. Let's just go one more step. Igm.com. Let's see what this is. That is k. If Japan, let's just accept that street we have revealed. So that's also very difficult because it's new news article again, where they're linking into high B. So that's gonna be very difficult. Let's go a little bit further down. Suppose Yahoo. So as you can already see now this is a strategy that does require quite some time, but it can be worth it. But you would basically have to go through all these well, most of them one-by-one to see if there's any content pieces that you believe that you can make better and then getting them to link to you instead, when the ohmmeter worse at different guy to zero and while the world, okay, Let's just see this one. But anyway, I think you get the point right. So again, if you have a site that is similar to whatever the issue within, then you go through there by clicking profile, like I was just doing here with I pieced.com. Then you look at all the backlinks they have. Look at what the content pieces are about, right? And then trying to identify if you can actually make a better content piece that the current one. And if you can, then you should make the content piece and then reach out to the webmaster of that canopies to get him to link to your counterpart. 15. 2. Finding broken links strategy: So this strategy is called the broken link strategy. You might ask, what is a broken link? A broken link is basically a link that previously existed, but now for some reason doesn't exist anymore. So it's basically linking into a full, full-page, which is basically a page that doesn't exist anymore. So their strategy involves identifying these broken links and then either making a content piece that is better or somehow relevant for that webmaster to link into your content piece instead of the one that is broken. So first of all, before you start doing anything, the most important here is to first of all identify these broken links, right? And how do you do that? Again, I'm going to use a race for doing that. So you go into areas, put in whatever the website you want to look at. So that would have to be one that is relevant to your industry, of course. Then you go to broken backlinks. And then it gives you a number of broken back links, as you can see here. There's quite a lot into delta here. As you can see, delta, that's the Delta Airlines website. Okay, so let's look at this one for instance, That's something about Heathrow Airport. It's from 2019 as you can see here, but let's just see delta. So let's find the link here. So here's the link, and this one then goes through a 44 pieces. You can see that if you could make a content piece that somehow would fit here instead of this one which is broken anyway. Then you could make that cut a piece and then reach out to the web master of this website and get him to replace this link with a link into your patients that so that's basically the broken backlink strategy. 16. 3. Guest posts on a blog: Then there's the guest blogging strategy. This strategy involves, first of all, identifying great blogs that you believe are relevant within your field. Then reaching out to the webmasters, asking them if you would be allowed to write a blog post on their block. And then asking them to link into your site basically within that blog post. That will be the main idea with this strategy. First of all, you could use a race again to try and fight blocks, but maybe you also just know some great within your field. Right here, I'm just looking at stripe, Stripe, the payment processor at their blog. As you can see up here. I'll just try and go into a blog post because one thing you have to be aware of, of course, is, well, one thing you want to make sure is that in, in their current blog post, or they exit linking out to any size. Here on stripe, you can see that they are actually adding a lot of links and you can see that they are actually to follow links. I'm using this link POSIX extension for seeing that, right? So you see the exit adding multiple links each different sites. So let's say you had a tool or software that is within this niche. You could actually convince stripe or the whoever controls, maybe Jennifer here too, to write a blog post on stripe.com, then you might actually be able to put a link into your side. This way. Of course, you will still have to do all the hard work by writing the content piece. But if you could actually get a link from Stripe by doing this, it would definitely be worth it. I would say this is the guess blocking strategy. 17. 4. Forums - Adding your link on different relevant forums: There are many sites out there where you can add a link to a website for free and that you should definitely do. One of them is for instance, CrunchBase. There you can add a link to your site if you have a startup for instance. So you can see if I go into whatever company here, right? So here just look for omega. You can see there's a link right here into omega i.com. And this side has like CrunchBase has quite a lot of traffic. As you can see here on similar web, I'm just calling it so you can see it has more than 10 million in estimated traffic per month. So that's a website with a lot of traffic, right? So it definitely makes sense to add your edit link to the site on these kind of size, if it, if it makes sense, right? But in this case, if you have a startup and maybe you also looking for some funding and so on, it would definitely make sense to register and add a mic on CrunchBase, for instance. But then many similar sites out there also within different niches. This is more focused on the startup world, but there are within all fields, they're always solve these kinds of sites where you can add a link for free. So that should definitely do. 18. 5. Posting a (fake) job in order to get links: So this one might be a little bit controversial, but what you can basically do is to make a landing page on your site. So slash jobs and then post a job there and make it look like you're looking for to hire someone. Then post on different of these job sites like AngelList or them, plenty of them out there to get the links into your side-by-side so that you're actually so that they believed that UIC looking for someone to hire you are, but you're just trying to get the links for it. So on many of these sites you can register yourself. You don't even have to talk to anyone. You just register your company profile and then you write about the job, and then you will get the links. The only thing about this strategy is that these links will only be temporarily read, so they will not be there for a very long time, maybe a couple of months, but it's definitely worth giving it a try. 19. 6. Product Hunt, Quora, Indie Hackers and more.: A couple of sides to get some great links from Product Hunt in Diego's and core. Alright, so product Hunt, maybe you already know it, but that's basically a place where you can launch your product. It will then be live as a launched version for 24 h where people can upload it. And then afterwards it will stay a C If you basically have a UL them, but probably isn't very, it has very high domain authority, so a great link to get syllabi. So it's still worth it, I will say right? And you can see you just click the Submit up here, submit new product, and then you basically go through the whole, the whole process here. But it doesn't take that long time and it's worth it, I would say right? So that's definitely something I would do. Any hackers is a good community for. Everything started related. So this is just the start-up, then it makes sense to also launch in here, make a profile for your company and to even be active. But if you make a profile for your company, you will get one link. So that's also an easy one and it is also a very strong Dwayne Quora, maybe you. But that's also a good place to be activated because you can easily get some, some good links from in here. And even like many of them are nofollow links, but they can still drive a lot of traffic because some of the answers on coral, they rank very high on Google's. So it, it can be some links that can generate a lot of traffic in suicide pathetically also want to check out. 20. 7. Making a simpel Chrome extension in order to get a link: Another tactic that I know works is to basically make a simple Chrome extension in order to get the link from the Chrome Store. So of course, this requires you to be a little bit technical. But to be honest, the Chrome extension doesn't need to be anything fancy, but it could just be something like a Chrome extension that changes your background color into yellow or something like that. But you would basically have to make the Chrome extension and then get it approved in the App Store. And then basically just place your link to your website there. And wallah. 21. 8. Buying links | Link farms: On the topic of buying links. So there's a lot of opinions here, many for, some against myself, against it because of the risk of running into a penalty. But I know a lot of places where you can buy links, right? So just look up works on Reddit. There's a subreddit about buying and selling the links. And maybe this tactic works for somebody. But if you decide to do is you just have to be really careful with really examining every site you buy things from, right? So how's that backlink profile? They have a high domain rating. How often do they sell links? Because you don't want to buy from someone who's cells all the time. But anyway, it's a big risk if you decide to do this, That's the basic risk of you running into a penalty. So you just have to be aware of that. But if you're okay with that, then yeah, you should go and test it out. 22. Outro to different ways of acquiring backlinks | Intro to content marketing: Okay, so I hope you enjoyed these tactics so far. They all work in their own ways, but they might not work consistently over time. And that's why I now want to jump into the best one, in my opinion that you can use pretty much all the time, which is the Content Marketing way of acquiring links. So let's jump into it. 23. What is content marketing?: So what is contemplating and why should you be doing it? Customizing it is all about creating awesome content. And you should be doing it because it's the best way to consistently generate backlinks to your website. What does the process look like? Basically, you set a goal, right? So maybe you want to create a concert piece every month. So you create a piece of great content. You make a landing page for that content piece. You then pitch the relevant site owners or journalists of the kinds of peas that you just made. You don't convince them. And you tried to convince them to write about your content piece. And once they've done that, you try and get them to link from their concert piece into the landing page that you made. That is the process in a nutshell. 24. What does content marketing require?: What does contemplating require? Well, it requires shoe to be a little bit creative. It requires you to be able to write and also make it landing page. Requires you to be able to pitch journalists to find during this email addresses. We're going to go through all this later in the course. And it's going to be quiet, persistent. It's not always going to work. And that's just how it is. But even if it doesn't work and you don't get any links to your cans of peas if you're satisfied with your county pays a new, find. It awesome is still great to have on your website. 25. Example of a content marketing piece - most popular university on social media: Okay, let me show you a cut piece I made a couple of years ago and also take you through the whole process. First of all, at that time, I had a startup, which was a transcription service, mainly focusing on students. So this, this piece was about what universities, what Ivy League universities were the most popular on social media. Data wise. Basic collected all the information from the Facebook, LinkedIn, instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and all the public available information on the Ivy League universities. And then just made a sheet like that. So that's the first part, right? Collecting the data. So that's the first part, right? So you have to be a little bit creative and then come up with an idea where you can maybe collect some data that is publicly available within a field that makes sense for whatever you are selling. Okay, so that was the first part. I collected this data. So that's great. Then I made a, just a constant piece like a PDF like this. And you can see, I'm writing that there's a big difference in polarity on social media between Ivy League universities. Okay? So basically trying to make it interesting for the person you are pitching. And I was pitching journalists at this time mainly, but also pitching the universities themselves. So you can see like I made the, the total number of followers. I also made a graph on followers per enrolled student follows per channel. So what university had the most on Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on, right? Then I basically in pitch to both the university himself, but also to sites that I believe would find this relevant read. So I made a pitching list, which basically just like a Google Excel sheet. And this was the pacing list are found. I was pitching it to these 35 and I found the emails and then I basically just went through them one by one and you can see what my pitch looked like here. So this is an example. So I'm basically just writing here, I'm just writing a contact e-mail. I don't know the exact name of the person, so that's why I'm just running higher because we've done a racist he ever really get into the content piece, the second piece that had been put on our website back then. Because that's important, right? Because it's an easy for them to link into that contemplates. Here's our research shows there's a big difference promotion. So it's meter between eight Ivy League universities. Thought this might be interesting for you, the research shows. So you make it easy for the journalists to pick the most interesting parts. Remember, most journalists, they get pitched all the time, so you really have to make it easy for them and catch it, right? So put the most importantly at the top basically, yeah. And you can also put in, if you put in a quote, that's also a good thing to do because then they can easily just copy, paste that code and use it in their article. And you can see here, I was then Lincoln, I was adding the link myself because if a journalist actually just copy paste, this didn't include the link, right? So that's why I just did like that. 26. What is a pitch list and why build a pitch list: So what is a pest list and why built a page list? So let's say you make your awesome content marketing piece and you only send it out to, to journalists. And then you're disappointed that you don't hear from any of them. And you then make another content piece that you'll use to three days on. And then you send that one out to three journalists and you don't hear anything from them either. And then you are sick and tired of doing content marketing. That's why it's important to actually also use quite some time on building your pitch lists. And often you get surprised on how many you can pitch or cotton peace to run. This is an example as you seeing here, of a pieces which is not even that long. Sometimes you can often make it 100, up to like more than 100 journalists or webmasters that you can send it out to read. So basically I just do it like this. I use Google Sheet for it where you just put this side. You can also put in the domain authority for that side. So you just use a width to put that in so that it's a quality side. I know that all these ones are called the size. That's why I didn't do it, because it's also, many of them are universities, the email. And then just like when it's good to keep track on when you send an email to that Germany saw that website owner, maybe also when you set the follow-up and so on, right? Yeah. A proper and well-made pitch list is always good to have. 27. How to build a pitch list: So let's say you made this awesome piece about what universities are most popular on social media. So what Ivy League universities are most popular on social media? Then you need to figure out who should you actually pitch to now. So what you start by doing is of course, the common sense way of doing it is that thinking about it yourself. So at least you can pitch it to the university's yourself, find themselves, right, So you can just put in our.com. So let's start with that one, hello.com and then you can go to Google and ride on how the news. So let's see what comes up here. Then when you do that, you can see there are a couple of sides here, right? So for instance, there's one called Harvard Magazine as independent here. And then there's the Harvard Crimson run. Okay, then you can put them into your list already. So we don't have the e-mails yet to any journalist or website owners. But that we will find later that. So let's just start by putting the Swanson. And this one was the last one. Okay? So we have three potential sites and we can paste two, okay? One thing you should then also just remember to check is if the sides are actually authoritative sites. So they have a lot of traffic. These quality sites. They probably are because they write about Harvard. But one way to quickly check it is just to use similar web, this extension, I think as you read to you earlier as well. So it basically just gives an estimation of the traffic on the side. And if the traffic is more than, let's say 50,000 per month, it's a great site here for this one, you can see that this side has an aerosol around 200,000 per month. Most of them coming from us. And the other one, this one, the Harvard Crimson. They have from 7800 up to more than 1 million run. So that's definitely also very good side. Okay? So that's one way of starting to build your pitch list. Another way is to use Arabs again, right? So you go to a virus at the site you want to check, and then you go again to the referring domains as you can see here. Okay? So then you can see all the sites that are writing about Harvard and linking into how those you can see, okay, nothing ham here, right? So it's that I'm not sure what this is, but we can just quickly take a look around. So this side, University of nothing, Ham has written about Howard, who knows, maybe you use an AAC University of nothing ham. We'd like to see something about the most public university on social media, but you never know they haven't linked into how it before. So I say I would put this one on my list as well. Yeah. And then you basically just go through this. So then you can easily get 100 on your list. I would say 100 sites to page two, right? Because here I've already found like 34 sides and I was only looking for how, what is that? 78 other Ivy League university. So of course you also go through their whole backlink profile. Then you should easily be able to get a list of more than 100 to page two. 28. Using site function on Google: One other thing I also just wanted to show is how to use the size function on Google. So if you were to go and you put in sight, and then the harvard.com, and then you paste this search within Howard, right? So if you're looking for a social media, Let's see what it says that you can see that it only searches within the domain Harvard third column. So it also, this is just a subdomain, right? So the journey's go to Media Law, okay? Yeah. But this can be useful sometimes. So somewhere here, Let's just try something else. Jennifer line, Let's just try that. Okay. So then you can say Jennifer Egan. All the D should include Jennifer's something. Okay. So that's just a quick tip. It can be very useful sometimes, especially if you say no the firstName of a journalist on a site, but you don't know. Maybe you don't know the e-mail. This can be a way to quickly find it. 29. Finding the right journalist to pitch to: Great. So you identified a number of sites that you want to pitch to, but you haven't identified, you haven't found an email to send your piece too. So how do you do that? Okay, let's do an example. Let's go into this one. I get the Harvard Crimson, which is a great site to pitch your content piece to run. But we want to find someone tracks the pitch to here. So one way you could do it is just to go through some of the reasons concept and just see if you can find email from the journalist who I see wrote the P site. So here you can see on this one, it's written by a, they don't write the actual journalist itself. Here. The genus name is not there, but maybe it is on, some of them are not sure the crimson new staff know. So that didn't work. Okay, So then let's go to a virus again and see if that can help us. So you guys put in crimson. Come. Now I said we would do it a little bit differently here. Because what is interesting here, what is important here is what the crimson is linking out to run in order to find that you want to go down to outgoing links, which is this one. Okay? Here, you can then see who the crimson on the L2. So that same statement. So here the first one you see the Harvard remembers, tell me in this one, there are some different places. So there's a link here. It's just see here for instance, this one is a link to a medium, medium poster. Interesting. Here they are ACE2 journalist named Amy and Alexandra. Let me just remove this one again so you can see MEN Alexandra. Okay. What happens if I click on it? So then I can actually see her e-mail. This is interesting when I found a journalist working for the Crimson and I have her e-mail address and I know that she has previously written some posts where she's including links to other sites. So that's very interesting. So this one could be, one could limit. Let me say that when I see So then I would basically say that I want, let me just do that and then add to the list here, so that's the crimson and then I will add it like that. But of course, to make it even better would be to find one that has something to do with what the area there'll be a pitching bond with. So social social things. Social see social media. Something comes up. No. No. Okay. So yeah, you would probably it's always better to have a you made like instead of writing an editorial e-mail to an editorial email is always better to send to a, an actual journalists. So this is already much better than the crimson new staff email. But of course the most optimal would be to find the email of journalists who has written about something very similar to what you're pitching that person about. In this case, we didn't find something like that, but we did find a journalists and her e-mail, so that's already really good. 30. How to find the email of journalists: Okay, Good. So as we saw just before, sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to find the email address of a journalist. And I wanted to show you one cool tool that sometimes makes it easier. For instance, we are on this one, right? And sometimes it can just be really hard to find any e-mail address on a website. Because basically, websites don't want to get spammed, which is understandable. But anyway, we want to spend them as one tool you can use is the one called, It's an extension, sorry, it's called hunter. And you basically just click it. And what it does is that it scrapes the side for any email addresses. And you can see here, it already found what does that like? Seven e-mail addresses. And you can easily just click it and then you copied it, right? So this is a really cool tools that can help you quickly identifying a journalist e-mail address. 31. What is a pitch: Okay, so now you have your console, please. You have your pitch list. So now we just have to start writing all the journalists. But how do you actually do that? You do that by first creating a pitch that you include in the email that you sent around to the journalist. And you couldn't have multiple pitches depending on what kind of outlets it is that you're writing to. Anyway. So a pitch is basically a, usually a short texts that you include in the top of the e-mail where you sum up your content piece. And you usually include a couple of bullet points with the most relevant points from your content piece in order to catch the journalist's eyes. So you have to convince him to write about this concept p. So that's basically what you're trying to do with the pitch. So we're going to see a couple of examples now on how you can do that. And what are some good examples and what are some bad examples? 32. How to write a pitch: Okay, so let's try and have a look at a good and a bad example of a pitch. And this is of course a little bit biased because this is one and set myself, but I think there's one was pretty good though. Okay, let me take you through the story here. It's still the social media story. And this pitch was sent to the crimson, the Harvard Crimson right side we were just looking at just before, which is a, as I understand it is the student's side for Harvard. So what do we have here? First of all, the heading and the title, they weren't big difference in popularity on social media between either the universities. That's catchy. If you work for the crimson, I would say road, so you will probably open it. Which also happened as you can see over here. Then I'm writing I, The Harvard Crimson, that that's super, super good I would say because I didn't actually find, I can see here, I didn't find a bank and a journalist to page two. So instead, I'm writing to the Managing Editor, which is, I don't know, maybe it's just one person, but it might be more than one person who has access to that e-mail address. So it's might not be an inbox that is looked at that much. So the problem with these kind of email addresses is that it might be getting a lot of incoming emails. So emails just tend to get lost there. So it's always best to send directly to Adrian list if you can find it, you missed the e-mail address. Okay. We've done a research that shows that there is a big difference in population. So to mediate between the eight Ivy League universities, That's pretty good I would say. And here I'm bringing into the research. So that's good. So if the journalists were interested, of course, just click on that LinkedIn. Okay, here comes the bullet points. Find the research shows when looking at the amount of followers put in bold student, Howard University comes in on top, which five through 832 follows per enrolled students. So here, this is pretty good, and it's also something about Harvard University. I could have probably made this bold. I think that would have been even better, easier to quickly see, okay, this is something about how a university, because that would have been even better when I'm sending to the crimson then as another bullet point and another point about Pennsylvania, that's probably not that interesting exit for the Crimson. But this one is also similar in absolute numbers. How would the rows has more than 12 million followers on social media? That is more than all the other seven Ivy League universities followers combined. So I can see that heading going out. So that's an easy one to write as a journalist in case you, you don't have that much else to read about. And then I'm saying again, you can read the whole pieces here. I'm adding a quote, which is also very good, I would say to do, you should always do that. And then just to make it professional, writing my full name, my title, my title at that time, and that was my phone numbers at that time. So overall, I would say what would you say? Like 89 out of ten. Okay, let's say that. Here's a bad example. Look at this. First of all, you've probably seen this before. But first of all, why is the textbook? I know you, dear business owners are focused on listening.com. Here it's like with capitals. See, I've no idea why. Take out areas as no one would answer. This is so this is like the worst pitch ever. Don't even understand why sent me a proposal. I don't even get it. Look at the title to be fixed. Focus on listening calm errors is just so bad, right? Yeah. So you see the difference there, right? It's all about It's all about trying to make it as personal as possible for the one you're sending it to in order to get that person to open and somehow response to what you're sending to that person. 33. Writing a pitch using ChatGPT: Okay, Good. So another way of writing your pitch is to try and get some help from chat TBT, you probably heard about it. It's an AI that basically can do lots of different things. Among others, write code, and also, right, very good. Actually texts. Let's see if we can get it to write a pitch. So here I put in this text, so please write a pitch. Is that the crimson? Her name is Jennifer. I've written a piece of content about the most popular university and social media, where I've collected follower data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. It turns out that Harvard University has the highest amount of followers, both in terms of absolute numbers and also when looking at followers per enrolled student. The aim with the piece is to try and get her to write about my piece of content. Let's see what chats EBT gives us back. So this is of course various things. So let's see the agenda. I hope this e-mail finds you well, because I have recently compiled a piece of content that I believe would be to your readers at the crimson, like orange. Now you can see it's not bad. It's not too bad. This is about the, what I've done at prices that they are already, this is pretty okay. I would say, I would probably make it even better by adding some bullet points maybe right here or somebody that you don't want to have two most texts. I don't think this is too much, but it's also not it's not like it doesn't say that most part that's because I didn't give you enough information up here. But as you see, as you can see, you can use transitivity for very quickly, get some help with writing. Some pretty okay. She pitches for journalists. 34. Track email opens via Streak: I realized I hadn't actually told you about streak, which is the extension here I'm using for tracking email opens. It's called streak. It's only for Gmail, but there's probably something similar to use for our outlook. And it's super helpful I see to use string because you can then know if Eden was opened, how many times it was opened in byte location where it was opened, it's not an accurate, but it's better than nothing for sure. If you can see, for instance, that an email goes three times or more, you know that the journalist might be interested in what you sent that person. So that's a really good tool. So I really recommend you using that as well. 35. Bulk sending vs. one-by-one: Sending in bold are sending one by one. You already know the answer here is always best to send one by one and to personalize it as much as possible. Another thing is you don't want to send to the whole list on the same day. You want to maybe sent to the first, let's say you have a list of 100, then sent to the first 20 on the first day, then wait, at least half and half a day, I would say. So. Why am I saying that? That's because sometimes it happens that you made a mistake. So maybe you made a mistake in which your data, you misspelled something or whatever. So a journalist might write you that there's something wrong with your data. If you, if that happens and if you already sent a pitch to the whole list, you've screwed everything up, right? Because what is probably going to happen then is that no one is going to write about your content piece because you already sent to the whole list. So you would then have to either make a completely new list, which might be difficult, or you will have to redo the counter p. So that's, so, that's very bad. So that's why I would always recommend starting by pitching to a small group to see if you get some feedback from them. If you do, and if you made some mistake, fix the mistake, and then sent to the rest of the list. 36. Why monitoring: Okay, Good. So you send out your content marketing piece and now it's time to monitor how it is actually performing. So that is important because you never know if you did something wrong. And it's just important in general to see how it is being received by journalists. So there are different ways you could do that. So let's jump into it. 37. Tools to use for monitoring - Mention.com: One monitoring tool that I like is one called mentioned.com. It has a 14 days free trial, so you should to try and test it out. But basically, how it works is that you add whatever brand or company you want to track. And in this case, I'm just now I'm just trying to track Harvard University just performed. So of course that is a brand that is getting a lot of mentions all the time on social media, on other websites and so on. But anyway, mentioned our column, then updates in real time every time Harvard is being mentioned. And as you can see right here, It's mainly on social media at them, All right, so Twitter and so on. But look at this one right here. There's also, this is a website that is interesting. So here you can see that this one was mentioning how a university, there's another one here, Washington Monthly, then you can see how the university was mentioned right there. So it's a great tool to use once you send out a content marketing piece because you never know if a journal is suddenly writes about your piece without telling you. If that happens, you want to find that piece of course, because maybe he added that link. Maybe he didn't edit link in case he didn't. Then this tool is great for discovering that. So you can act on that. So yeah, I wouldn't encourage you to check it out. I really like it, so yeah, go ahead and check it out and see you in the next lesson. 38. How to follow up on journalists: So you send out your awesome contemplating piece to a bunch of journalists and you wait, and you don't hear from any of them. Okay? What do you do then? You don't just get it off, of course, then it's time to follow up. And how do you do that? There are a different number of different ways to do that. First of all, you use streak to see who opened their e-mails. A lot of times, if you see something like this, that a journalist opened a, an email multiple times, that's a good sign, of course. That indicates that, okay, maybe the Germans didn't have time yet to write about it, but he owned it a lot of time. So that's a good sign. Then you basically write the first email, whereas high, I don't know if you saw my e-mail from the other day, but I was wondering if you find it interesting question marks. So always add a question mark because then you get him to reply to your email. Okay. So that's the first one. And then if you still don't hear anything from the journalist, then wait two more days and then write it very short ones saying something like, hi, did you see my email? Question mark? So that is the way I would do it. Don't do it more than that because that might be seen as spammy, but I would say that it's fine to write three emails and do that for your whole list. And when you do that, you should hear from at least a couple of them. Okay. That's how you follow up on emails. 39. How to call a journalist: Sometimes they can also be fine to follow by calling the journalists. Journalists. They get so many emails all the time. So it might even be better to catch their attention by xy calling them. So in order to do that, of course you need a phone number and then it's all about doing it right? So it also depends on what kind of person you are. If you are very introverted and stuff that maybe it's better just to focus on emails. But if you're the extrovert type who are good at selling yourself via phone, then I would definitely recommend at least testing it out there. So I would say that it's all about presenting yourself quickly, presenting what you sent to them, and then just asking for some kind of reply back. Is that a yes? No. Is it interesting for the journalists? Are not. Calling journalists is definitely also a strategy that is very good to do if you're the type who likes calling and no matter who you are, I would definitely test it out. But because it's good to test it out, to figure out if this is something that works for you or not. 40. How to ask for a link in case there was none added: Okay, so let's say that you've been pitching the crimson here and you actually got your piece out. But there's no link in the P site. And so they're writing about your content piece but there's no link. Okay, so what do you do now? There are different ways you can approach this. So first of all, you can just directly S the journalists to add a link. But then you might get a zero. You might also get a yes, but it's probably a 50, 58 really depends on your site and if it fits, really fits to what they've been writing. So it doesn't make sense to add a link to your site. Another way you could do it is that you make Atlantic page on your site. So a specific landing page with all the data that you have provided in this content marketing piece that you made. So we are having all the data there. It, then it makes it a little bit more sense for journalists to link to the data instead of directly to your front page of your website. That's probably a better approach. So making a specific landing page where you include all the data that you used for your content marketing piece. Unfortunately, sometimes it does happen that you will not get that link, but you still can't dimension though, which is better than nothing. But that's the tape would come to melting. Sometimes. It only leads to dementia and that's still good for brand building is always good. It can also be good for traffic. You know, sometimes if I see a brand being mentioned somewhere, even though it's not a link, I do Google it afterwards to find out what is that accompany, I should do it. So it's better than nothing, right? But that's how it is we're contemplating. Sometimes you get a link, sometimes you don't. 41. Now it is your turn: Okay, so now it's time to turn the camera towards you. You now have all the tools in order to make awesome content marketing pieces. So please start the creative process by finding a story that you believe fits your brand, fits your company. Then collect all the data, write the story, then make the pitch list, start pitching, start the monitoring process, follow up on the ones that you don't hear from. And then I'm sure you're gonna get a lot of back links within the next near future. So good luck. 42. Outro: Congratulations on you now being an expert SEO link builder. Awesome. That is really well done. You don't have a tool that you can use both for your own websites, for client websites. So amazing. And I hope that you enjoyed these lessons with me as a teacher. Always just leave your feedback in the comments or send me an e-mail that will be very helpful. Thank you. One last thing I wanted to let you know before I leave you is that I have a Slack group which is around two link building. So if you would like to join that one, just send me an email. My email is restless as certain ways.com. I'll write it in the notes as well. So just send me an email and then I will add you. Thank you so much. Bye bye.