Link Building for Beginners (Complete Guide)

- Every so often we like refreshing our link building for beginners video. That's what this video is gonna be today. You probably already saw that in the description though so I don't know why I'm wasting your time, let's get started with that. If you don't remember from last time or in case you missed it, I'm new to this channel, my name's Danny. I'm working with Julian over at Goldie Agency. So if you were to work with us and wanted to schedule a call, I would most likely be the first one you'd be talking with. And also just as a reminder, we do have a free book called Link Building Mastery. It's linked in the comments below. It does go over a lot of what we're gonna talk about today, but also it really goes more in depth with nine different techniques on how to improve your link building and apply that to your site. So, first things first let's actually talk about what link building even is. It really is as simple as it sounds

you're building a link from somebody else's site or some other company's site or a news site or a blog or what have you, to your site, essentially meaning there's a hyperlink on somebody else's site external from yours, that when you click it, it goes to something on your site, whether it's your homepage, a product page, a blog, an article, another type of piece of content. That's really what we're doing. We're building as many of those links from as many different sites as possible and that's essentially what link building is.

So why is link building important? That's a great question. So essentially, the reason link building is important is because whenever you're on any kind of a search engine, that search engine needs to factor in a bunch of different aspects and a bunch of different metrics to figure out what's gonna be the most valuable piece of content or what's gonna be the most valuable site that we can send our users to for any given keyword. If you search for cat photos, it's not just randomly coming up with cat photos. There's a reason that when you go into a Google image search, some of the funniest and most recognizable cat photos are gonna be in there. And that's because a lot of those have a lot of links to them, whether it's from other blogs or Reddit posts or from other forms of social media. And the reason for that is because the more those links are produced, the more valuable Google thinks that piece of content or that site actually is. And the same goes for anything. It can go for cat photos, government contractors, construction sites. It can go for any of those. So that's why it's important that no matter what your niche or no matter what your brand or no matter what your industry is, if you have a web presence, you wanna make sure that you're signaling to Google that what you provide is actually valuable and signal it in a way that you're gonna be growing in the rankings and climbing higher in the rankings and pulling in more of that user base and pulling in more of the people searching for those keywords. So you might be asking me though, why does Google, why do they care so much about these links? The answer is really simple. The reason they care about those links is because there's plenty of competitors to Google.

Yes, Google is obviously the most popular and most people are gonna be using it. But every single search engine has their own algorithm and their own methods for ranking different sites. Google makes this a very important aspect because this, like I said before, it signals to them what is the community at large? What is everybody searching? What do they feel is the most valuable site to go to? If you're searching for camera equipment, it's not gonna send you to just Joe Nobody who set up a blog five days ago and posted one article about camera equipment. No, it's gonna send you to like an Amazon link or a B& H photo link. It's gonna send you to one of those that have been accessed and searched and linked thousands of times, clicked on hundreds of thousands or millions of times in some cases, depending on what the site is. And they need to do that, Google, because their ultimate goal for the user is to keep the user coming back. And if the user feels like they're getting the results that they need and they're being pointed in valuable directions, they're going to come back and they're gonna use Google again. If for whatever reason Google starts valuing less important sites or starts pointing you in the direction of these really weird sites, you're probably not gonna be using Google much longer and you might move on to Bing or some other type of search engine that might be out there. So one of the best ways to get links

is to write link building content. Now, basically, that's gonna be like a top five reasons why you need to do X, Y and Z or top five best products for accomplishing certain goals. You've all seen those types of articles, we've all seen those types of blogs, we've all seen those YouTube videos. So, leveraging those pieces of content, whether it's an infographic, a blog post, an article, a video, what have you, you've got to have something of high quality that people are actually gonna want to link to. With this method, generally you're gonna be talking to human beings and interacting with human beings, whether it's through email or you might even do a phone call, most of it's through email in our experience. but you have to remember that you're speaking with humans and those humans need to actually see the value of what you're bringing to the table. They're not gonna just link to anything you bring up to them. You're not going to be able to just send an email saying "Hey, my name's Danny, I work with Goldie agency. Can you post this link that I just dropped in the email?" No, of course not, they're definitely not going to do that, especially if the content is super poor. You need to make sure that you put a lot of thought into it, put a lot of effort into it. Make sure that you're actually an expert on what you're doing because that's gonna show through. You can't just formulate some kind of a blog article out of thin air and hope that you're gonna get traction with it. It has to be good, high quality. That is the most important factor in all of this.

So the second half of the content piece is the prospecting piece. This is the piece that scares most people off or drives most people to just go to an agency because this part is difficult. You get a lot more nos than you get yeses and you're gonna have to be okay with rejection and you're gonna have to be okay with people saying that they don't see value in what you're doing. Now, when you're in the prospecting phase, one of the most important parts is to do the research ahead of time. We use HREFs for that research and what we're doing is we're going in and we're looking at our keyword competitors. So whatever that keyword or search phrase that you want to rank for, you need to see who's already in the top 10 for that. How many links is it gonna take to get into the top 10? What are your competitors link building profiles? What do they actually look like? Where are they getting their links? How many links do they have? There's so many factors that go into that. But once you start researching that and building up a prospecting list from there, you can actually have websites to go after. You can have certain articles to target from your keyword competitors and you can start building and formulating

an outreach prospecting list from that information and that's gonna be your biggest tool. Now, you're gonna have to figure out how much time you're gonna have to set aside in order to go after this. And depending on the quality of the content, sometimes it'll take a little less time and sometimes it'll take a little more time. It also depends on how much competition you have. If you're in a highly competitive environment, you better make sure that your content is top quality and that you have a huge prospecting list because you're gonna get way more nos than you get yeses. On the flip side though, if you're in a not so competitive keyword or if you have a product or a service that's not as competitive, maybe in your region or in your state or in your city, or what have you, it might actually be easier to get those links and it might take fewer touches when it comes to outreach in order to get a yes. And so that's gonna be how you start building up those back links and start adding that to your backlink arsenal. So there's a number of things you really do have to be careful of. And this is where I'm going to come back to paid backlinks. Now, there's a lot of services out there that offer tit for tat back linking, so basically an exchange. So I backlink to your product, you backlink to mine. This can get a little bit sketchy but the most sketchy is gonna be paid backlinks and we highly recommend not doing paid backlinks. And what I mean for that is going to a site like a private blog network which we have videos on that as well. But you can go to a private blog network or a PBM and they'll say, yeah, we'll give you as many backlinks as you, as you can afford. And what they do is they just have a bunch of cut and paste content. They have a bunch of content that doesn't even read well. There's a lot of red flags when it comes to PBNs and it's really easy to identify. If you're having trouble or you wanna see if you're involved with a PBN, just click through their site, look at what's on there, look at the type of content, look at the quality of the content, read through it. If it's tough to read and there's a zillion different categories and you've got different niches, and there's not really a trend with the site or a niche that the site is a part of, there's a good chance that's part of a private blog network. Now, when you pay for these, it's basically a pay for play system. You give them $20 and they give you a backlink or you give them $5 and they give you a backlink. That sounds great on paper and it sounds like you're gonna save a lot of time and a lot of effort in the long run, and yeah, you probably will. And you probably will see your domain rating and your domain authority start to go up and you'll probably start to see your traffic start to increase, but Google is always playing a game of cat and mouse with these PBNs and they're always finding them and bringing them down. And when they take them down, it does not just penalize the PBN site, it penalizes your site as well. So you might've put all that money and you might've put in $5,000 in PBNs and now all of a sudden your domain rating has crashed and your traffic has crashed. So now that $5,000 that you spent backlinking in the last month has all just been wasted. So you wanna make sure that you're staying away from that. So this is where the quality really comes in. How do you identify a good quality site? Well, one of the biggest tells for a good quality site is are you actually speaking with a human being? Do they have something that they're also doing? Are they relevant to what you're doing? If you're in cameras or camera equipment, is this another person who does photography for a living? Is this somebody who does street photography, landscape photography, videography, vlogging, what do they do? Can you tell that they actually have industry knowledge of something? And if they do, and they're linking to your site, that's gonna be a lot of link juice going your way. and that's gonna be a super good high quality backlink. And Google can recognize the difference between you just putting a blog comment linking to your own site versus somebody else actually going in and editing their site to add a backlink to yours. So those are some of the things to really look out for. A low quality backlink, like I said, would be more like a blog comment. If you can put a link to your site on your own without anybody else intervening, that's gonna be a low-quality backlink. So stay away from those because Google will actually penalize you if you're spamming that as well. And if you go to somebody's blog or a bunch of different blogs and you start spanning all of their blog articles with comments just linking to your site, that's a pretty quick way to make some enemies. And those links are unlikely to stay there, they might go in and actually remove them if they feel like you are being spamming. So finally is link-building hard?

Well, the short answer is, yeah, it's hard. Otherwise there wouldn't be a zillion videos and a bunch of blogs and a bunch of tutorials on how to do it. Now, the link building itself is not hard. It's not a hard concept to grasp, but it is very time-consuming to actually go through the research, the prospecting and the content creation. So just make sure that you spend most of your time on that aspect of it. And don't get so wrapped around the axle on the type of link building that you're gonna do or making sure that you've optimized the anchor text, that can all come later. What you really wanna do is just create the good quality content, create the good site, create the good articles, because we wanna start that cycle of SEO and we wanna start that link building journey with good content because the rest of it can all be applied later and the prospecting can come at a later time. But just make sure that you're putting all of your energy and all of your resources into creating that good content. That is the hardest part. The prospecting is just time consuming, it's not really that difficult. As always, thanks again for spending your time with me. I really appreciate it. If there's anything that we didn't cover or something that you want me to go into more detail with, just drop a comment below and we can get a conversation started there and we might even make a video of it in the future. But until then, thanks again and I'll talk to you next time.