Awesome Link Building Strategies That Don’t Demand Content Production

Guest posting has become so popular that you can now find a blogger agency that will reach out to bloggers in your niche, produce the content for guest posts, and secure backlinks for your business.

However, the time and effort required to produce content is also a deterrent that prevents a lot of bootstrapped businesses from undertaking link building. 

Thankfully, you can still build a strong and genuine backlink profile despite not being able to produce quality content.

Want to learn how? Read on.

Strategy 1: Turning Brand Mentions Into Linked Brand Mentions

This strategy is fairly simple to execute and brings about great results. All you need to do is find instances on other websites where your brand has been mentioned and if they haven’t linked to your website, send them an email politely asking for a link associated with your brand mention. 

The best part is, you don’t have to limit this outreach to instances where your brand or business has been mentioned. If members of your company are active on the web and have been mentioned on other websites, you can ask for a backlink, as long as the mention is relevant to your business.

You must be wondering how you can find and track your brand mentions. 

Let’s begin by understanding how you can locate every instance of your brand being mentioned on the web so far. For this, we will use the Google search engine. 

You already know the term(s) you want to track (your brand name and variations) and you know the websites where you don’t want to locate these mentions (your own webpages and social media pages). Keeping this in mind, search on Google with the following query:

“Brand name variation”+”brand name variation 2”-site:ownwebsite.com-site:Twitter.com-site:Facebook.com

The list of results will be all the other websites that are mentioning your desired term (brand name variation). 

Now, let us look at how you can track brand mentions that you will garner in the future. The ability to track these mentions will allow you to consistently build backlinks with this technique. 

To find fresh brand mentions, you can use Google Alerts or a service like Mention.com. Out of the two, Google Alerts is a free service and thus, an incredibly popular way for brands to track their mentions.

Here’s how you can track your own brand mentions with Google Alerts:

1-

Begin by going to the Google Alerts website. Here, you will see a search bar with the text “Create an alert about”. Here, you have to enter the terms (your brand name variations) that you want to track with Google Alerts. Don’t forget to add variations. For instance, here’s a list of keywords I would have entered here for my business:

“Digital Web Solutions”-site:digitalwebsolutions.com
“Digitalwebsoltions”-site:digitalwebsolutions.com
“DWS”-site:digitalwebsolutions.com
“Vaibhav Kakkar” Founder or CEO-site:digitalwebsolutions.com
“Vaibhav Kakkar” SEO-site:digitalwebsolutions.com

When creating this list, make sure you are being extremely thorough and using as many search modifiers as you can think of. If you aren’t, Google will send across a flood of useless alerts that will do nothing but waste your precious time.

2-

Next, you will see a “Create Alert” button right below the search bar and a drop down menu next to it that will contain “more options”. Expand the drop down menu and you will be presented with options about how often you want to be alerted and more. The selection of most of these will depend on your personal preferences. 

When using these settings, do hesitate to cast a wider-than-necessary net in order to ensure you never miss out on an alert.

Now that you have understood how you can track brand mentions, all that is left to do is send an email to the owners/editors of websites that are mentioning your brand. With a simple Google search, you can find thousands of templates for the job. Here’s just one of them.

With that said, make sure you don’t waste this opportunity by simply asking for a single link. Instead, modify the email template of your choice in a way that enables you to start a conversation with the owners of other websites. Next, use the conversation to forge a long-term relationship with them. This way, you can ensure that at least some of the websites you are reaching out to will give you backlinks in the future.

Strategy 2: Broken Link Building

Broken link building sits among the most popular link building strategies used by savvy marketers, and for good reason. In fact, it is so popular that if you have ever worked with an SEO agency in the past, chances are that your website already has some backlinks that were earned through this strategy. SEO agency in the past, chances are that your website already has some backlinks that were earned through this strategy.

Depending on the approach and your existing content bank, you can use this strategy with or without producing fresh content. 

However, the real reason that broken link building enjoys so much popularity is that the strategy has the potential to deliver several links with a single email blast. Another reason that this strategy is popular is that it requires virtually no monetary investment, not even in an SEO tool!

You can utilise a free backlink checker to find targeted broken links and start reaching out to the website owners for backlinks. 

To implement broken link building without producing any new content, you will have to utilise Brian Dean’s moving man method.

The strategy is quite straightforward. It involves the following three steps:

Step 1:Find Domains Of Out-Of-Business Businesses

The web is home to an ocean of failed businesses. Regardless of what you sell, you can find hundreds if not thousands of businesses in your niche that have gone under. Once the business owner stops paying for the domain of their business, the domain is picked up by auction websites like Godaddy Auctions. This is what they look like:

Most of the time, these websites only pick domains that have something special about them, like a large number of backlinks pointing at them. All you need to do is find such a website from your niche.

The best part is, since these websites are “technically” functional, the links pointing to them are not detected as dead links. This means, the links you will find in the next step will probably be dead links that your competition isn’t even aware about.

Once you have prepared a list of dead websites in your niche, move on to the next step.

Step 2:Check The Backlink Profile For The Dead Website

As mentioned earlier, you can utilise one of the many free backlink checker tools available online for this task.

The idea here is to find a dead website with a high number of links pointing towards it. Once you find such a website, it is time for step 3.

Step 3: Reach Out

This is one of the more obvious steps in this process. Here, all you have to do is send an email to each of the websites pointing to your dead website informing them about the same.

In the same email, subtly present your website or even better, a specific page on your website as a potential replacement for the dead outgoing link on their website.

If you do your research right and get your email copy right, you should be able to build several links in one go. 

Don’t implement this process once and stop. Every few days, take out time to look for websites in your niche that go out of business and send a few emails to steal/salvage their links.

Strategy 3: HARO Links

HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out and it does exactly what the name suggests. It is a service where reporters can find expert opinions and quotes to include in their articles. In exchange, those who provide the quote can get a backlink from a new publication website, which usually have very high authority. 

Not to forget, your business name appearing on a news website can do incredible wonders for your business’ online visibility. However, that is a secondary benefit of this strategy and shouldn’t be your goal.

Your goal should be to deliver value to the reporter and get a backlink. Moreover, your goal should be to possibly forge a relationship with the reporter so next time they need someone of your expertise, they directly contact you instead of depending on HARO.

Now, all of what I just told you about HARO may sound like a dream, but the reality is often quite disappointing. This is true because when you sign up for HARO updates, you will be flooded with several updates that are completely irrelevant to your business and your expertise. 

With that said, you will come across a chunk of backlink gold every once in a while so it is definitely worth your time to browse through a list of HARO requests every day. 

If you see a niche-relevant opportunity that may not be directly related to your expertise, make sure you save the details of that opportunity. You can also try to find the email of the reporter on your own (because HARO will encrypt the email address unless you start working with the reporter).

If you succeed, you can send a value-filled email (for example, with a relevant content offer) and try to establish a relationship with them. Through this, you can not just communicate your expertise to the reporter so that they may contact you for future queries, you can open doors to other backlink building opportunities on their high-authority publication.

Even if you find yourself hesitating to produce content, if you get an opportunity to guest post on one of the biggest publications in your niche, I am sure you will push through the pain of writing the guest post.

Conclusion

As you may have realised, link building may be closely related to content development, but it isn’t totally dependent on the production of content. With that said, don’t let any of these strategies trick you into thinking you will be able to build a complete and strong backlink profile without ever producing content. 

However, these strategies can potentially benefit your business website until the time you figure out a way to produce the necessary content.