How to Increase Backlinks and Traffic with Whitehat Influencer Marketing Tactics
Let’s face it, getting low-cost traffic is difficult today. Paid ads are getting more expensive, and manipulating your way to #1 Google rankings with backlinks doesn’t really work either.
We all know the value in creating “high-quality content“… but if you are only focusing on content, you are never going to rank or get the importance backlinks you need to compete. No matter what industry, business or niche market you are in, it’s important to remember that there are over a billion active sites on the internet. Without the necessary backlinks, social promotions and outreach in place… it’s a black hole that you will never find you way out of.
The good news is that there are plenty of ethical and white-hat methods to help your site stand out from the crowd and rank higher month after month. The bad news is that these methods usually take a lot of time and effort.
However, there are some tools out there that make this process a lot easier and more manageable. Remember… at the end of the day, it’s not about the content you create, but instead the outreach your focus on afterward.
The Process of Creating Great Content and Promoting It Effectively
For many site owners and bloggers, way too much time is spent on creating content, guides, ebooks, software and what not. While these are all necessities for online marketing and content, too often we think “great content will promote itself”. This simply isn’t the case — especially with more websites, blogs and social media profiles going live every day.
This is something Brian Dean preaches through his blog all the time.
If you want to find success in the world of online content and marketing, follow these three simple steps:
- Create high-quality content your users find value in
- Promote that content to your audience and social networks
- Focus on manual outreach to big players within your niche
As you can guess, it’s a timely process, but one that also yields huge results. In terms of ROI, it can be in the 1000% range as this is usually more focused on your time and the valuable links and mentions you can get in return could be valued in the hundreds of even thousands of dollars range.
Ben Murray and Abhi Dwivedi are the co-creators of TrafficFresh, a software that was created to make the process of content outreach and promotion much easier and manageable. Through the case study and detailed walkthrough below, I’m going to show you how they are able to create killer content for their site, then focus their efforts on reaching out to the biggest players within their niche. All while build high-quality backlinks to their site (many of which are for free!)
Ben has a site he just started in the health and fitness niche and he just went live with a new article on his site. After some outreach and social promotion he was able to receive 2,000+ pageviews to hit site — all at no cost.
In addition to getting traffic to his site, he was also able to rack up a few hundred social shares as well.
To make this case study even more interesting, Ben’s Paleo Diet Desserts article was the only post on the blog!
So how did he get all that traffic so fast without SEO or ads?
It’s as easy as these three simple steps.
1.) Discover what content top influencers are already sharing and deem valuable.
If you want to get other top influencers within your niche to start sharing your content, then you are going to need to kno what they are already sharing. Not only will this make your content that much more relevant to their audience, but it will also grealt increase your chances of them picking it up as well.
From within the TrafficFresh platform Ben was able to look up other influencers and people within the CrossFit niche and who might be interested in linking or referencing to his Paleo Diet article.
Upon deeper investigation, Ben found that top influencers specifically liked to share articles about paleo diet desserts.
Once you’ve seen what other sites are interested in sharing, you can then put together a nice amount of content and outreach to get an idea how well this might actually work.
Step 2. Build a better article than what the top influencers were already sharing
After researching his niche and competitor sites, Ben saw there was a big interest in articles related to “The Top 5 Paleo Diet Desserts” so he then went on to create an article titled “The Top 30 Paleo Diet Desserts”. If big influencers shared the article with the massive following about 5 dessert recipes, then they’d REALLY want to share his new article.
What was even better, was he outsourced much of the content for that post by contacting the influencers and asking if they’d like to contribute a recipe in return for me linking to their website which many did.
You can see an email of his outreach email below.
Once this is done, it’s then time to keep track of how many sites are promoting your content, who responded/ignored your message and how you can follow up to further increase conversions.
Step 3. Have influencers share your content and profit.
It’s easy to find a handful of sites that would be relevant to your content, but if you want to outrank your competition, you are going to need a lot more links from high quality and relevant sites. Ben was able to find more influencers who would be interested in sharing my content using the Influencer Search tab within Traffic Fresh.
Following the same method before, Ben simply reached out to these audiences to see if any of them would be interested in sharing. Some were interested, some were not.
The content was great and provided a lot of value. Here are just some of the sites and social outlets that went on to share his content.
PaleoWired: A Paleo Facebook group with over 24,000 followers.
(and here’s proof that they shared it)
Paleo Italian Cooking: Another social group with over 14,000 followers
(and she was happy to share it as well)
Ben also got traffic from Twitter influencers as well…
and many more…
It’s all about adding value today, but also saving time!
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, high-quality content is great — but outreach is key!
If Ben created his article and just put it out there, it would still be sitting there and waiting to eventually rank in the search results. With just a little bit of outreach he was able to tap into over 50,000 users on social media and also gain a few backlinks to the site in the process.
The best part is you can replicate this process in any niche and save hours of time while using a software like Traffic Fresh to find these opportunities and store them for you.
Create your content. Focus on outreach. Dominate your industry!
