Link-building tactics that were viable just 5 years ago are now obsolete (like paying for links and automating generic mass outreach emails). 

Why is that?

There are many reasons, including Google Algorithm Updates, emerging search trends (like AI chatbots), and the fact that some tactics simply wear out their welcome. 

For example, generic outreach email templates used to work fine for acquiring backlinks – but now site owners have grown tired of seeing them fill up their inboxes every day. 

That’s why SEOs need to rethink how they get backlinks periodically. 

If your tried-and-true tactics aren’t yielding results anymore, then it’s time to think outside the box and try something new. 

The good news is that new link-building techniques are always popping up, so you shouldn’t have to look too far to find some new tactics to try. 

To make things easier for you, we’ve put together 5 of the most recent link-building tactics that are bearing fruit. 

Instead of focusing on ‘classic’ link-building tactics like the skyscraper technique – you’re better off utilizing techniques like relationship-building, link insertions, and becoming a source for bloggers, reporters, and journalists. 

Read on to discover the best ways to get backlinks in 2023 and beyond.

Do Backlinks Still Matter for SEO?

Since SEO changes so much, is it even still worth pursuing backlinks for your SEO strategy?

If you’re optimizing your website for Google Search, then the answer is a definite yes. 

Backlinks are still among Google’s strongest ranking signals, and they’re essential for achieving top rankings (positions 10 and above). 

In fact, whether or not a website can outrank a competitor usually comes down to the strength of their backlink profiles. 

So if you’ve hit a snag and can’t seem to climb higher than your current rank, your competitors likely have higher-authority backlinks pointing to their sites. 

You can peek at your competitor’s links by using our free Backlink Checker tool. 

Enter your competitor’s URL, and then take a close look at the backlinks they have. 

Are there backlinks from sites with DR (domain ratings) of 80 or above? Do you recognize any of the sites linking back to them?

If so, then they have a particularly strong backlink profile. 

The good news?

There’s no reason why you can’t pursue backlinks from the same sources to help even the odds. 

As long as you have the right tactics, it’s possible to acquire your competitor’s backlinks (or similar ones) to surpass them on the SERPs. 

The general rule of thumb is the stronger your backlink profile, the easier it’ll be to rank in the top 5 for your target keywords. 

However, if your SEO campaign focuses on Bing instead of Google, backlinks won’t matter as much. That’s because Bing uses a different series of ranking factors, and backlinks aren’t very high on the list. 

Check out our Bing SEO guide to discover how to optimize your website for it instead of Google. 

5 Effective Ways to Get Backlinks for Your Website 

If you want to find success with a modern link-building campaign, you need to ensure you’re using the right tactics. 

Here’s an in-depth look at 5 current ways to get backlinks that will provide the best results for your SEO campaign. 

#1: Link insertions 

While link insertions aren’t exactly new, they’ve recently exploded in popularity. 

In the past, most SEOs looked down on link insertions and equated them with ‘link begging.’ 

That all changed once the effectiveness of the technique became apparent. 

Link insertions are excellent because they require less outreach than guest posts, you can target virtually every website in your niche, and they get indexed quicker than guest blogs. 

The technique involves reaching out to site owners to place one of your links in an existing piece of their content. 

For example, if an ultimate guide you created would work as a supplementary piece to an existing blog on another website, you can ask the site owner to add the link for you. 

All you have to do is write some optimized anchor text for the link, and you’re done. 

The catch?

You will have to find a way to add value to the website owner, as adding one of your links to an old post doesn’t do much for them. 

To sweeten the pot, you can add new insights/images/infographics to the post to make it fresh and rankable again. Or you could offer the site owner the chance to write a guest post on your website – granting them a backlink in return. 

Since link insertions don’t involve any content creation (unlike guest posts), they’re a lot faster to acquire. Not only that, but you won’t have to wait long for the backlink to start affecting your SEO, as you’re inserting it into a piece of content that’s already in Google’s index. 

#2: Using HARO (Help-a-Reporter-Out)

Another effective way to acquire backlinks is to become a resource for bloggers, reporters, and journalists on HARO. 

Whenever you sign up as a source, you’ll receive a regular set of emails each day (morning, afternoon, and evening) that contain requests from journalists. 

In particular, they’re looking for experts to provide information on a certain topic (they’re categorized by industry, like business/finance, entertainment, etc.) for a piece they’re writing. 

As long as you’re able to find requests that align with your expertise, you can send a pitch to the journalist. 

Provide some valuable insights and display your knowledge on the subject, and don’t forget to ask for a shout-out via a backlink if they use your pitch. 

When done correctly, this is a highly effective way to generate lots of authoritative backlinks from trusted sources. 

You just need to make sure that you’re able to provide value to the journalist, as they will receive more than one pitch for their request. 

Accordingly, your pitch needs to shine above the rest if you want to land a backlink out of it. 

For this reason, you should only respond to requests that you’re very knowledgeable about. 

The last thing you want to do is send out a bunch of mediocre pitches on subjects you aren’t an expert on, as you’ll just be wasting your time. 

Also, the quicker you can reply to a request, the better. If possible, try to respond to a pitch within 30 minutes after it goes live. 

Lastly, quickly vet each media outlet by checking their domain rating to determine if a backlink from them is worth it or not. 

#3: Relationship building 

Since generic outreach templates are all but antiquated in today’s age, SEOs are now flocking towards building links by forming relationships instead. 

What’s that?

Relationship-based link-building involves forming long-term bonds with other website owners in your niche. 

That way, you can continue to generate backlinks for one another instead of a one-and-done deal. 

Not only that but forming relationships with other websites is a great way to network and discover new link sources. By sharing your sources with a partner, you’ll both find new opportunities to acquire backlinks. 

Of course, you should only try to form relationships with thought leaders in your industry – as partnering with low DR sites won’t do you any favors. 

Taking this approach requires most SEOs to rethink the way they approach backlink outreach. 

Instead of asking for a link outright, your goal is to connect with the website owner and form a bond. That means connecting with them on social media platforms and interacting with their posts in a genuine way. 

Only after getting to know them should you introduce the idea of building links together. 

If you’re able to form a network of high-authority link partners in your industry, dominating the SERPs will become far easier. 

#4: Guest blogging 

Some classic ways to get backlinks never go out of style, and guest blogging is definitely one of them. 

Writing high-quality guest blogs on trusted sites in your niche is still one of the most reliable ways to acquire desirable backlinks. 

In addition to landing backlinks, guest posts are also excellent for raising brand awareness and introducing your content to a new audience. 

They’re a tad trickier and more time-consuming than link insertions, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t worth it. 

Here’s a quick method for finding websites in your niche that accept guest blogs. 

Head over to Google Search and type ‘’your niche keyword – blogs that accept guest posts.’ 

#5: Creating ultimate guides and infographics 

If you create outstanding content that provides value to your niche, then you’ll be able to acquire backlinks without even trying. 

That’s because content like ultimate guides and infographics (especially ones containing relevant statistics) generates the most backlinks online. 

So if you’re able to write an ultimate guide for a topic that your target audience wants to learn about, the backlinks will start raking in. 

Wrapping Up: 5 Ways to Get Backlinks 

Link-building is always going through changes due to a variety of reasons, which means eventually, the tactics you use will go out of style. 

For now, the 5 techniques in this guide are the cream of the crop for boosting your backlink profile. 

Do you want to reach the top of the SERPs in your industry?

Then don’t wait to check out our Link Insertion and Link Outreach Services from The HOTH. Our link-building gurus are well-versed in all the most effective techniques, so don’t wait to book a call today.    

The post 5 Modern Ways to Get Backlinks to Boost Your SEO Profile  appeared first on The HOTH.

But have you ever wondered how much your site is actually worth? A lot of entrepreneurs with monetized content sites don’t realize they can actually sell their business for a profitable sum.

Inbound traffic is one of the best traffic sources.

It’s a great lead generation tool and arguably the lifeblood of online businesses, since the quality of your SEO affects how easy it is to find your content.

A well-optimized site can drive tens of thousands of views each month from just a few articles.

As you’re reading this, you’re probably generating revenue from your site through affiliate links or display advertising.

The great news is that sites with optimized SEO are lucrative assets for savvy buyers.

Over the last three years, content sites sold for an average of $94,419, increasing year-on-year in value by 23%.

Sellers who made a profitable exit realized they could pass their business on to someone else so that they could explore other ventures or tend to personal matters while raising a large amount of capital. Yet, many online business owners never even realize that selling their business is an option.

We’ve seen great content sites slump into a former shell of what they were because the site owners didn’t have time to keep up with the latest keywords, update their content with relevant topics, or they just lost interest in the side project altogether.

To help you understand what selling your business looks like, and what you should consider when preparing your business to sell if and when it’s time, we’ll break down how your site is valued and what factors influence the price, as well as talk about how you might increase your asset’s value if and when you decide to sell.

How Online Businesses Are Valued

Our valuation formula is as follows:

We use a monthly average net profit as opposed to an annual profit figure because we feel it gives a closer look at a business’s performance. It’s easy enough to calculate the first half of the formula; just add up the combined net profit from the past 12 months and divide by 12.

Working out the multiple is a more complex step. It takes many factors into account, such as pricing windows, the domain age, traffic diversity, and others. Let’s dive into these factors in more detail.

Pricing Windows

When checking how an online business is performing, the monthly revenue and profit figures are analyzed over a trailing 12month (TTM) period.

The TTM period is a gold standard and usually recommended for all businesses to use for two reasons. First, it accounts for seasonality. Depending on your niche, traffic may be amplified or slower during certain times of the year. Using a shorter time period may exaggerate a business’s performance to be much better or worse than it is across a whole year.

The second reason follows from the first: more data will instill more trust in buyers who are looking at your business.

It’s possible to choose a six-month pricing window if your site has just started earning profit and it’s the earliest period of time you measured any revenue that was generated. It’s not advisable to use such a short pricing window if you’re selling for the first time, especially if it’s because your site started making money recently.

If you’re not in a hurry to sell your content site, we recommend that you wait until you build your online business more and it generates more consistent profit before submitting it for a sale. That way, you can receive a higher valuation.

Domain Age

As a reader or customer of The HOTH, you’ll know that inbound traffic takes time and dedication to build.

The older the domain, the more likely the multiple will increase for a couple of reasons.
Some SEOs believe that Google’s sandbox effect means that newer sites take between three to six months before that site’s content will start to rank.

Once your articles start ranking higher in search pages, your chance to increase revenue improves.

The other reason domain age plays a significant role in the multiple is because an older domain indicates the site is resilient against search engine algorithm updates. We’ve seen many businesses hit hard by a change in Google’s algorithm, with revenue and traffic dropping by half.

A profitable content business that’s been around for several years implies that the content is good quality and optimized for SEO without being dependent on black hat techniques.

Traffic Diversity

Increasing the diversity of traffic across your site improves your content business’s valuation, because it lowers the risk of a drop in performance if any of the ranks of your top pages are affected by algorithm changes.

Another way to lower the risk of being overly reliant on one source of traffic is by having multiple traffic channels.

While organic search is a popular way to attract visitors, you could also influence the multiple needle by nurturing other channels such as social media and referral through content partnerships with other blogs in shoulder niches.

Revenue Income

Most content sites are monetized through commissions from sales after clicking affiliate links, or by revenue generated from how many display ads are clicked.

Spreading out the number of ways your site is monetized not only increases your total monthly revenue, but also helps mitigate the risk if a primary monetization channel is shut down due to a breach in terms of services.

Building different income streams gives you a chance to pivot as you scale your site. For example, as you develop other ways to generate revenue, you might find that your viewers are more likely to click on affiliate links instead of ad banners.

SEO

Naturally, SEO plays a huge role in your site’s valuation!

We can all agree that inbound traffic is a powerful way to create a hands-off business. How optimized your site is for both on-page and off-page SEO plays a large part when considering SEO.

When looking at on-page SEO, we’ll see how many keywords the site ranks for, how diversified the page views are across the top-performing pages, and loading speeds. Tools like The HOTH X Managed SEO all-in-one service is a great way to extend your organic reach while improving your existing content so your articles rank on the desired first page of the SERP results.

Domain Ranking

Domain ranking (DR) can be hard to influence, but it’s important to a site’s valuation nonetheless.

Off-page SEO factors can improve DR by how many backlinks the site has, if any PBNs were used, and whether the site has been affected by previous Google updates.

Tools like Moz, SEMRush, and Ahrefs are really useful in giving you a rough idea of what your DR is. However, each of these tools has a different way to calculate your site’s DR, so take each measure with a grain of salt.

Ultimately, they provide a glance at how reputable your site is according to search engines.

Content Quality

There’s a reason why “content is king” is still true even in today’s era of SEO.

It’s tough to explain in a few words what high-quality content looks like. A couple of things we look for is how readable the content is, whether it’s evergreen, and if it provides a lot of value to readers.

Longform articles that are well written tend to perform better than shorter articles. Evergreen content requires fewer updates since they’ll be relevant over a longer period of time, unless the blog owner wants to update affiliate offers or further optimize for SEO.

Fewer updates also means it takes less time to maintain the business, which makes a site more attractive to a wider pool of buyers who want to invest in an online business that needs little owner involvement.

Naturally, plagiarized content doesn’t sit well with search engines or with brokers. Sites are run through Copyscape to check if any content is copied from other blogs.

If writing isn’t your strength, or you’d prefer to spend your time growing the business in other ways, consider hiring a freelancer to produce original content.

Where You Can Sell Your Site

Now that you’ve got an idea of what goes into a site’s valuation, you might be wondering where you can sell your online business.

There are two main options: a private sale or use a broker.

If you’re considering selling a content site for the first time, we strongly recommend that you go through a broker.

It’s not as simple as negotiating a fee, signing a contract, shaking hands, handing over the digital keys (or logins), and walking away. Brokers that act as a curated marketplace will have systems in place to protect both the sellers and buyers.

There is a lot to consider when selling your site. When you use a service like Empire Flippers, a broker will help turn your finances into a profit and loss (P&L) statement.

A P&L statement acts like an Instagram highlight reel of your business so that qualified buyers can check what your site’s financial performance is like.

Once you’re listed for sale, buyers will be competing to acquire your business. With a private sale, it’s hard to generate the same amount of interest for your business.

We often see FOMO kicking in for private sales, which is why sellers tend to agree to the first deal that comes along even when it’s far below what they were hoping to get out of a deal.

Attracting Qualified Buyers

A broker will help circulate your business to the right types of buyers who will have the right skillset to continue running it after you part ways. More importantly, buyers will need to prove that they can afford the business by verifying their liquidity, or proof of funds.

Private sales are notorious for attracting tire kickers. These are people who waste your time by making non-serious inquiries and offers for your business since they’re spending most of their time window shopping.

While brokers will ask for a commission of the sale (ranging from 2% to 15%, depending on the size of the deal), it’ll be worth your time as they’ll provide you with the platform and tools to streamline the transaction process. You can focus on weighing which offers are best and speaking with buyers to work out a great deal instead of worrying about how to sell your business.

Use SEO as Leverage to Sell

Content sites with optimized SEO and built-up traffic channels are highly sought-after assets for buyers.

The nature of inbound traffic means these types of online businesses are one of the most hands-off operations to run. A buyer will want to invest in a business that’s making money from day one and needs only a few hours each week to maintain.

Since SEO and DR take time to develop, buyers will want to save time and money from starting their own. Whether it’s a lead generation or a monetized content site, buyers want to skip the hard phase of building up momentum.

If you’re thinking about selling or wonder how much your site is worth, consider speaking to our team to start planning your exit strategy.

Even if you don’t sell now, you can think about when you want to make your exit in the future. In the meantime, continue building your site and use services like The HOTH to grow your business. When it’s time to exit, you could raise the most capital you’ve ever received through one single sale.

The post How Much is Your Online Business Worth? (And How to Increase Its Sales Price!) appeared first on The HOTH.

Hey there Hoth Family! This is Alejandro from HumanProofDesigns and on this post I’m going to show you the number 1 technique to build links to affiliate sites in a safe way.

Why should you even care? Well, let me tell you something.

Chances are, you are working against yourself when you do link building without knowing.

Why do I know that?

Ever found a site using anchors like “chicago cpa attorney” or “best waterproof bluetooth speakers 2018” with all their links?

Ever bought links and used such anchors pointing straight to your money pages? Oh, several times you say?

Well, like said… You may be shooting yourself in the foot.

Don’t take me wrong, exact match anchors when used right and coming from strong, clean sources can shoot your page to the moon, even if it’s a single link.

But this year the SEO game is harder than ever, niches are just getting more and more competitive (Thanks to BIG media agencies expanding their turfs into affiliate lands) and you need to start being SMART when you grow your site and build links to it.

On this article, I’m NOT going to cover link pillowing, anchor text ratios or off-page SEO principles that you should ideally be already familiar with, but more about the RIGHT type of internal architecture for affiliate sites.

I’ve linked to top of the league guides for those things above anyway Take your time and do your reading if you need.

By the end of this article you’ll be equipped to bring your link building to a new level.

Let’s jump right into the meat.

1. Architecture For Affiliate Sites: Building Topical Relevance and Internal Links.

So the first thing that you need to have in place is the right architecture. You’re probably familiar with the concept of “topical relevance” but if you aren’t, here’s the TL:DR of it:

A website needs a sufficient amount of content (pages) around a given topic/location/concept for it to be considered “relevant”. 5 seems to be the minimum.

This means a niche site about straight razors that grows into general men’s grooming, should ideally have at least 5 pages/posts about “waxing” if it wishes to rank for things like “best wax for chest hair”

You know exactly what I’m about to say.

First thing you need: Enough pieces of content around any topic.

So let’s say you want to rank for “best straight razor” with your awesome brand new guide.

First thing for you to do is create AT LEAST another 4 pieces of content about straight razors and interlink them to your “best straight razor of 2018 (reviews and comparison)” page (cuz that’s the title you’re using, right?)

(At HPD we do exactly that when we build affiliate sites for our customers. We pick a profitable niche, and we use this architecture to create a solid site that ranks and helps users.)

Regarding which anchors to use internally, you want to keep your exact match anchors at 30-50% (depends on how many pages you have. Not the same to link 4 times to a page than link 120 times) and then just use what I call “smart anchors” on the off-page seo guide that I’ve linked to above.

Keep them relevant and natural, that’s all.

What this gives you is sufficient Topical Support for your main affiliate term.

Let’s elaborate on what the above structure means and how to pick the right keywords for your support content.

2. Best Types Of Supporting Content & Money/Info Ratios

You can theoretically talk about whatever you want for as long as the main topic is the same as the page you’re trying to support (i.e. straight razors)

But why would you invest money in just “any” content, right?

Here are the typical ways to create supporting content and grow any affiliate niche:

• Create other money pages about specific variations of the product (so, longer tail versions of it, what I call “second” and “third” level of depth). I.e. “best dovo straight razor” or “best straight razor for shaving head”. (light blue bubble)
• Review specific products. I.e. “Equinox Professional review” (orange bubbles)
• Compare products (i.e. “straight razor vs safety razor”)
• Solve people’s questions about the product: How to use it, what are the different types of xyz available, how to clean it, is it safe to use… for any given product there will be HUNDREDS of these that you can find. (green bubbles)

NerdWallet is a prime example of an affiliate site that grew with content.

What is the single best type of content to build links to?

Informational content.

Why?

Because it’s natural.

People share useful guides on social media all the time. People like to back up their statements when talking about a topic with some expert’s opinion on the issue; and because it’s user-centric content.

It’s simply a million times more natural for someone to share or link to an article about “Top tips to avoid ingrown hairs when using a straight razor” or “Shaving like your badass grandpa: why you should use a straight razor” rather than to a list of the top 10 selling razors on Amazon.

How many info pieces should you be creating? I suggest a 1:2 ratio. At least one info piece per 2 money pieces. You still want to bring home that revenue so you need a nice amount of money content.

Now you might be saying, “I’m never going to rank for how to shave with a straight razor. I’ve seen the SERP. Why would I bother spending money on that piece? I’ll just send links to my best straight razors page”

Hold on buddy, I’ve got you covered.

3. Finding EASY Topics To Rank For That People Actually Search For

In any field or niche, beyond the obvious doubts about the product itself there are always a nice bunch of more obscure, less frequent questions that people search for in Google.

“Why do my eyelashes curl down” isn’t a keyword you’d necessarily think about when you try to come up with informational content ideas to support your “best eyelash curler” page, is it?

Yet, the search term has volume and do you know how many pages in the whole immensity of the interwebz are answering that question?

Yes, that’s just one single answer, you can stop rubbing your eyes now.

Disclaimer: I claim no credit for this smart method. Credit’s due to the man who originally talked about using allintitle searches to gauge competition and even came up with a complete math ratio to determine if a keyword is dead easy to rank for or not: Doug Cunnington.

Ok ok, awesome way to find good keywords. But why on Earth would I build links to something that ranks that easy? Doesn’t it defeat the whole purpose of these type of keywords?

Let’s solve this puzzle for once and for all:

4. Funneling Juice & THE ONE THING You Need To Build Links To Any Page

Traffic. That’s its. You NEED traffic to justify links. (And some social shares help too, obv)

The more traffic, the more links you can send to any page. It’s just natural right? More people see it… more people link to it.

So here’s the whole process laid down for you:

• Create your money page.
• Create support pages around KGR keywords
• Interlink those support pages to your money page using the right anchors.
• Traffic will flow from the support pages to your money page via internal links
• Build links to those support pages
• Juice will flow to your money page
• Send a few high-impact links straight to your money page
• Upload traffic screenshot to your favorite SEO group on Facebook for other people’s delight.
• Profit.

And last but not least: Test.

Good SEOs test. Test stuff. You can use HOTH products to build the links to your support pages while you concentrate on testing different architectures.

Test. And have some fun in the process.

To your success,

Alejandro.

Author Bio: Alejandro Meyerhans is a Spanish marketer that focuses on SEO and Lead Generation. He’s HumanProofDesigns’ Acquisitions Director and is obsessed with sales, scaling, systems and all things Internet Marketing. He also manages a portfolio of 13 affiliate sites. In the odd hours when he isn’t working, he enjoys motorcycles (riding and building them) and discovering the best eateries in Chiang Mai.

The post How To Structure Affiliate Sites To Optimize Link Building appeared first on The HOTH.

Editor’s Note: In this killer article, Greg from Empire Flippers goes over some of the most common mistakes and solutions for creating an SEO agency that can actually be sold. Even if you’re not planning on selling your agency, you should still implement these tactics, and make it “built to sell.” The same things that you would do to make it sellable are the same things that are going to make the business successfully be able operate, profit, and grow.

How To Build An SEO Agency – The Right Way

Building a business is exciting. Selling one is even more exciting. It is the culmination of all that sweat equity you’ve put into the business. It is the reward at the end of the journey.

Considering you could collect 20 to 40 times your monthly net profit up-front, that reward can be quite lucrative.

Search engine optimization (SEO) agencies have great margins. Often, they produce pure profit every month once your clients are actually ranked on the first page of Google. The agencies can be wonderful cash cows, especially if you are managing your clients correctly so they don’t take up too much of your time.

Despite bringing in the profit, SEO agencies are incredibly difficult to sell.

Service businesses, in general, are always the hardest style of online businesses to sell for a variety of reasons. However, the good news is you can fix most of these issues.

Do that, plus understand how a buyer’s mind works, and you can create a real sellable asset from your SEO agency.

So what are the issues that make it nearly impossible for most SEO agencies to sell?

The Big Bad Problem With Selling SEO Agencies

There are a lot of problems that ail SEO agencies.

One of the biggest issues is the fact that most agencies are one-person shows, which means the owner is doing everything. They are running:

• Marketing
• Sales
• Fulfillment of services
• Customer service
• And everything in between

It’s all on them, and doing everything is not something buyers are usually interested in doing. At the end of the day, the majority of buyers are looking to invest in an asset, not a job where they are working 40+ hours per week.

The second issue agencies run into is their actual clients. Most agencies have only a handful of clients. Out of those clients, there is often one big client that is making up 50 percent or more of the agency’s revenue. Having one majority client is a huge critical point of failure. It would take just one bad day for that agency to lose half of its earnings from a client stepping out, and buyers aren’t on board with purchasing an agency with that issue.

If your business has only one majority client right now, you need to do some serious client acquisition to get away from this problem as fast as possible. At Empire Flippers, we won’t even accept an agency that gets 50 percent or more of their revenue from a single client.

Speaking of clients, a lot of SEO agencies are super broad, which means they never really took on a single niche. For SEO agencies, there are two kinds of niches:

1. Localities (i.e., Austin, Texas)
2. Industries (i.e., Chiropractors)

An SEO agency that is too broad, meaning they are trying to cover every industry and locality, can sometimes be an issue for a buyer. Buyers like to see a focused business that is laser targeted with their client acquisition. For one, it makes running paid ads to acquire more clients a lot more scalable; your ads can use a common pain point for a focused target market and still reach a large new audience. Plus, it is easier to rank for SEO terms targeting one particular type of client well versus hundreds of different kinds of clients.

One thing to think about from a seller perspective is that most buyers will make you sign a non-compete agreement. If your SEO agency is super broad, you may run into a problem telling them you’re selling the business to expand your other SEO agency that also has broad targeting. Instead, it is a lot easier to say you’re selling your SEO agency that handles only mold restoration companies so you can focus on your SEO agency that handles only plastic surgeons.

To fix these issues and prepare your agency for selling SEO, here are three of the best solutions to follow:

1. Turn the agency into the Rank and Rent model
2. Use a White Label method for fulfilling the services
3. Scale your team

Let’s explore these three models in more detail.

Rank and Rent Model

This is a great model that allows you to build out an asset for your agency. Unlike working on client sites, you actually own these sites. Create your own website and rank for something like “Fort Lauderdale Plumber,” and once you’re ranked #1 on Google, you can rent out the entire website to a business in that area.

A lot of businesses will hop onto this solution and be more than happy to pay you a monthly fee for replacing the information on the site with theirs. The really powerful thing here is that if the client ever stops paying you … you just call their competitor and give them the same deal.

From a selling perspective, the Rank and Rent model can be more appealing to potential buyers who have zero interest in dealing with clients.

You can usually turn a Rank and Rent model easily into a simple local lead generation model. Simply sign up for a local lead generation network like QuinStreet, RingPartner, or HomeAdvisor and they’ll pay you out in a similar fashion as affiliate networks would.

This method creates real assets in the business, minimizes the need for client interaction, and is less fragile in terms of revenue plummeting if a client decides to stop paying you.

All of these traits are much more attractive to a potential buyer than a typical SEO agency. If it’s more attractive to a buyer, that makes it way easier for you to sell quickly and collect that 20 to 40 times of net monthly profit up-front.

The White Label Method

One of the biggest issues with SEO agencies, especially when selling one, goes back to the fact that buyers are looking for investments, not jobs. So, if your SEO agency requires you to actually fulfill the service, that limits your potential buyer pool by a dramatic amount.

Not only do you need a buyer who knows SEO, sales, and operations, but you need someone who knows your particular system of SEO. That can be a really tough ask.

You can use the power of white labeling to handle the majority of your actual fulfillment. White labeling is simply where you hire an SEO service provider to fulfill the SEO services your clients are paying you for. An easy way to look at this model is to view your agency as retail prices and the white label service provider as the wholesale prices. You make your money on the difference in the price tag.

Ideally, your white labeling method should not rely on a single person.

Instead, you should seek out an agency that can fulfill your needs at scale, and can adjust as you go up or down that scale.

White labeling is a great method of doing traditional client SEO without the potential buyer needing to fulfill the actual service. Plus, there are no employees that the buyer needs to manage.

The buyer will still need to manage clients, which will limit the overall buyer pool interested in purchasing your SEO agency. However, you can minimize this issue by combining a white label SEO service provider with scaling a team of your own.

Scaling Your Team

Just like the Rank and Rent model where you own the sites that create an actual asset for the business, a good team can also be the main asset of a service business.

A team could consist of an account manager, an administrative staff member, and a project manager that oversees the operations side of the business. The team is the other half of the system if you’re using white label service providers that can take care of the clients. Or, if you’re not using white label services, the team is the entire system for operating the business, as they do the actual service fulfillment.

The team must be willing to stay on for the buyer. If a buyer takes over an SEO agency and faces a brain drain of talent, they basically just invested in a high-pressure job to fix all the pieces. You should tell your team you’re selling the business, and make sure they’re comfortable with it. If you really want to make sure they’re going to stay, you could give them a kickback from the sale of your business after staying on for at least six months with the new owner.

While the team is the major thing here, you also need to make sure you’ve created really detailed standard operating procedures (SOPs). These SOPs are the operator’s manual for your SEO agency and will allow your potential buyer to train new employees in the case that any of the current employees leave the business or if they wish to expand the team.

Typically, the best way to install a team is to mix it with white label services. The white label services are there for the SEO fulfillment and the team is there to handle marketing, sales, and all client acquisitions/management.

I’ve talked quite bit about how to keep your buyer pool expanded rather than narrowing the buyer pool. Yet, even by implementing the above strategies, you’ll miss the boat if you don’t understand the mindset of a digital investor.

What is the psychology and anatomy of an online business buyer? Knowing the answer to that question is key if you plan on selling your agency for the highest possible price.

Understanding the Mindset of a Digital Investor

Selling any online business means getting into the heads of buyers/investors. The easiest way to understand your potential buyer is simply by doing what you’re already doing in your SEO agency today. Whenever you are out there hunting for new clients, you are looking for someone that has a problem you can solve. For SEO agencies, that problem is simple: The prospect is not ranking #1 on Google for buyer keyword terms.

Let’s use that same mindset as we approach potential buyers for your SEO agency.

What are their problems? What are their issues? How is your agency in particular the perfect solution to those issues?

Maybe they’re looking for a huge network of specific industry clients to upsell them on their Facebook ads product. They might specifically want to buy your SEO agency focused around mold restoration professionals so they can then upsell that entire client base on Facebook ads too. Or perhaps they love the idea of the Rank and Rent method because they have a lot of connections with the kind of professionals renting these sites.

For the most part, buyers, in general, are not looking to buy a job. That is why I’ve stressed how important it is to build assets for your SEO agency that most agencies don’t have. Potential buyers are looking to acquire a real asset, an investment that can grow month over month for them.

If you’re doing a private deal, then you’ll need to do some discovery. Ask buyers why they are looking at the business in the first place, find out about their background, and feel out why they are searching for an online business.

If you’re using a brokerage to sell your agency, you’ll have an advantage. For example, at Empire Flippers, we know our buyers very well. We talk to them every day about their criteria. Our Business Advisors understand both our clients’ short-term and long-term goals. That goes a long way to position your business as the obvious solution to buyers’ problems.

Once you have the psychology down, you need to know how to negotiate with the investor. Learning how to structure an earn-out, for example, can be extremely helpful if your agency is worth more than $200,000. At this price range, there will be more wheeling and dealing. Buyers will look to structure a deal that benefits them the most.

You’ll need to understand enough about deal structure to make sure you mitigate the risks associated with an earn-out, where a buyer pays you a large up-front amount, and then pays the rest of what they owe over a period of time (often 6-12 months). The payment could be an equal payment every month, or it could be a balloon payment where the buyer pays you a little every month, with a large payment that covers the rest of the price at the end of the loan period.

This kind of seller financing is very common in our industry due to the difficulty of getting traditional loans for online businesses.

While deal structuring almost always benefits the buyer more than the seller, if you find yourself in a seller financing arrangement, I have one pro tip for you: Charge an interest rate to the buyer. Almost zero sellers ask for interest on financing, and it is literally leaving money on the table.

By charging a small interest rate, you can mitigate some of the risk associated with an earn-out, and get paid more than what the business was actually bought for.

If You Want to Sell Your SEO Agency, Turn It Into an Asset

While negotiations and buyer mindset are obviously important aspects of selling your SEO agency, the most important piece of the puzzle is turning your agency into an asset that people want to buy in the first place.

The top three ways to make your business an asset are:

1. Rank and Rent Model / Lead Generation Model
2. SEO White Labeling to fulfill the service
3. Scaling and growing a team

If you focus on creating a valuable asset that is a profit-producing machine with a solid foundation (i.e., SOPs, teams, business model, etc.), then you will put yourself in the best possible position when it does come down to the actual negotiations.

Which is to say, you’re going to make the most money when you do exit your agency.

The post How to Create a Sellable SEO Agency appeared first on The HOTH.

Did you know you can make money online… Without ever creating any products?

The affiliate business model works like this:

The affiliate refers someone to seller of some kind, and if a sale is made the affiliate gets a predetermined commission.

It’s a classic business model of referring clients and customers. All the affiliate has to do is promote other people’s products and services – and they get a commission when a purchase is made.

Let me show you some examples:

Pat Flynn is an affiliate marketer that helps people learn about internet marketing, then recommends products for them to buy.

Another example is Rob Atkinson, who helps people find the right products to buy on Amazon through his website.

Both Pat and Rob had corporate careers, i.e. “Real Jobs,” before they learned about affiliate marketing. But both Pat and Rob make far more now as affiliate marketers than they ever could working for “The Man,” and they’re their own boss.

Pat runs a blog called Smart Passive Income and has a podcast of the same name. He makes most of his revenue from software and tool referrals, and it’s a staggering amount.

You can see real revenue data on his income reports, and he made over $64,000 from affiliate marketing in March of 2017.

Rob has a few niche websites that focus on product reviews. The websites help would-be buyers figure out what products to buy on Amazon. Rob made about $223,000 in 2016 just from Amazon, and is on target to make even more in 2017.

For most people, Amazon Associates is the easiest and best way to get started with affiliate marketing.

Here’s why: Amazon sells just about everything, for every kind of person, and people trust Amazon.

So all you have to do is have a way to refer people to Amazon with a hyperlink and you can make commissions.

Some people use a blog, others use YouTube, and others share links on social platforms like Facebook or Pinterest.

In this article, I want to give you the basics of how this all works, and how you can get started.

1. First, I want to show you a couple examples of Amazon Affiliate Sites that are done well, and the potential revenue that you can make with a simple product review website.

2. Next, I’ll tell you about another type of affiliate site where diverse products are marketed. These will be products outside of Amazon.

3. Last, I’ll mention the biggest downside to affiliate marketing, something that is often overlooked.

Let’s get into it:

1. Affiliate Site Examples

There are a few varieties of affiliate sites based on what they sell and the programs that they’re associated with.

Some affiliate programs are relationships with individual companies, service providers, and vendors, like web hosting or SAAS products.

Others are with big retailers and merchants, such as Amazon, Walmart, or Target.

Let’s look at a few specific examples.

Amazon Affiliate Site Examples

The most universal program for most people is the Amazon Associates program because Amazon has so many products available. Just about any blog out there can be monetized with Amazon Associates.

Let’s review three examples so you can get a feel for the kind of sites that are out there.

The first two are ones that you can go study, review, and reverse engineer, while the last is a site that cannot be revealed.

But the last site one that I own so I can reveal the earnings to give you an idea about the potential of these deceivingly simple sites.

1. The Wirecutter

The Wirecutter is a huge site that publishes gadget and electronics reviews. It was founded by an expert publishing veteran, Brian Lam, in 2011.

And in 2016 The New York Times bought the site (and it’s sister site, The Sweet Home) for a reported $30,000,000.

Yes, that’s the right number of zeros — $30 million.

The Wirecutter is considered the best of the best by many, including me. I look to them for best practices and ways to boost conversions on affiliate sites.

You can check out my video teardown and critique of The Wirecutter here.

They do a few things that really set them apart from most of the competition.

1. The Wirecutter buys all the products that they review so they really do test the products and try them out. And buying the products gives them credibility over review websites that get free products in exchange for reviews.
2. The Wirecutter hires great writers that often have a journalistic background. The content is better and readers can tell.
3. The Wirecutter structures the reviews in a way that converts well. Each part of the review helps guide the reader to buy a product through credibility and knowledge. (In a future post, you can see the template for The Perfect Amazon Review.)

2. Outdoor Gear Lab

Outdoor Gear Lab reviews outdoor, camping, and sports products. The site was founded in 2010 by Chris McNamara, and grew out of a rock climbing site that he also worked on. Outdoor Gear Lab truly grew organically out of the gear review section of the rock climbing site that Chris was passionate about.

Outdoor Gear Lab follows along with the example of the Wirecutter because it also pays for all the products that are reviewed and doesn’t accept free product samples.

Outdoor Gear Lab has a very slick looking custom theme for the site. This is best showcased with their product comparison tables.

You can see the rating and summary for several products at a time so it’s easy to see which product is the best for you.

3. Secret Site: Project Go White Hat

I can’t reveal this site because it’s one that I’m personally working on, and it’s risky to share your money making sites in a public forum.

But it will give you an idea about what an Amazon Affiliate Niche Site can earn and how long it can take to achieve the earnings. It’s averaged about $8,700 per month over the last year which is a full-time salary for most people.

This particular site is one that was created with the goal of selling it.

I tell the whole story here, in the multi-part case study called Project Go White.

Here is the summary of the case study:

• I have an Amazon Affiliate site that was built in late 2014.
• The site was very profitable averaging over $8,700 per month profit.
• I wanted to sell it and to boost the monthly multiple. I needed to replace the Gray Hat links that worked so well with White Hat Guest post links, like the HOTH GP. Most website buyers will pay more for a White Hat site since the risk is perceived to be lower. (I won’t argue the merits of perceived risk, but that’s what the market dictates.)
• It took a while, but I replaced the links and put the site up for sale for over a quarter million dollars.

Want more examples of Amazon Affiliate sites and analysis? Check out my playlist on YouTube.

Let’s look at a super affiliate that works with a lot of individual companies, Pat Flynn, from Smart Passive Income (SPI)

Diverse Affiliate Programs

Pat Flynn is a master affiliate marketer. He started with the basic building block of affiliate marketing, niche sites.

Then, he shared the process on his blog and podcast creating “raving fans” as he calls them.

Eventually, his affiliate income surpassed his income from niche sites, and now the margin is huge. He makes in a month what most people earn in a year.

Pat uses services, software, and tools, and if he likes them, he recommends them.

It’s so simple.

Let’s look at his Resources page to see one way he can showcase his affiliate relationships.

He has the content divided up into three different sections since he has so many offers. The offers used to be on one single page, and that’s what I do on my blog, but SPI strategically organized the sections to be more effective.

The sections are:

• Most Recommended – Four offers are listed and are the ones that make the most money for SPI. They are Bluehost, ConvertKit, LeadPages, and the SPI WordPress theme. The highest converting offers are here, and I expect that Pat analyzed the data over the years to arrive at these four deals. Pat is an adviser to ConvertKit and LeadPages, implying he’s part owner of each company. So these affiliate deals are the ones that generate the most revenue and have strategic value for the SPI brand.
• Exclusive Deals – Bluehost is the only exclusive deal at the time of this writing. SPI drives so many new customers to Bluehost that it gave SPI a special discounted deal. You could do the same thing for almost any affiliate relationship—negotiate special terms if you have the leverage of driving a significant amount of business.
• Entrepreneurial Journey – This is the catchall section and basically what the Resources page used to be on SPI. It has courses, tools, services, apps, and helpful SPI content from the blog and on YouTube. The cool thing is that some of the resources are free, some are purely helpful content, and most of them are paid. The paid resources are the ones that are most important, of course, since they’re the ones that pay the bills for Pat Flynn.

Bluehost is still the largest single source of income for most months. Bluehost commissions were $30,000 to over $40,000 each month for the first four months of 2017.

SPI has other ways to push the affiliate deals that are more effective than the Resources page, including but not limited to:

• Blog posts, especially how-to content
• YouTube Videos, especially  hands-on demos
• Podcasts

The how-to content and hands-on demo are most likely the best converting ways to get people to buy through your affiliate links.

2. Where To Find Affiliate Programs

When you start looking for them, you’ll see that there are many affiliate programs right under your nose.

Here’s a list of the some of the biggest programs out there:

• Amazon Associates – You know about this one already. You can monetize just about any blog or social media account with Amazon.
• Walmart Affiliate Program – Walmart is one of Amazon’s biggest competitors online and offline so the affiliate program is growing.
• ShareASale – ShareASale connects over 3,900 merchants with affiliates and have just about any product that you can imagine. The affiliate commissions at ShareASale are much higher than Amazon or Walmart, most of the time, but the conversion rates might be lower.
• ClickBank – ClickBank specializes in digital products and is one of the first programs that I learned about.
• Expedia Affiliate Network– Expedia is a great way to monetize the travel niche. The Hotels.com Affiliate Programme will be the best match for most bloggers.

There are a lot of affiliate programs out there working with thousands of websites and merchants.

You can check out more of them, such as Impact Radius, Commission Junction, and PepperJam, to see the breadth of products that you can promote.

Many vendors and merchants have affiliate programs that they run themselves. For example, The HOTH has one, I have one for my Five Figure Niche Site course, just about all hosting companies have an affiliate program, and the list goes on.

The best way to find the one-off affiliate programs is to think about the products you like to use. Then, you can reach out to the company to see if they have a program. If not, they still might work with you as a trial.

It’s great to recommend those products that you actually like because you’ll be able to authentically talk about them.

3. What About the Downsides of Affiliate Marketing?

I’ve just mentioned the great parts of the affiliate marketing business model, but there are some cons.

The biggest potential issue is that you, as the affiliate, do not control the affiliate program. That means the company can change the terms of the affiliate program.

Let’s look at a real example from Amazon.

Amazon changed the commission structure in March of 2017 after years of a consistent payout percentage. For some affiliates it was devastating to the bottom line.

Here is the old progressive commission rates based on the volume of products sold:

Here is the current commission rates based on the category of the product:

Amazon used to reward affiliates that sold a lot of products, then changed the rules of the game by considering only the category of the product.

It was out of the control of the affiliates.

For me, the change amounted to a 35% drop in revenue across two sites getting a cumulative 4,000 to 5,000 visitors a day on average.

• The previous commission rate was 8.5% on average because more than 3131 products were sold.
• The new structure pushed the effective commission rate to about 5.5%, determined by analyzing a year’s worth of historical sales data and current sales data.

It’s possible that a company could totally discontinue their affiliate program, too.

You can prepare for the risk as long as you know the possibility of changes to the program.

What’s Next?

Affiliate marketing is one of the most common ways people get started online. I think it’s the best way.

It has big advantages over some other business models.

For example:

• Start up costs are low. Normally, the costs are for hosting your website, which is far lower than if you’re trying to develop or manufacture a physical product.
• The start up timeline is shorter than some other business models. You can launch your site quickly, learn what works, and iterate. A software product might take long time to develop and test, then you still have to market it.
• You learn skills (SEO, marketing, copywriting) that are transferable to other business ventures and projects. Sometimes people get started with affiliate marketing, realize they love one aspect of it. Then they have the ability to change their job to something they enjoy more.

Remember there is risk in being an affiliate, just like any other business model. You are reliant on other companies and their affiliate programs.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out the Niche Site Process for creating an Amazon Affiliate site. Even if the Amazon Associates program isn’t the one you want to work with, you can still follow most of the steps and the concepts.

If you’re drawn to the diverse affiliate programs (i.e. the “Pat Flynn model”), then make a list of products that you like and check for existing affiliate programs. You can join up and start marketing them via a blog, YouTube, or email list.

Any questions? Let us know in the comments!

The post How To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing appeared first on The HOTH.

Today I am sharing with you the Top Four Most Costly Mistakes People Make on Their Websites (and how to correct them)!

Correcting these four mistakes can increase traffic to your site, improve your ranking on Google, generate more leads and ultimately increase your sales.

Here they are:

Mistake #1: Not Knowing How Your Site Is Performing

Google Analytics

The metrics of your site have so much to tell you, but if you aren’t using them (or worse yet, you don’t have them *gasp* ) you will have no idea how your site is actually performing.

You might be getting plenty of traffic, but you’re not converting the traffic you have (getting leads or making sales). Or maybe you aren’t getting any traffic at all and that’s why you aren’t making sales or getting leads. Not knowing how your site is performing is the most common (and in our opinion the mostly costly) website mistake.

The first step to overcoming this problem is by installing Google Analytics on your website so you have a great picture of how your website is performing. Here’s a great article to show you how to download it now.

You want to look at these three primary pieces of information:

• Traffic (the number of visitors to your site)
• Bounce Rate (how many people leave your site before exploring any other page)
• Conversion Rate (how many people took the action you wanted them to take, i.e., gave you
  their email address, purchased your product, signed up for your newsletter, etc.)

If your traffic is minimal, then you know you need to increase traffic to your site. The primary way to accomplish this is by generating content your audience wants to read and then pushing that great content to them through a well thought out content strategy. (See #4)

If your traffic is great, but they are bouncing (leaving quickly) then you know you need to adjust your content or possibly your call to action.

And if you’re getting lots of traffic, but they aren’t buying, you know you need to change the way you are presenting the opportunity to buy.

(There is a lot more you can learn from your analytics, but these are some great first steps in avoiding this mistake.)

Mistake #2: No Primary Call to Action

strong call to action

Your primary call to action is the number one thing you want visitors to your site to do. Do you want them to download something, sign up for something, buy something? Remember, if you
don’t know what you want them to do, they won’t know either. Your message has to be crystal
clear.

One of the more common mistakes we see is placing the call to action below the fold on your
website. “The Fold” is the point on your website where someone has to scroll to see more
information. You don’t want them to have to scroll to see your primary call to action. Place your call to action in your banner, or somewhere prominent and above the fold.

Mistake #3: Things That Kill SEO

In retail, taking inventory is what you do to determine what you have on hand; what you’ve sold, what you want to replace, etc.

In the website world, taking inventory means knowing which pages are performing the best (which ones have the most traffic, have the best performing keywords, highest conversion rate, etc.). If you don’t know what you have, and how it’s doing, you might accidentally get rid of a page or some content that is generating some heavy SEO credit (this is bad, bad, bad).

One of the best practices we can recommend is never deleting a page (or update your website)
without knowing exactly which pages are your top SEO performers.

Bonus Tip: Create a helpful 404 page that allows people to find other helpful content if a page is broken on your site. It’s very important to your SEO.

Mistake #4: No Content Strategy

content strategy

Content is the text and video information you present on your website that constantly pushes
traffic to your site. Your content must be current, relevant to your target market, and informative.

Building a robust and thorough content strategy takes work. We recommend using an editorial
calendar to determine exactly what type of content you will generate and how and where you
will communicate.

Blogging, podcasting, webinars, and guest blog posts (which are epic for SEO because you not only have YOUR audience, you now have the guest blogger’s traffic as well! #winning) – these are all great examples of content. Content is still king.

And hey, we get it. Some people would just rather have someone do all this for them. No shame
in that game.

Learning how to interpret your analytics, constantly creating updated content and calls to action, and worrying about SEO; that’s some heavy lifting, especially when you have a business to manage!

If you still have questions about how to optimize your website for maximum traffic, maximum lead generation, and maximum sales, or you just want someone else to do the heavy lifting for you, we’d be happy to help you at Beefy Marketing.

Beefy will create a custom (yes, custom, not template-based) website for you and then manage
your website for you.

They update your content, make sure your site is secure, and keep your design fresh and current, all for one low monthly fee.

Beefy’s motto is, “Manage Your Business, Not Your Website.” We agree, that’s great advice.

Have a great one!

The post 4 Common Ways Your Website Is Leaking Cash appeared first on The HOTH.

When I launched GuestPostTracker.com in 2016 I made the decision to focus on SEO as my main traffic source.

I needed results in Google quickly so I came up with a very strategic plan.

In less than a year, Guest Post Tracker ranked on page one of Google for almost every single key phrase I was targeting.

Let me show you exactly how I did it.

The 3 Part SEO Strategy For Safe & Fast Rankings

My SEO strategy had main 3 parts.

1. Build brand trust with Google as fast as I could
2. Use power pages to rank for my main key phrases
3. Use SEO power of power pages to boost the rest of my pages

I have been in the SEO world for 15 years and knew that the fastest way to the top of Google these days was using this strategy.

Let me explain what I did in each step of the 3 part SEO plan in more detail.

Step 1: Build Brand Trust With Google

One of the most misunderstood principles of SEO is the importance of building trust with Google.

If you skip this step or don’t take it seriously, none of your other SEO efforts will amount to much.

Google loves brands because brands are able to get links naturally.

Whether it be through PR efforts, online advertising or just fans showing their loyalty, well-known brands have no trouble getting links.

Because of this Google trusts brands.

Well-known brands very rarely get hit by Google updates, and they rank all over the SERPs.

Here’s the thing about brands, they never target key phrases on their home page in their link building.

Don’t believe me? Go look at Amazon’s homepage backlinks. 90% of the anchors are either “Amazon” or “Amazon.com” (or some other form of the URL).

A trusted brand only gets these kinds of non-keyword backlinks to their homepage, and they get a lot of them.

So my first strategy with Guest Post Tracker was to mimic what big brands do.

I went out and got links from business/marketing related sites that had a majority “GuestPostTracker.com” and “Guest Post Tracker” as the anchor.

I wanted Google to know I was not some fly by night AdSense site, but that I was a real business with a real brand.

I started guest posting like crazy (yes guest posting is alive and well).

I used my own list of guest blogging sites at Guest Post Tracker to get some high-end blogs to link to me.

I then used a blogger outreach service to fill in the gaps of the links I still needed to build out a #1 ranked backlink profile.

All along the way, I was using the homepage link map SEOJet had built for me. The link map told me exactly which anchors to use with every link I built (more on SEOJet later).

Step 2: Create SEO Power Pages To Rank For Key Phrases

An SEO power page is a page in your site that has enough awesome content to support a lot of links naturally pointing to it.

In other words, its the type of content that when people read it they love it and feel compelled to leave a comment or even link to naturally.

Editor Note: This is also sometimes called “pillar content” or a “linkable asset” – something that’s actually worth linking to as opposed to a product page. This makes the whole white hat link building process 10x easier because other blogs are happy to link to valuable resources.

This is your top tier content.

Often times this will be a blog post that is 2000 plus words.

In other cases, it is just an important page in your site.

Either way, you strategically use these pages for two purposes:

• First, you choose one or two of your most important keywords and heavily target those keywords on the page.
• Second, through link building, you build up the SEO power of the page and then pass that power to smaller pages through internal links.

The reason we target keywords on the power pages is that is what Google expects you to do.

Based on the backlink research we have done for SEOJet, non-homepage power pages typically have 55%-75% of their backlinks with some keyword reference in the anchor text.

Luckily, a link map inside of SEOJet will tell you exactly which anchors to use every time on your power page.

So my strategy for Guest Post Tracker for the first few months was to build about three times as many links to the homepage as I was building to all of the other pages combined.

I say “all other pages” as if it was a lot of pages I was building links for, but in reality it was only 5-6 pages including my homepage.

As I built links to the site I was literally just following what each link map was telling me to do.

All the while my backlink profile for every one of these pages matched what a #1 ranked backlink profile looks like.

In other words, all along the way it always looked extremely natural to Google.

Step 3: Use Power Pages To Pass SEO Value To Rest Of Your Site

I mentioned that power pages served two purposes in my overall SEO strategy, this is the other breakthrough that allowed my site to rank for almost every single keyword I was targeting.

The reason SEO power pages are so great (and powerful) is that as you build up the SEO juice to these pages, not only do they rank for their own targeting keywords, but they also can pass that juice onto other pages in your site as well by just using internal linking.

Guest Post Tracker has about 30 category pages that list blogs that accept guest posts in that category.

For example, our Real Estate category page lists all of the real estate blogs we have found that will accept a guest post.

The pages don’t have a ton of content other than the list of blogs and it wouldn’t be natural to build a lot of links to those pages (plus it would be extremely expensive).

In order to get these category pages to the top of Google, I needed to pass the SEO juice from my power pages to these pages.

I actually built the power pages and started building links to those pages to build up their SEO value.

Then once they had several links pointing to them I then added internal links from my power pages to my category pages.

Within days of adding links to my category pages, almost all of my category pages were showing up in the top 3 of Google for their respective keywords.

Go ahead and search “real estate guest post” and see where Guest Post Tracker comes up.

Now I know that some will argue that most of the keywords from those category pages are not very competitive.

But that is exactly why this strategy works so well. I didn’t have to build any links to those category pages to get them to the top 3 of Google.

While I was building links to a power page that was targeting one of my big key phrases, I was able to use that effort to promote my other pages.

It meant a huge jump in both traffic and conversions.

How To Get More Results With Less Links

Within a few months of launching one of my power pages, I noticed that I had made it to the top 3 of Google for the keywords I was targeting on that page.

I was happy to see that my strategy was really working and that the link maps from SEOJet were guiding me in the right direction.

I then decided to look at all of the other people in the top 6 of Google for the same phrase I was ranking for to see how many links they had pointing to their page verses how many I had pointing to mine.

I was shocked to see that while the other sites ranged from 70-600 links pointing to their pages, I had only 8 links.

8 links, with a site that was about 6 months old.

This was my big ah-ha moment.

By following the link building strategy that SEOJet had given me I was able to get top 3 rankings with 70% less links.

Now keep in mind that I would never have just stopped building links at that point.

In fact, I will always build links no matter if I rank #1 or #100.

Good link building is the way to really dominate search results.

But it was awesome to see I could get results so quickly because I had built brand trust and then built amazing backlink profiles on my power pages.

This also meant that I saw a big jump in site revenue from search traffic.

Link Building Schedule

You’re probably asking yourself how often I was building links, or how many I built per month.

It might actually surprise you that for the first year I was only building about 6-10 links to the site per month.

But here’s the catch, all of those links were from guest posts on extremely relevant blogs.

In fact, probably 90% of my links were from guest posts.

As I mentioned before I used Guest Post Trackers list to do my own outreach and get some high DA links and used an outreach service to fill in the blanks on my link maps.

I made sure the blogs I was getting links on had some kind of social presence, and then I would build links to my links (also known as tiered linking or link stacking).

By building links to my links I was increasing the SEO value of the page linking to me (the power page strategy) and I was also using good keyword anchors to link to those pages so I could manufacture better relevance with each link I got.

All of this has added up to Guest Post Tracker receiving over 5000 visitors a month just from search.

The best thing about this strategy is as Google continues to make updates to their algorithm, my rankings continue to increase because I built a natural anchor text distribution.

Now I mentioned before that all throughout this process I was using SEOJet to effectively implement this 3 part SEO strategy.

SEOJet is SEO software that gives you a proven link building plan (link maps) you can follow so your backlink profile matches a #1 ranked profile on Google.

It takes all of the guesswork out of what anchor text you need to use for each link. By using real data from #1 ranked websites, SEOJet tells you exactly which anchor to use for every link you get.

Essentially it helps you copy exactly what the top dogs are doing so you rise to the top of Google quickly.

Go ahead and give it a try and see how it works for your client’s sites.

Get 25% off SEOJet through the HOTH partners page or you can also see a demo of SEOJet here.

The post The Link Building Plan To Rank Faster With Less Links appeared first on The HOTH.

There are internet marketers out there who practically suffer cardiac arrest every time they find out a link they earned is a Nofollow. At the surface, these types of links seem pointless. They don’t offer anything in terms of pure SEO value or ranking, so what’s the point? Are they harmful, do they look bad on your backlink profile?

All of these questions and more are swirling through the minds of bloggers and marketers everywhere. It’s time to put the doubts to rest and find out why Nofollow links aren’t as bad as they seem.

What are the Difference between Follow and Nofollow Links?

In terms of SEO, when someone places a hyperlink directing to one of the pages on your site, you get a small boost to your ranking. Think of it like a recommendation letter. Someone saw enough value in your content to recommend it to their readers. This kind of trust shows Google that you’re doing something right. Earning high-quality white-hat links like these is a major focus for SEO specialists.

Google measures these inbound links in the form of a metric called PageRank. A term you may hear in the SEO world is “link juice” which refers to the points you get from backlinks. The more authority and rank the site linking to you has, the more link juice you get. For example, getting a link from a major news site is huge!

That’s a follow link. A Nofollow link doesn’t offer any of these benefits in terms of SEO. When you see them in a page’s HTML code, they look like this: 

<a href=”http://www.website.com/” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text</a> 

That little tag shows us that this isn’t a regular link. In fact, it tells search engines to just disregard it. Why do we even have something like this? Well the main purpose is to stop spam from artificially getting link juice. It didn’t stop spam from appearing in blog comments, but it certainly helped.

Nofollow links are most commonly used in situations where a link is paid, or in comments, forums, and anything else Google’s guidelines would consider “untrusted.” 

Right, so Nofollow Links = Bad, Right?

No, that’s not the case. Nofollow was designed the limit spam and the like, but they have their uses. In the grand scheme of things, one single backlink doesn’t make or break an SEO strategy. There are plenty of other SEO tips out there that can boost your rankings easily. On the flip side of things, one Nofollow link can do wonders for your traffic, leads, and conversions.

How is this possible, I hear you ask? 

Nofollow links can bring you something called referral traffic. Beyond simple SEO, links are meant to provide a seal of approval as mentioned earlier. A reader doesn’t know if a link is follow or Nofollow just by looking at it. Either way, if they click on it, they get to see your content. That alone is a bonus, regardless of the behind-the-scenes SEO benefit or lack thereof. 

Links on Twitter for example are Nofollow, but how many times have you clicked a link because you liked the headline? These simple events can create awareness. As Nicole Kohler described in her post on Moz, links create a certain type of equation:

A (awareness) + E (engagement) = P (Profit!) 

A single click from a single link on a place like Twitter, or in a blog comment, can start this equation by raising awareness. Once you have the visitor, the rest comes from engaging them through your content and ultimately turning them into a paying customer.

All of the links on social media are Nofollow, but as we all know, they can lead to traffic. Traffic leads to leads, and leads turn into conversions. In addition to raising awareness, Nofollow links can lead to follow links down the line.

Final Thoughts

In the eyes of a reader, and potential lead, a link is a link. They don’t know and probably don’t care if it’s follow or Nofollow. What matters is that you have a link directing people to your content. Get the most out of your Nofollow links by making them relevant and point them to high quality content.

How do you maximize your Nofollow links? What tips would you offer for those seeking a good mix of follow and Nofollow links? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The post Uncovering Hidden Potential: Why Nofollow Links Aren’t as Bad as You Think appeared first on The HOTH.