How To Build Thousands of Backlinks Without Even Asking For Them

A lot of people are reluctant to build backlinks. They get scared because you need to do outreach to hundreds, if not, thousands of website's owners before you get your first handful of backlinks. But truth be told, you don't have to do that. There are organic ways where you can attract backlinks without practically doing outreach. In this article I'm going to breakdown how to build thousands of backlinks without even asking for them.

So the first tactic I have for you, offer free courses. I'm not talking about vlogging, I'm talking about full-blown courses. Look, everyone has a vlog these days. There's over a billion vlogs on the web, there's so much content that, hey, creating more vlog content, it's not going to guarantee anything, but creating courses, people love that. HubSpot Academy, this is a course from HubSpot. It's a free marketing course, offers certification as well, and they get over a thousand backlinks from 450 referring domain names. According to UberSuggest, in the United States alone, they have over 37,000 visitors per month to that course.

A lot of people love their course because they want to be certified by HubSpot, which is an important brand in the marketing space. Now, if you're going to use the approach of creating a course like HubSpot, make sure your course is super detailed, thorough, it's so good that people would've had paid money for it, right? Look at the Udemy courses, if it's that quality, and you release it for free, you'll do really well.

The second tactic I have for you, create free tools. With Uber Suggest, I've been able to get over 25,000 backlinks from over 3,400 referring domain names. Building free tools is amazing. Now, here's the kicker about Uber Suggest, it also is in many different languages like German, Spanish, Portuguese, and the list goes on and on. When you include all variations, there's another 11,000 backlinks from over 3,000 more referring domain names. That's a lot, and this doesn't just happen in the SEO industry, it happens in all industries.

Bankrate, they have a mortgage calculator that has over 3,400 backlinks from over 413 referring domain names. If you don't have the money to build a tool like Uber Suggest or Bankrate, don't worry about it, there's a site called CodeCanyon, when you go to it, you can buy a tool for pretty much any industry out there for, literally, five, 10, 20, 30, $40. It's very rare to see tools on CodeCanyon for 30 or $40, most of them, from what we've seen that are good, are around 10, $20. That means you can do really well by just spending 10 bucks, and you can just create backlinks over time. It won't happen instantly, it won't happen overnight, but over time, you'll constantly see your tools getting more and more backlinks.

The third tactic I have for you, come up with stats and industry reports that are generated by you and your team. In other words, they're proprietary. Last year alone, I launched two reports including proprietary statistics that I gathered from my own audience. One of them, I got data from 183 companies who were all leveraging content marketing and produced 17 charts that show where content marketing is headed. In the other one, about social media, I was able to pull 483 companies who were all leveraging Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. These two studies alone have generated over 97,000 backlinks from 119 referring domain names. That's a lot of links just from studies. You should consider creating your own.

The fourth strategy, use ego bait. Ego bait is basically something that involves stroking the ego of an influencer or website owner that you want a link from. There are a few ways that you can do this. The simplest way is roundup post. Roundup post, example of this is you take all the influencers out there in your space, and you do an interview with them, ask them one simple question, they'll give you feedback, and when you get feedback, publish that in one comprehensive post, share it out there on the social web, email them all once it's published, and ask them to share it and link to it. Most people will share it, every once in a while, someone will link to it.

Another thing you can do is review books, tools, and other things from other websites that you want links from because a lot of these sites that offer tools or books, they'll link back and say, hey, check out this review on X, Y and Z site dot com.

Another way is listicles. Example of this, the top 15 SEO experts you should follow in 2020. So when you do this, you're listing people, a lot of people will link out to this and be, like, I'm on this list, it's amazing. I've done it, I've linked out to Forbes talking about Neil Patel being a Top 10 Marketer, right? You can also do interviews, interviewing other influencers, shockingly, you're like, hey, most of these influencers I don't know, it's okay, just cold email them, most people will say, yes, I'll take an interview, and it can be a blog interview, video interview, podcast interview, they'll at least share it, if not, link to it.

Awards are another amazing way. You can create awards like the Top 100 Digital Marketing Blogs, the Top 100 Pet Blogs, whatever it is within your industry, create a badge, you can go on Fiverr, pay someone $5 to create a badge or use Canva to create your own badge, give it to people, a lot of them will embed it on their website and link back to you.

The fifth tip I have for you is employee infographics and data visualizations. Look, infographics are huge. They aren't as used as they once were in the past, but they're still super effective. Data visualization is when you get data and present it in a more user-friendly way. So it's statistics, historical timelines, maps, geography distribution, and with infographics, you can take all this data and display it in an animated way that's interactive and in a storytelling way. So, when you do this, people are like, oh cool, I can end up seeing an infographic on things like how car engines work or how fast a Cheetah runs, and it's done in a simple, visual way where people are like, oh, cool, this makes sense. This generates literally thousands of links over time.

I used to have a company called KISSmetrics, and the majority of the links that we generated were from infographics, and the blog got up to a million visitors a month, but the reason the blog did well is all of the infographics, and we created over 40 of them, got thousands of links, and that caused all the blog content to rank higher as well. So yes, it's a lot of work to be building links, but you can do it in a more effortless way if you use one of the tactics that I mention above. If you need help to increase your rankings, getting more links, writing content and doing it the right way, check out Neil Patel Digital. If you have any questions, leave a comment below.