Content-Based Link Building is the ONLY Link Building Left Worth Doing

For those of you who know blogging and marketing expert Seth Godin, I am playing on his statement “Content marketing is the only marketing that’s left.”

The old way of marketing is an interruption with your “cute” agency-level message, and that is similar to the old way of begging for links, in the sense that it no longer works. Begging for links is next to useless now unless you are really building a relationship with someone that makes sense. Today, link building focuses on building content that journalists, bloggers, and other people (like your prospects and customers) will find just too informative or cool to ignore.

Quality content can attract people who will then share your content with their networks of their own free will. You should be building up a cache of content that informs, inspires, or makes your target audience laugh. What is this content? Basically, it’s anything really cool, informative, or sometimes just free—like a free trial software download that generates a ton of people clicking on your site. Widgets, calculators, and infographics are also examples of content that can generate links.

My cousin Lucas Brunelle has a website about crazy bike videos. Over a million people have viewed his videos on YouTube and roughly 15,000 people link to his site. He never did search engine marketing officially until I shared it with him and yet these numbers blew me away. He had great ranks in the search engines simply because people linked to him based on how unusual his content was. A search marketer’s job is to replicate that natural or organic process in a healthy way that actually adds value.

We have built video games, infographics, cool articles, and more in order to get links for our clients. It has paid off much better than emailing a million people to request links or taking huge risks buying links.

While not all campaigns get the links you want, if you build good content your users still benefit.

Is your content quality content?

photo credit: stefanomaggi via photopin cc