How to Get More Backlinks and Traffic for Your Site (The Right Way!)

In this clip, we're going to talk about how you can get your site more links and traffic the right way. So this is a part of a series on YouTube. It's a 5-video series. It's in a playlist. And if you're coming from YouTube right now, don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell button. And if you're on any other channel, subscribe. Doesn't matter where you're coming from. Subscribe is the keyword. So what I want to talk about real quick here is think about links and traffic. So what used to happen, I remember I did this one time. I had a website called portal2walkthrough.com. You're asking like, what does that even mean? So there's this game called Portal, and this is a game made by Valve where you can shoot a gun and, you know, there would be portals and you can jump through the portals and you can shoot portals at other people. Really cool game. And Portal 2 came out and I was playing it for a period of time.

I'm like, you know what?

I'm just starting to learn this SEO thing. So I'm gonna make a website called portal2walkthrough.com so I can, you know, be an affiliate and then sell these other people's Portal 2 game guides. And make a cut. So they might sell a guide for $20 and I'll make $5 on it. You know, that was the commission I'd make as like an affiliate, or maybe I'll make $10 or something like that. So, you know, what happened there was like I did the same thing where, you know, with the pimples blog and the light show videos thing where I would buy a new domain, put it on HostGator, put it on WordPress, I'd buy a bunch of content from Textbroker, and then from there what I would do is, this is the thing that the part I was missing, was I'd have the content, I'd have a little design from a cheap, you know, a design website. And then I would pay like maybe $25 to $50 per article. And then what I would do there after that is I was like, man, I need links. Cause there's a lot of volume around Portal 2 walkthrough. So when a new game comes out, typically the volume will go up a lot. Maybe there's like 60,000 to 100,000 people searching for it per month. So what happened was, guess what? I started building links. I went to a, I went to a website forum where the gray hat SEOs and the black hat SEOs hang out. And I was like, I'm going to try this thing and see if I can, if I can, um, if I can rank this website. Um, and what I did was I did this, this thing called, um, Drip Feed Blast. Okay. It's no longer in service, but basically I would pay like, you know, $50 a month or $100 a month or something like that. And they would just, you know, um, you know, create a bunch of forum links, right? Created a bunch of forum links on a lot of different websites. And, um, that used to work like a long time ago in SEO and The thing is this, Google gets smarter, that stuff doesn't work anymore. So you're better off playing in the long term. 'Cause what happened here was my website, even though the traffic spiked, like I started ranking really high for that keyword, in a matter of 2 days, Google filtered the site out and the site was ranking for nothing. The traffic went down from like, I think I was getting like 30 or 40,000 visits a day. So I guess it was a lot more than 120,000 visits a month, but I was getting a lot of visits and I was like, man, okay, I hit the jackpot here. This site's gonna get like millions of visits, you know, eventually. Google burned the website. They torched the website, 'cause it was very easy for them to see that a lot of spammy links were coming in. So, the key point here is that when you're thinking about link building and traffic, you gotta think about the long term, doing it the right way, doing it the long-term way. And that, those are the tough lessons I learned from the early days that actually helped me get to the next level and think the way I think right now about marketing. To help you sidestep the stupid mistakes that I made, we've got a clip for you from marketing school. And well, without further ado, let's go ahead and check it out.

So with link building, you guys all know that you need more links if you want to rank higher. And everyone's just like, how do I go out there and get more links? So today we're going to break down tools that make the process much easier. So let's first start off, and this is going to be the first step. And it's not technically, this isn't even going to be the step, but this is going to be a prerequisite. The prerequisite is you need some sort of amazing content. If you don't have amazing content, it is hard to build links because everyone's familiar with link building these days and no one wants to build it or link to you more so. So the first thing you want to do is use tools like BuzzSumo and Ahrefs. If you put in keywords to other people who have similar type of content, what it'll do is it'll show you their top pages. And even with a paid BuzzSumo account, you can see all the people who are linking to that piece of content. You can do the same thing within Ahrefs. Yeah.

The other thing is, so we're talking strictly on tools?

Yeah. So, and then exactly tools that people can use to scale out their link building to make it much more efficient.

Oh, you know what? Okay. So here's another tool. There's a cool tool called PitchBox. So I was actually having dinner the other day with the CEO and PitchBox, what it does is it helps you scale your outreach when it comes to link building. And this was built for from people that had an SEO agency in the past. So they know the pain, they know everything people need to go through. And guess what? They show the metrics from like Ahrefs, for example, or I think they even pull API data from BuzzSumo and they show you your targets when you're reaching out to people. How strong is the link going to be, right? Then you can group everything together and it's like an outreach tool that you can use and it shows you reports that's going to help you scale your link building.

Another thing you can do is use Scrapebox. What it'll do is scrape the whole web and find everyone who links to other sites or writes about content that's related to your articles. And then you can then gather all of their website URLs, their data, contact forms, email addresses. There's plugins and add-ons for Scrapebox. And then of course you can start mass mailing people. You have to check, watch out for GDPR now. Mass email people. You don't want to email people in the European Union to convince them to try to link back to your website.

Yeah. The other thing too is, you know, I would recommend using a tool like hunter.io to find emails to reach out to people too. So once you have these target websites, you got to find their email addresses too. And then you load those email addresses into a tool. So this is kind of going back to the tool PitchBox and then you kind of come full circle there.

Yeah.

And another thing that you want to do with your link building, if you really want to scale it out and do well, is you can find people that already have articles that are popular and have a ton of links, you can use tools like Infogram or Canva or any of those design apps out there to create your own infographics of those most popular blog posts. And then of course, using all the other tools we mentioned, you can hit up all the people that linked to the past article that's similar to your infographic because you're creating an infographic of that blog post that's popular and getting them to link to your visual version of that popular piece of text-based content.

I want to give a little advanced one too. If you look at HubSpot's Website Grader, that tool, right? It just, it's, you put in your email and it grades your website. That has about 7,000 referring domains going to it. So 7,000 links. It ranks for about, I think maybe it's the other way around, 11,000 referring domains and then 7,000, it ranks for 7,000 keywords. So my point of saying that is that if you can somehow build a linkable asset that is a useful tool to people, You're going to get a lot of links coming to it. And what you can do, if you don't have the talent, like myself, I don't have the talent to do it. You can go to Upwork or for like a, you know, a cheaper developer, or you can go to somewhere like Toptal, pay some money to have something like that developed, like a tool or like a widget. And then from there you have a linkable asset, or you can just go out there and you can try to buy one. Okay. So this is a little more advanced, but it does work.

Yeah.

And the last link building tip that I have for you guys is Go out there and don't just focus on links, but focus on social shares. So the more people that read your content, the more people that'll naturally link to you. And what I found is if I can find other popular blog posts that are similar, like Eric, if Eric has a really popular SEO blog post and I have a new blog post on SEO, I will go and find all the people who tweeted his article. You can just put in that URL into Twitter. It goes through them. I would hit up each of those people. Actually, you can also use BuzzSumo for this as well. They show you the shares. I would hit up each of those people and be like, hey John, I noticed you shared The Beginner's Guide to SEO by Eric Siu. I have a similar article coming out, but mine's Advanced Guide to SEO. Let me know if you want to see it. And by creating a conversation, they're much more likely to email back and say yes. The moment they say yes, I'll email him back like, here you go, John. Cheers, Neil. P.S., if you share this, this wouldn't just make my day, it would make my week. Thanks. And then you can even add a P.P.S. being like, let me know if you need me to share anything for you.

All right, so here's one more video from our YouTube channel to go a little deeper. If you think about it, a lot of the web has a ton of graphics out there. If you look at Pinterest, for example, that's the most visual— call it a visual search engine. And there's a ton of infographics on Pinterest. If you think about going out there and getting an infographic done, I'm using infographics because that's the example I can think of. Infographics have done really well. As a matter of fact, if you listen to a couple episodes that I've done on the Marketing School Podcast with Neil, we talk about the effectiveness of infographics. They still work today. All you gotta do is go to a site like Dribbble, that's D-R-I-B-B-L-E.com, or Behance.com, go find infographic designers, pay them a couple hundred bucks, and then what you do is you add an embed code for your infographic and then you reach out to people and then have them link to it. That's the easiest way of going about it. In fact, that's how Kissmetrics, which is one of Neil's companies that he co-founded, that's how they built a ton of links, made millions of dollars in sales, and they actually have their infographic section that's still active today. A couple years ago, I showed Neil something. I was like, hey, like, check this out. It shows that the— there's this one graphic that shows the top 3 results in Google need about 2,500 words or so. And he put that on his blog and it literally just blew up. I'm not sure if he cited it, but it literally just blew up and I saw that image everywhere after that. And that image became so popular that somebody else made a— did new research around that a couple years later. So oftentimes, you know, you— if one image is good enough, it's well-researched, it can stand on its own, and you reach out to a couple people, and they, you know, reporters or bloggers, they like to look smart, they're gonna put it up there, and then you just find one big person like Neil that has a big audience, and it's just gonna explode everywhere. All right, so you just learned a really quick way on how you can actually build more links using images. You can do the same thing with videos as well. Just make sure you have an embed code, make sure you have something that can stand on its own, and you are going to be able to explode your traffic. All right, so, we're not done with the series yet. Don't forget to check out the next video over there. I'm pointing, if you're on YouTube right now, I'm pointing over there. There is a next video to continue this series. And, and, don't forget to leave a comment below. Let me know what you think. in terms of my story, if you think my storytelling sucks, if you think about, if you think I'm missing something at all, just drop it in the comments. And whatever channel you're coming from, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. And we'll see you in the next video.

Bye.