Neil Patel and Eric Siu share how they built tens of thousands of backlinks by finding competitors' popular posts, turning them into infographics, and pitching them to sites that already linked to the originals. The strategy powered ChrisMetrics' growth and works because you're offering something better to people already interested in the topic.
Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today, we're going to give you the best hack to building thousands of backlinks really fast. And Neil was one of the pioneers of doing this, if not the pioneer. So Neil, can you speak to what you did with one of your companies in the past?
This is the simplest strategy to building links ever. First off, go to Ahrefs and go see who links to all your competitors, right? And the way you do this is, or that's actually the wrong way to phrase it. Go see which of your competitors is getting the most traffic. So you can type in their URLs and it shows you their estimated search traffic. You then go look at their most popular pages and you see which ones get the most traffic. You can also see which people or who are linking to those specific pages, like which sites. Now that you have your list, you go take those top blog posts and you just make them visual. Here's what I mean by that. Go to 99designs or go to Dribbble, dribbble.com. Pay a designer to create an infographic of that blog post. Cite them, you know, tell people how you got the data from that blog post. And then you go to all the people who linked to it and you'd be like, hey, I noticed you linked to X, Y, and Z blog posts. I just made the whole thing into infographic. Check it out. I think it'll be easier for your users to understand. If you like it, feel free to embed it onto your site as well. And just even give them the embed code. By doing that, you get a shit ton of links. That's how we grew ChrisMetrics super fast. And we generated, you know, tens of thousands of backlinks from infographics by just looking at the most popular articles online and generating links from it.
Didn't you guys have— there was this one post I think you wrote, maybe on Quick Sprout or Neil Patel, about how much revenue and how much time total backlinks you generated from doing the infographic?
Yeah, that was an old post. That was on Quick Sprout and I talked about how I generated like X thousand links from some like 50 infographics or something like that. And it worked so well that I remember there was an ex-HubSpot employee named Dan Zarella.
Yeah, okay.
We took his data, we cited him, and we mentioned him in multiple places throughout the infographic. And we got more social shares and more links than his original post. And he got really upset about that. But eh.
Yep. What can you do? Actually, there's a book that's kind of related to that in a similar vein, but it's called Newsjacking. So that's a similar thing where you can just kind of hop on a trend, for example, and then kind of siphon the traffic. But anyway, I digress. And so to Neil's point, I mean, the infographics, they certainly work really well. And Neil, I think you're in the process of getting that Kissmetrics blog back.
Correct. I bought the website back and then in June 2018, which technically we're in, so I don't know when you guys are listening to this, but in June 2018, you'll see it merge over into the Neil Patel site.
3 days from this one.
Oh yeah, that's true. June 21st, that's 3 days. So, and I'm really excited because I bought it not for the SEO juice, not for the links, but they just under-monetize it. And I was like, oh, why not just throw up a shitload of lead gen and send it to my sales reps and see how many consulting leads I can close?
Right. So you can do the infographics, definitely works. And I think also kind of to Neil's point about taking like a piece of content out there that's really good and then just making it into an infographic or doing something really nice with it. Maybe you can make it a skyscraper type of post. And I recommend Googling skyscraper technique backlinko and then looking at that. And that's basically making a 10x piece of content that's better than everything the top 3 positions on Google out there and doing the outreach that way. And you can do the same thing with building a tool, for example, or building some kind of visual infographic, or it could be like some kind of video too. So there's a bunch of ways, a bunch of different ways to skin a cat, but the idea here is just making something that's much better than what's out there already.
Cool, I think that's it from my end.
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