Evan Carmichael explains why buying backlinks damages rankings and walks through four legitimate tactics instead: press outreach, using PRLeads to connect with reporters, offering testimonials for vendor links, and creating shareable content like top-50 lists that earn hundreds of inbound links.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my forum readers who's asking about backlinking. So he wrote in asking, "In your opinion, what should backlinking packages contain? What do you think are the most effective strategies that can be used in backlinking?" So you can call me a little old school, but I don't believe in buying links. I haven't bought backlinks as part of my website, and I think it can have a negative impact on the long-term success of your business, right? If you're caught buying backlinks, it can have a big negative impact on your rankings in the search engines. So you want to think long-term on where your business is going to go. You want to avoid buying backlinks, but there are a couple of great ways that you can build backlinks legitimately that can help you with your rankings, and I want to share a couple of those with you today. So the first that I really enjoy is using the press. And hopefully you're an expert in whatever you're doing as an entrepreneur. We should be experts in our field. And whenever the media is covering a story, they're looking for experts to come and comment on it. So you should be that expert. Why not you, right? You should be really good at what you're doing. So the first step is to build up a media list. Think of anybody who covers your industry and start creating potential stories for them. And try not to create a press release, but actually give them a story idea that can be really useful and helpful. And when I first started doing this, every week I would send out a new story idea to my list and almost always got picked up by at least one media outlet. And again, whenever I'm credited, they link to my website, hopefully. So it's a great way to build backlinks, and the media sites are usually very high authority and can have a nice impact on your Google rankings. So that's one great way to do it. The other way that I use more often now is I subscribe to a service called PRLeads, and this is where reporters will publish their stories that they're looking for experts on. So they haven't actually created their story yet. They list all the topics that they're going to be writing about and that they need expert commentary for, so you could be that expert. I've talked about it before, and there's a demo on my website of how to use it. It's $100 a month, or $99 a month, but it's super useful, and I found it's gotten me into the New York Times and a couple other big-name media outlets. So definitely a great way to check out if you're going to be spending money instead of Buying backlinks, this could be a good investment of that money. The second thing that I found really useful in terms of building up backlinks is testimonials. So think about all the different products and services that you use and offer the company a testimonial, assuming you really like the service and you want to, you know, put your name on it. Entrepreneurs are always looking for people to leave testimonials, and if you contact the company and say, "Hey, I really like using your product or service. I'd love to offer a testimonial for you." if they link to your website. And usually when people are showing testimonials, they put it in a pretty prominent place, right? You don't want to bury your testimonials, you want to showcase it front and center. Here are happy customers. So this could be an opportunity for you to potentially even get on the homepage, which can carry a lot more linking power than being buried somewhere on an inside page. So write to the companies that you, you know, you use their product. Tell them you'd like to create a testimonial, and you can include even a picture or potentially even a video, as long as they link back to your website as part of the credit. And usually people are more than happy to do that. It's a great way to build up a one-way link from established websites. The last thing that I find really helpful is building great content. And you wanna build content that people want to link to. So part of that is just having really, really good content that people enjoy, but you can also design some content that is made to be shared and made to be linked to. So anytime you're talking about social media or blogs, Facebook, Twitter, that kind of stuff, you're probably gonna get a lot of links into your site. So one of the things that we do is every month we'll create a top 50 list of blogs for different area that still deals with entrepreneurship. So one month it could be top 50 social media blogs, next month it could be top 50 human resources blogs, still tied to entrepreneurship. And then we'll let the bloggers who are on the list know about it, and we'll tweet about it, and let all of our fans know about it. And what that generates is a lot of linking in. We can get upwards of 1,000 links coming just to that one post because people wanna share those types of things. So anytime you have a top list, people love that kind of stuff. And what that does is not only help boost that one page, but it helps your entire link profile for your website, and everything else starts to benefit from those links that you built in as well. So having those kind of key pieces of content that can build links is super helpful as well. So hopefully that gives you some ideas of what I've done that's been successful. You know, buying links can be an effective short-term strategy. I don't have any success or examples to share with you from my own experience, but hopefully what I gave is useful and helpful. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback, especially if you've done your own link building strategies. Leave a comment below the video and stay tuned for the next episode.
