7 Ways to Generate Backlinks for your Blog in 2020

Himanshu Gupta / 27 Feb 2020

I recently asked the question, “What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to SEO?” Nearly everyone in my community mentioned that their most significant issue at present is creating high-quality backlinks.

Generating backlinks today is not the same as it was five years ago. You need to get links from quality sites to see a difference in your company rankings. Spammy links on your blog are not going to do you any good, and the links may be wrong for your website.

To help aspiring marketers and SEO specialists, here are seven ways to generate backlinks to your site.

1. Blogger Outreach.

This is by far the most difficult way of acquiring backlinks to your site. But the links generated from this technique is generally very high quality. To summarise it blogger outreach, it is the process of reaching out to bloggers for link opportunities. Let’s see how you can go about blogger outreach –

The first step is to create a piece of content that has a previous history of getting a significantly higher number of links. To find out you can use a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush and do a quick search. Just make sure when do enough research to make the article better than the rest.
After publishing the content, the next step is to find prospects. These are people who have previously linked to a similar article before.
You then need to outreach them through email and tell them about your piece of content. Just don’t make it look spammy or use a template from the internet. Trust me it won’t get you good results.
To automate your outreach you can use tools like Lemlist, Ninja outreach etc.
Just make sure to follow up with your prospects to get the best ROI from the campaign.

Your blogger outreach strategy is all dependent on the relevancy of your prospects. If you can get it right you’ll end up attracting quality links. However, don’t expect a high conversion rate.

2. Create in-depth guides.

Want to get links to your blog organically?

Try creating in-depth guides. Bloggers and journalists are always on the lookout for great content pieces to link it in their content. Relevant linking helps an article gain credibility. If you can consistently produce content that’s worthy of a link, you’ll definitely get backlinks.

But there’s a word of caution. An in-depth article doesn’t mean stuffing in as much content as possible into the piece. It’s not about the word count. The aim should be providing the user with just the right content to solve the problem.

Also, don’t forget to promote the content across communities to get it across those journalists and bloggers.

3. Participate in link roundups.

First things first, what is link roundup?

Link Roundups is essentially a list of the best articles curated around a specific topic by bloggers weekly, monthly, or annually. There’s usually a submission process that allows people to submit links before a deadline.

Here’s how to go about participating in link roundups.

The first step process is to find the relevant roundups in your niche. You can go through this guide to find the exact way of finding the right prospects.
The second step is to create a quality article. Look at previous roundups to get an idea about the type and quality of articles that usually get accepted.
After you have read what types of posts are accepted, you’ll want to submit your article. Depending on the submission process you’ll need to wait for the roundup to be published.

If you’re lucky you’ll get your post featured in the roundup. The aim should be to submit your article in as many roundups as possible to get maximum results.

4. Reports.

Reports/Data studies usually get a lot of links. The additional links can be for obvious reasons. Most of these reports contain data that are so unique that you won’t find it anywhere else.

You need to have a large user base to come up with these reports. Regardless, you can still use social media, communities, or ads to promote a survey that can help you get data to come up with a report. If you’re just starting out, don’t worry about the audience size, as long as it’s a sustainable size, you’re fine.

Make sure to promote the reports to get it across your prospects effectively. Try using tools like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or Typeform to collect data.

5. Attract links by creating free tools.

Creating free tools can generate a lot of links. Let me explain this with an example.

Let’s say if my blog was in the mortgage niche, I could create a mortgage calculator. Providing something of value will help you generate relevant links. But creating a tool is not easy. Usually, you’ll need a developer to create something usable and embed it on the page.

Note your tools need not be complicated, a simple tool as an embed code generator can help you generate links.

SiegeMedia, a popular content marketing site, created an infographic embed code generator to attract links to their domain. Similarly, Hubspot uses its “Free Email Signature Template Generator” to get links.

If you need inspiration about how to attract links — go through these five examples.

6. Contribute Guest Posts.

One of the effective techniques to generate links to your blog is by contributing posts to other blogs in your niche. Even after posts saying, “Guest posts are dead,” trust me, guest posts are still a compelling technique of generating links to your blog.

Here are a few actionable tips to note for guest posts —

Go after the authority sites first. It might be hard, but that single link will be more beneficial when compared to a dozen links from other low-quality sites.
If you have difficulty in finding sites in your niche, look at an overlapping niche. For example, a health blog can contribute to a fitness blog, and vice versa.
Make sure to conduct quality research before outreach. Keep three to four blog ideas with outline ready before reaching out. If you receive a reply — you can respond by sending them an overview, or the post, immediately.
If a blog doesn’t have a “Write to us” page, don’t hesitate to reach out to the blog. There’s a high chance that they’re accepting guest posts.
Focus on providing value to the prospect. Pitching something unique or a case study increases your chances of approval. You just need to stand out.

7. Submit your blog to resource lists.

There are a lot of sites that curate a list of blogs and websites, depending on the niche. These can be standalone directories or bloggers. You can either directly submit your site or outreach them with your request through an email.

You can use tools like Dropmylink dot com to find such blogs. Make sure to go after the best links first.

Remember, when it comes to link building, quality always comes before quantity.

Conclusion

Remember, link building is not hard. You’ll need to come with a proper plan and invest enough time in your best effort to see good results for your site.

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