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Everything you need to know for a successful backlink strategy!

Backlinks are a strong indicator of popularity for search engines.

In order to rank for the top 10 searches (SERP) on google, you need a well crafted backlink strategy.

Depending on the keyword you want to rank for, you will need anywhere between 15 to over a hundred backlinks, per post.

To get that many backlinks, you need to save and manage access to hundreds of articles and websites to execute on your strategy.

Kurator is the right tool for curating and managing access to hundreds of backlinks with ease. Let’s see how it works!

What is the Best Backlink Strategy?

Backlinks are when external websites link to your website.

An effective Backlink strategy is essential to the success of your inbound marketing strategy.

Many influencers and experts recommend a long term strategy for building your brand. There are no short cuts.

Nathan Gotch, founder of Gotch SEO offers this advice in his post titled; “Should you buy Backlinks in 2017

Buying backlinks is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It doesn’t matter whether it’s blogger outreach or whether you are using private blog networks.

Neil Patel, a top SEO and Marketing influencer gives the following advice on link building

Obviously, I’m 100% against spammy, black-hat link building, a la 2011.

So, when it comes to solid, reputable, ethical, high-quality link building to your awesome content, I’m a fan!

My philosophy in business and marketing is to choose long term gains over short term wins. Too often, the short term wins end up costing you in the long term.

And, that’s the tricky thing about link building. It can take a while! It’s a long-term play.

Knowing that link building and relation building are long term plays that take planning, lets take a look at some strategies for effectively managing this process.

Finding the right Partners?

Obviously, to get someone to mention your company, your product and your services, it has to be a win-win for both parties.

This implies that you should direct your effort at Journalist, Bloggers, and partners that either cover your industry, or benefit from a partnership with you.

There are a number of great tools that help you find the right partners.

One of my favorite growth hacking tools is Ahrefs.  Ahrefs offers 4 features for finding the best prospects for your backlinks.

  • Site Explorer
  • Content Explorer
  • Keyword Explorer
  • Alerts

Growth hacking with Site Explorer

With Site Explorer you can target your competition’s backlinks. Anyone interested in your competitors products will potentially be interested in yours too!

To explore this strategy lets look at OneTab – A chrome extension that solves some of the same problems Kurator solves.

OneTab removes tab clutter from the browser, by quickly closing and saving all of your open tabs.

Kurator also solves browser clutter by allowing you to curate the tabs you want to keep, and closing all others!

The assumption is that anyone using, writing about, or mentioning OneTab, should be interested in Kurator the same!

In order to create a list of publishers and authors to contact we plug the one-tab.com url into Ahref’s site explorer.

Depending on our SEO strategy, we can now find a list of Backlinks (New, Lost, Broken) for our own outreach program.

Site Explorer - Ahrefs

We are interested in building a strong list of referring domains from the above report.

The “backlinks” profile will give us a list of the most influential sites, linking back to one-tab.com. We can use the filters in Ahrefs to sort our findings by domain authority, social shares, language and other parameters, to collect sites and authors that can help us boost our brand.

From here we start examining each link, and saving the ones we want to contact.

backlinks - Ahrefs

Saving and Managing a list of backlinks

Our goal is to collect a large number of articles by different people, and preferably from different domains.

Using Ahref and other discovery tools (You can find a list of content discovery tools on our research page), we start curating and building our backlink lists.

Kurator makes it real easy to save important information like the publisher, author, authors contact information and comments with the links we curate.

The program automatically scrapes most of the information you need.  The post summary, publisher, author and twitter handle may have to be entered manually (Some sites do a good job of adding meta information to the post, and some don’t).

Most of meta information is present on the page and easy to add, but if its not, you should try to search for that information as you save the article.  This will save you a lot of time when using the information to promote your products and services.

This video walks us through the process of curating and commenting your backlinks with Kurator.

How many Backlinks do I need to Rank in top 10 of google

The right answer is that, it depends on the keywords you want to rank for!

You should devise a multi faceted approach, that includes a series of blog posts and keywords.

It is easier to generate inbound and organic traffic from long tail keywords.

There is an excellent post by Tim Soulo, chief marketing and product development lead at Ahrefs, where he walks you through understanding how to find the easiest keywords to rank for.

After some research we found that the keyword “too many tabs” is a relatively easy keyword to rank for.

People who install the “OneTab” solution are looking to solve their tab clutter problem, so the chosen keyword will target the right audience.

It also means that the people who are writing about OneTab will also find value in our Kurator extension for chrome.

Following is the backlink analysis for “too many tabs” in keyword explorer. It shows that we need to get 23 backlinks to rank in the top 10 for search on this keyword.

By ranking for this keyword we can potentially drive 400 organic visitors to our website every month.

too many tabs - keyword explorer - ahref

Setting the correct Benchmarks

What is critical to understand is that link building and relation building is a long term strategy, and to be successful you need to set the right benchmarks.

As an example, to get 23 backlinks to our post here, we need to contact and build a much larger list than the 23 links we need here!

The guys at “Authority Hacker” have a great post under the Pareto Outreach Principle. Here is a summary of realistic outreach activities that will help you gain an understanding of the task at hand!

Pareto Outreach states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes

To build the kind of authority we’re trying to build with our sites, it takes a lot more than a couple dozen emails.

Hell, it takes a lot more than a couple hundred emails.

No… to build Health Ambition-level authority, it takes many thousands of emails.

As you can see, over time you will have to manage a list of hundreds and even thousands of backlinks.

Therefore, the ability to search and organize your curated links for instant access, is a big time saver.

With Kurator you can categorize and save backlinks in different folders.

Each folder can be easily sorted by headline, date, publisher, author and content tags.

If you spend the time commenting each curated link carefully, you will save a lot of time locating the links you are looking for, when you need them.

Kurator folder

Additionally, once you curate an article, the program remembers it by highlighting the kurator icon in the toolbar.

In other words, when curating and managing hundreds of links, its hard to remember if you have already curated an article.

Therefore, this is an important feature, reminding you not to save the same link twice.

Kurator icon

There is more than one way to get a Backlink

We are going to explore 3 different methods for utilizing our curated content to drive inbound traffic and improve our exposure and ranking in general.

Blogging

The most effective way to get recognition is to write great and useful content.

One effective method to boost your content is to use quotes and research from industry leaders and influencers.

The content you curate over time will be a great resource for your outbound link strategy.

As you can see from my post here, and the quote below, I use quotes and excerpts from some of the leading experts in the industry to validate my own arguments.

Brian Dean from Backlinko has a great post on actionable SEO techniques where he explains the importance of your outbound links .

Hilltop is essentially an on-page SEO signal way that tells Google whether or not a page is a “hub” of information.

So: How does Google know which pages are hubs?

It’s simple: Hubs are determined by the quality and relevancy of that page’s outbound links.

This makes total sense if you think about it…

The pages you link out to tend to reflect the topic of your page.

And pages that link to helpful resources also tend to be higher-quality than pages that only link to their own stuff.

In other words, pages that link out to awesome resources establish themselves as hubs of helpful content in the eyes of Big G.

So not only will the outbound links help you with the content creation and SEO, but the chances of getting a brand mention from the author will improve!

Add your own comments to the Article

Commenting on relevant posts is a great way to increase your influence, get brand mention and generate backlinks.

This is actually a common practice. If you are trying to promote a product, then any article that mentions your competitors is a great target.

Many people, not just vendors, like to add their favorite tools to the list.

Sujan Patel, offers his experience in his YouTube post on “Blog Commenting for Leads” and says that posting comments on blogs that already generate lots of traffic is a great source for getting leads.

In his brief video tutorial, Sujan explains how he received hundreds of valuable leads using this exact method.

You may not get everyone in your list to mention your company or your product, but you can certainly comment on every link you curate!

The “top referring content” feature in ahrefs gives us some great leads to curate.

As you can see the top link in this list has had over 13K shares. The right message can get you some valuable leads from this post!

ahref - top referring content

Publishing your Curated content to KBucket

Another powerful and unique feature in Kurator,  is the ability to publish your curated content online!

To do so, you organize one ore more folders into a file, and export it to a KBucket page.

KBucket pages are either hosted on our crowd sourced KBucket.com website, or you can integrate them with your own web site.

As a business you can use your curated content to drove traffic to your site and connect with influencers.

You can also use the content to generate new blog ideas or find references for your blog posts.

Many of the quotes I use in this post, are articles I have curated over time from top influencers in the industry.

To understand why sharing others content is effective, let’s take a look at the 6 tenants of the art of influence by Caldini

art of influence - By Robert Caldini

We can directly use these principles to get backlinks and persuade people with our influence.

Here are 3 principles that confirm why you should share your curated content online!

Reciprocity

Simply put, people are obliged to give back to others the form of behavior, gift, or service that they have received first.

It is not unreasonable to expect influencers to return the favor and give you a mention, if you share their posts.

Make sure the content you curate is relevant to your field, and interest of the influencers you want to connect with.

Authority

The idea that people follow the lead of credible knowledgeable experts.

A curated library of tens and hundreds of related articles signals domain authority

Consensus

People will generally look to the actions and behaviors of others to determine their own.

Quoting other influencers, to verify your own ideas and arguments helps you persuade your readers.

 Creating KBucket files

A KBucket page (K stands for Knowledge) is a curated page, built from your curated content.

You can build these pages from your curated content.

Each folder in your Kurator extension, is a channel on the KBucket page. (click on the image to see the page)!

Curated KBucket Page

We create our KBucket files under the Curation Tree.  We have detailed instructions in our forum – Sharing on KBucket.

Sharing your curated content on KBucket page will drive hundreds of organic traffic to your website every month.  To learn more about the social sharing feature and benefits visit our blog post – How to get 153% CTR with KBucket content curation.

Conclusion

We spend too much time looking for information. This takes away from our productive work time.

Cottrill Research published a study on information overload quantifying the cost in terms of lost productivity as follows:

According to a McKinsey report, employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average, searching and gathering information.

As a result, businesses hire 5 employees but only 4 show up to work; the fifth is off searching for answers, but not contributing any value.”

Kurator is the right solution, for significantly cutting down on your search time.

The result is more productivity and less wasted time.

Give it a try.