Qingtongxia SEO training: Problems with website content-driven link building

Now, there are some issues with link building that make it highly risky, and there are a few things I want to discuss before I provide you with some potential solutions that can help make your link building less risky. So first a few questions:

I. Content-driven link building is risky.
The problem with content-driven link building is that you’re churning out some content and you don’t really know if it’s going to work. This is quite risky and you are not actually sure you will get the link.

II. A good content idea may not be a very good content idea for getting links.
There is a huge difference between a good idea for content and a good idea for getting links. It's really important to understand this difference. So we need to talk about how we deal with this problem.

III. This is a big investment of time and budget.

Creating content, especially visual content, and doing design and development takes time. It can employ freelancers. It enables designers and developers. So it was a big moment and budget investment. If you’re going to invest time and budget into a marketing campaign, you want to know that it’s likely to work without being too risky.

IV. Think of link building as a campaign lead: fire it up and stop it.

So you do a link building campaign, then you stop and start a new campaign. I want to get rid of this idea. I want to talk about thinking about link building as an ongoing activity, rather than thinking of it as an activity that has a start date and an end date, and then forget about it and move on to the next one. So I'm going to talk about that as well.

Solutions So these are some of the problems we encounter with content-driven link building. I want to talk about some solutions, how to offset the risks of content-driven link building, and how to increase your chances of actually getting links, and that your campaign doesn’t fail and not work out for you.

I. Don’t tie content to a specific date or assignment So, number one, now when you’re coming up with content ideas, it’s very easy to tie content ideas to an assignment in the year or an assignment in a few days. If something is happening in your client’s career that is very important, with holidays and similar events at the time, this is a great way to hook a piece of content into that career. Now, the problem with that is if you produce a piece of content around a certain date, and then that date passes and the content doesn’t work as well, you’re left with content that’s no longer relevant.

So as an example of what we did at Aira, we had a client who published a piece of content at Internet of Things Day. In fact, this year's celebrations actually took place on April 9 of this year. Now, we have created a piece of content for IoT and its development in the world and its impact on the world. But the important thing is that we don't tie it completely to this date. So the article itself didn’t say a date, but we published it at that time and the outreach talked about Internet of Things Day. So the focus of the promotion is on the date and the assignment, but not the content itself. This means that after July 9, we can still promote this content because it is still relevant. It is not tied to an exact date.

So what that means is that we are not gambling on a specific job or a specific day. If we get to July 9 and we don't have connectivity, it's obviously significant, but we can continue. We can continue to push this content. So, by all means, create content that is relevant to the date and the job, but don’t include too much in the content piece and tie it to itself.

II. Find data sets that provide you with multiple broadened perspectives. Second, a lot of content ideas may come from data. So you can take a data set and generate content ideas from behind the data, but use the data to generate angles and stories. Now, this can be quite risky because you don’t know if the data will give you a story or angle until you get into it. So what we try to do at Aira when trying to generate content around data really comes from the different angles that you can use from that data.

So, for example:
position. Can you run a piece of content in different locations in the US or UK so you can use different data points to track local newspapers, local magazines serving different parts of the country?

Demographics. Are you able to target different demographics? Can you target women, men, young people, old people? Can you segment the data differently to address different demographics, which would give you multiple ways to implement your outreach content?

years. Is it updated annually? So it’s 2018. Is there a data update in 2019? If there is, and it is like an annual exercise that is repeated when the data is updated, then the content can be redone in the following year. So you are now able to publish a piece of content. When the data is updated the following year, the new data is inserted and restarted. So you don't have to rebuild a piece of content every time. You can use old content and then update the data.