The internet works because people are willing to share their knowledge and thoughts. This may be for free or not but the fact that they are open to sharing this wealth of information is what drives the internet forward. However, thanks to the sheer number of people sharing content, finding the most useful piece of content that is apt and relevant to the user at that point of time is hard, really really hard. That’s the job that search engines have been designed to handle.
Over the years, they’ve evolved and managed to figure out ways to assess the quality of the content through word analysis and other unique methods. However, the volume of content that is still out there, that exactly matches what the user is looking for is still enormous.
Thus, search engines rely on each website’s authority derived through links pointing at their website from elsewhere on the internet as a major deciding factor to providing users with not only the most relevant content but also the most authoritative.
These links pointing back to websites, or backlinks as they are referred to in our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry are the lifeblood of websites. They decide how much traffic flows into websites and thereby the revenue that any particular website can generate.
Having seen the importance of backlinks to any website, let us now take a look at 7 mind unique and mind-blowing ways to get new backlinks to your website.
1) Awards and Digital Trophies
One of the easiest ways to get the attention of other people is by praising them in public. They are bound to take note and when they do, they feel a sense of pride and also gratitude. These two emotions are the primary drivers of this method to acquire new backlinks. Let us take a step-by-step look at how this strategy can be implemented.
i) Create a well-researched article with facts and statistics with a title of something like ‘The Grand 2022 Awards – Best Digital Marketing Blogs’.
Notice how we’ve used the year and words like ‘Grand’ and ‘Best’ in the title. Studies have shown that these words subconsciously trigger the reader’s curiosity and they are more likely to thus click to open the article and start reading.
ii) In the article, make sure you give out various awards for as many sub-categories as you can think of in your particular niche. The more awards you give to various websites in your niche, the better.
iii) Share the article on social media, send it to influencers, and promote it as much as you can to get it some good traction. The curiosity-inducing title means that your article has the potential to naturally go viral as well through user shares.
iv) Finally, reach out to the websites you’ve lauded in the article and write a personalized congratulatory note to each one of them. Be sure to present them with a digital trophy as well that they can proudly display on their website. It should be a custom-created image with their website and award category clearly mentioned. Do subtly ask them to share it with their audience as well.
v) That’s it! Once you send these congratulatory notes, you can be sure that at least a third of the awardees will proudly post the trophy on their website and include a link to your award article.
2) Listicles
The internet loves lists and listicles are the perfect answer to this internet’s love affair with lists. The word listicle is a portmanteau of ‘List’ and ‘Article’. Thus, a listicle is nothing but a list presented in the form of an easy-to-read article.
Listicles naturally contain a sense of mystery and thus tingle the curiosity of the reader. This sense of mystery also makes them go viral easily as people tend to share the articles.
So when it comes to listicles, the strategy will be pretty similar to the awards and trophies strategy above. With listicles, however, you can go a level further and create massive lists. For example, you could come up with an article like ‘47 Most Useful Websites That Every Digital Marketer Must Know About.
Once the article is ready, the process to reach out to the websites mentioned in the article is exactly the same as the previous awards method.
You simply reach out to the websites, congratulating them on their wonderful work and effort at bringing out quality content over the years. You then mention that you were so impressed by their consistently awesome content that you’ve included their website in your listicle of the best so and so. And, right at the end, subtly suggest that they share this with their readers.
Do it right and you can be sure that a good portion of websites links back to your listicle!
3) Case Studies
As a content creator, I’m sure you’ve often been in a situation where you need to provide some sort of proof and evidence to back up certain claims you make in your content. How do you do this? Well, there are various ways, but the most popular and simple way would be to link to a case study by an external website that concludes your claim.
Case studies and statistics analyses thus have a huge potential of being cited a lot on the internet.
For example, I was recently working on an article about the broken link-building method to get new backlinks and wanted to drive the fact that this age-old method still worked like a charm even in 2023. So what did I do?
I went on to Google, looked up case studies on the broken link-building method, read a few, found the one that exactly proved my point, and included a link to that case study in my article.
Do you see how case studies have the potential to naturally get lots and lots of backlinks?
This is what we aim for in this method. Create a well-researched and statistics-filled case study to prove hypotheses or disprove myths. Be sure to use the right keywords so that potential linkers can easily find your article when they search for the right content to link to.
That’s pretty much it. A few good case studies can organically keep bringing in hundreds of backlinks over time.
4) Guest Appearance
The advent of super-powerful smartphones over the last decade has enabled multimedia content creators to gain vast audiences. The youth of today consider Youtube and Podcasts as viable careers that they can pursue.
Just like any other form of content, these creators are also on the lookout for new content ideas, stories, and interviews. This is a huge opportunity that you can easily leverage.
Find content creators in your niche who often bring other people on their shows. It can be something like an interview or a guest appearance to explain a particular topic to the audience.
Reach out to them with an appreciative note about their show and mention that you would love to make an appearance in their show as a subject expert on your topic. Most accept and when they interview you, make sure you mention or cite some interesting article of yours.
Almost all these content creators have a website where they document each episode or podcast they put out and give the additional source or reading material to their audience. So when you talk in their show about some interesting things from a particular article you wrote, you can be sure that they will include a link to it from their website.
This may seem like a slightly tedious process to get a backlink, but it also has the added advantage of building your own personal authority as an expert in your niche. Over time, this simple awareness about your expertise can and will bring in organic backlinks because people will feel confident in linking to your articles as authoritative pieces on topics in your niche.
5) Image Creation
As a blog writer, I’m sure you are constantly on the lookout for images and graphics that match your content. If you are like most writers, I’m sure you just head over to Google Images and pick the most suitable image from there. And as a responsible author, you would probably include a link to the source as Image Credits in your article.
Now if we reverse engineer this, we have a neat little method that we can use to generate a massive number of high-quality backlinks. Let’s take a look at the simple steps you can follow to get this method underway.
i) Use your keyword research tool to find relevant image search keywords. It could be something like ‘Search Engines Market Share’ or similar infographic-type searches that have a high volume of searches in your niche.
ii) Use your graphic designer to create a detailed infographic or image to match the search terms exactly.
iii) Upload it to your website and make sure you include alt tags with the relevant keywords.
iv) Reach out to websites that talk about this particular topic and share the graphic with them saying that it would greatly benefit their readers. Subtly mention that they are free to use it on their website and all they need to do is credit you through an Image Source link.
v) As time goes by, more authors will naturally start using your image and include source credits to your website.
vi) Use Google Reverse Image search regularly to find blogs that have used your image and check to see if they’ve included image source credit links. If not, simply reach out to them and ask in a nice manner that they do. Most will comply and you will continue generating new backlinks for a long time.
6) Brand Mentions
The internet is a vast place, and people often talk about you in some nook or corner of the internet. Most include a link when they mention your brand in some articles they write but some don’t.
These brand mentions have excellent backlink potential and can be easy to find as well.
Let us look at the simple steps you can follow to get these backlinks.
i) Head over to Google Alerts and create an alert for your brand name or website name. Be sure to set up alerts for spelling variations, plurals, and even misspellings of your brand or website name.
ii) As and when you receive alerts about new brand mentions check if they have linked to your website.
iii) If they haven’t, reach out to them with a thank you note for mentioning your brand in their article. In the end, suggest that they change the mention to a link to your website so that their readers can easily find the website without having to search the internet separately.
iv) Most creators oblige and you get cool new backlinks!
7) Donations
The last innovative method we will be talking about today to get backlinks to your website is charity and donations.
This is a pretty straightforward method that involves a certain amount of money. Here are the simple steps.
i) Search for charities and non-profit organizations that are working in areas that you personally care about.
ii) Go through the website of each one and shortlist the ones that include a donors page to showcase their list of donors.
ii) Donate to their organization. In the bio that they ask about you, don’t forget to include a brand name and link to your website.
iii) Most of these charities will be more than happy to include your website in your bio and you can start getting high-quality backlinks from the high-authority websites of these charities and organizations.
Although this method involves money, it is, after all, a donation to a cause that you personally care about so it is a win-win in the end.
Well, that brings us to the end of this short list of a few mind-blowing methods to get high-quality backlinks to your website. What did you think? Any other strategy that you’ve seen that works well? Let us know in the comments below!
