http://www.veravo.com/trafficjam/backlink-strategies-brian-dean/

TJ45 – SEO Link Building: 3 Untapped Backlink Strategies and the Backlinko Skyscraper Technique ~ Brian Dean

9/9/2014 with

Brian Dean with James Reynolds on Traffic JamSo here’s the rub. When it comes to search engine optimization backlinks do still work.

But, whether they work for you to increase your ranking, or against you to send your site in to search engine abyss depends on your ability to acquire high value backlinks.

In the modern day of SEO link building is tough. No more can website owners spam their site’s from article directories, link farms or automation tools and expect to get results. In the present day links must be earned, mainly via hard graft and outreach or by creating content so awesome people actually want to link to it. Most people opt for the latter and are disappointed by the results.

To get good links to your site it’s helpful to have some backlink strategies up your sleeve. Brian Dean has several and he shares his 3 very best on this episode.

Listen in as we discuss how to acquire powerful backlinks using email outreach, Brian’s skyscraper technique, plus the step-by-step process that grew Backlinko’s search traffic 110% in 14 days.

FREE BONUS: Download Brian Dean’s copy-and-paste email outreach swipe file. Plus a special bonus template from me, MP3, transcript and episode artwork.

OUR GUEST:

Brian Dean is an well-recognised entrepreneur and SEO specialist and the founder of Backlinko.com. Backlinko, under Brian’s watchful eye, sets out to provide practical SEO techniques to marketing professionals and entrepreneurs.

Everything Brain publishes on his blog is actionable and carefully crafted to help readers get more traffic, leads and customers. Aside from blogging at Backlinko.com he’s also contributed to Hubspot, Entrepreneur, QuickSprout and Moz.

Since February of 2010 Brian has built a growing internet marketing company while traveling to 25 countries including Thailand, Japan, Spain, and Turkey. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany.

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Brian Dean from Backlinko on the Traffic Jam Podcast

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from this episode of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

  • Three Types of Backlinks (Good, Bad and Indifferent).
  • The Power of Direct Outreach.
  • How to Get Links from Resource Pages.
  • Using the Broken Link Strategy to Increase Your Backlink Count.
  • How to Take Advantage of Infographics
  • The Skyscraper Technique.
  • Guest-o-graphics – What are they?
  • Why Keyword Research is the Highest Yield Activity in SEO.

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet my favourite quote from this show.

You can also download this quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with other episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

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Welcome back listener! This is Traffic Jam show #45 and what a great show we’ve got lined up for you. Now before I tell you about today’s guests, I want to say hi to some Traffic Jam listeners who have been getting in on the discussion for episode #44. In no particular order, Denver Profit Jr., Robert McGovern, Ian Tong, and Veravo’s very own Freya Jones. Thank you for stopping by the episode page and commenting. To join the chats on this episode, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/45 where you can also get the extra bonuses I put together to help you implement the strategies on today’s show. So at that appropriate junction, let me introduce our guest today. His name is Brian Green and he’s got a great website called backlinko.com where he teaches very practical advice that you can use to get more traffic. so you know this is a conversation that I am going to be very excited about and you should be as well, and that is because Brian is one of these new breed of SEOs who get where SEO is going and he is able to deliver actionable results driven tactics that work in the modern day of search, which is actually easier to say than to do sometimes. And what he teaches really does work. My approach and Brian’s approach are similar in many regards but still I have been able to learn a hell of a lot from Brian and I know you will too, which is exactly why I have invited him to the show, so without any further ado, here on Traffic Jam, is Brian Dean from Backlinko.com.

James: So welcome back listener! This is episode #45 and joining us today in the hot seat is Brian Dean. Brian, how are you?

Brian: I am well. How is it going James?

James: It’s doing, doing good. Glad to have you on the show. Now you of course have this website called Backlinco and I think we should appropriately start the discussion talking about backlinks perhaps and how they affect search engine optimization. Despite all of the recent turmoil, I think any SEO will tell you that backlinks do still work, but what is the difference between the backlinks that will work for you and one that works against you?

Brian: Well, there’s a couple things that go in to backlinks that actually increases your rankings, there’s kind of a third category of those that don’t do anything and then there is the one that you mentioned that could hurt you and basically the difference is that the ones that you want are links from related sites that someone has put there, they are usually called editorial links and here’s the nice description of what they are. Basically someone saw your site or a piece of content on your site and say hey, that is pretty cool, I want to link to that, and they either link to that from a blog post or a news site or a resource page, whatever page that links out to different sources, you end up there based on the fact that someone else says that’s cool I want to link out to it. That’s very different on how it used to work when it was basically a sandblast and you just basically get links anywhere, and basically a good rule of thumb is if your competition can easily just get the same link that you get, it’s probably not a good link because it is going to be devalued at some point so any sort of mass link building, it can work for short term. I am not going to lie and say that it won’t work at all, but it definitely puts you on the danger zone.

James: Yeah, absolutely! I think some of those links that are most effective are those that you don’t really know are coming, right? There’s just those that land up to you because your content is good and because people generally and editorially want to link out to you –

Brian: Definitely, but I don’t think you necessarily have to wait for that to happen, it is kind of a mistake a lot of people make – they just publish great content and hope the links roll in but in my experience the best links that I get are from direct outreach and I’d be happy to talk about how to do that but of course I do get those natural links and they are the best that you can get because they are super editorial and you don’t have to do any extra work to get them.

James: Yeah, absolutely! Well, let’s talk about that a little bit because, rightly said, you can just wait and hope and perhaps cross your fingers that people are going to start linking to you, or you can go out and find them. Now you’ve published a post called The 17 Untapped Back Links Sources, I’d love to get your insights on that and perhaps to ask you to do a condensed version and perhaps name your top three untapped link sources because I think that would make pretty good listening.

Brian: Sure. So in that post, one of the best is the aforementioned resource page so in that post I talk about just resource pages that or .edu sites so .edu sites are in the States, University sites, right? They’re very hard links to get. Some people in SEO feel that they have some special ranking power in Google if you can get a link from them, I don’t personally believe that but the point is that without exception, they are all very powerful, highly trusted domains. I mean, we are talking about household names like Harvard, Yale, Princeton – these are institutions that you have heard of that are highly trusted sites. But it is really hard to get a link from them, harder than your average site but one of the easiest ways to get your foot in the door and actually get a link is the fact that a lot of them have resource pages which are just links to great resources. They have resources about nutrition, about email marketing, they even have resource pages about SEO. So what you want to do is find those resource pages in edu sites or on other sites and get your links on them and the easiest way is to really just create something that would be a good fit for that page and then email that person and let them know. You can easily find resource pages and another nice thing about them is that they are super easy to find on Google you only have to put something in like in url: resources + keyword. So you put +nutrition, +gardening, + cooking and see what comes up. And if you want to specify edu sites, you can put site:.edu and we can have the search engine in the show notes because they are a bit hard to sound out.

James: Man, you’re doing a great job!

Brian: I have never done that before but they are super easy to find. You have maybe two or three search terms to find more than you even know to do it and then it’s just a matter of grinding out, finding that person who runs that section of the site and emailing them a non-pushy pitch that’s basically saying, “hey I found your list of resources really great I have something that I just published about gardening and it might be a great fit. Either way, keep up the great work.” And you’ll find that you’ll have about a 10% conversion rate if you find the right person and have a great piece of content. It is hard to find a specific conversion rate. A lot of people are like – well, if I email a hundred people, how many people will link? It really is hard to say because it depends how great your content is, right? If you have something like the meaning of life, it is a lot easier to get links than if you have a 500-word article for 5 tips for gardening. It’s going to be a lot harder. So I guess some links, it is somewhat a numbers game. The more people you email your content to give them a heads up, the more links you get.

James: Yeah, so have you got any tips for crafting an effective email that may get the attention of someone that is managing a resource page?

Brian: Definitely! The first thing is to find the right person. That’s where a lot of people skip over and what they’ll do for example an edu site, any large institution site, not a blog run by one guy, you’ll need to find whoever is in charge of that particular section because if you email the general email or the general contact form, your email is going to end up in the black hole, right? It’s not going to be forwarded to the right person because it doesn’t seem like a very urgent email to send to someone. So your first job is to find out who curates that area. A lot of times you’ll find clues on the page; they’ll have a name and an email address, or if you look at the category in the urls say for example the url is like trafficjam/webinar/resources and you’ll have a list of webinar resources what we want to do is just look at trafficjam/webinar and then see who runs that section. A lot of times you’ll have a person that will be in charge specifically for that section. So that is the first thing. Once you found it, it really is not rocket science. A lot of people overthink email outreach. I really want to put in the subject line something like – A quick question about your resource page and then I just put their name and then the pitch that I basically outlined – found your resource page, it is really great, I have something that might be a good fit, here’s the link, it might make a good addition to the page, if not, that’s cool. That’s basically all you need to do.

James: Fantastic! Cool! Well that I think is a super easy and actionable thing that our listeners can go out and do. that’s #1, what’s #2 on the list?

Brian: #2 would be broken link building which is kind of like that strategy souped up a little bit so if you’re serious about link building and you want to get more links than your emails, this is the strategy that you have to do. So broken link building is basically the same approach. Look at these resource pages and what you do instead of just begging for a link. I just told you it works, it can work, but what you need to do is you look for broken links on that page so what you’re doing is when you find a broken link, reach out to that person and instead of just asking for something straight up, you kind of getting your foot to the door with helping them and say you found some broken links on a page, and especially when your page is a nice replacement for that broken link, you can recommend that it’s not easy to get a replacement. Now if that was a broken link that used to link to an article about gardening, and you have an article about gardening that’s really similar and you email that person, it’s really a no-brainer for them to replace your broken link so in a sense you are doing them a little bit of a favor by identifying broken links on their page and then you have a great resource that is a great fit and then the conversion rate is double or triple that straight up of link begging and it doesn’t really take a lot of extra work. You can use a great extension for Chrome called Check My Links and when you click a little button on your Chrome browser, it finds broken links in like 10 seconds, super easy.

James: Nice! Nice! I guess the process there is then going and finding appropriate websites in your niche or market and then hitting send and getting in contact with those people responsible, right?

Brian: Exactly!

James: Simple! Love it. Okay, so, #3? This is the Top 3 list.

Brian: Okay, so #3, this is a little bit more involved. You can’t just pages that you know people. It’s infographics. For me, infographics is like one of the most untapped content marketing strategies, period. Link building, SEO, content. The problem with infographics is that they’ve become so commonplace and they’ve become so saturated that a guest in your show, Neil Patel, told me that when he started Kissmetrics, one of the reasons it did so well was that they published a lot of infographics, they published a weekly infographics for a year, and this was before infographics are really big. Regardless of whether infographics was great or good or mediocre, they would still get a ton of traffic and links from it. Today, it doesn’t really work like that. There are so many infographics out there. That being said, the right infographics can still do really well especially when it comes to link building. What I like to do is look at the site Visual.ly and that is basically a community of infographic designers and you can find infographics that people have submitted there and what you want to do is find one in your space that is already done well, you can sort them by views, by likes and by comments and you can see which ones are done well, take bits and pieces that you like and create a sort of a Frankenstein infographics of all the things that you found that you liked and minus the things that you did not like and create an awesome infographic. From that point, it’s a matter of the outreach. Outreach for infographics is very different than with resource pages link building or broken link building which we went over. With infographics, what you want to do is basically find people that publish content about your topic. So again, if you have a nice gardening infographic that is ready to go, you want to email people that wrote about gardening and say, hey you write about gardening, and if you want to give it an edge and say write an infographic about growing tomatoes, then you’d want to find people who write about growing tomatoes quite often and email those people and say, hey, you write about tomatoes and I just published an infographic about growing tomatoes – here you go. That’s what you really want to do, at that point I don’t ask them to do anything, I don’t even send them the link, I just say, do you want to see the infographic? And when their reply says yes, I say here you go and then I say if you ever want to republish this on your site, I’d be happy to write a unique introduction for you. And that really increases the wheels because if someone is going to publish the infographics on someone else’s site, it’s nice because they don’t have to write content that day. But the bad thing is that you do have to write content because you have to write at least the introduction. You don’t just slap an infographic on a blog post and call it a day. So when you write an intro for them, you’re really saying, hey once you’ve got a nice infographic to share with your audience, I’ll write you a unique introduction just for you. And if you are doing that, you can get tons of great links for your infographic.

James: And this is the concept you call guest-o-graphics, is that right?

Brian: Exactly.

James: Love it! I was going to ask you about that. We kind of had these infographic terms pop up on Traffic Jam over the weeks. Neil’s was the gif-o-graphics which is kind of getting popular, now we’ve got guest-o-graphics so we’re really mixing this thing up with infographics.

Brian: Well, that’s the thing. Like I said, there’s so many now.

James: You have to innovate, right?

Brian: Yeah, you have to.

James: Now, one of the most successful posts on your site in terms of referring domains, which is the number of other websites linking to your post about Google ranking factors. What was it about that post specifically that garnered so much attention and links to your site?

Brian: I think one of them was the fact that it’s the most comprehensive resource on that topic online. It is very hard to say that it is bar none the most comprehensive resource about that topic. I think, once you have that in hand, the job of link building is a lot easier. The number two thing is that it did a ton of outreach. I did a lot of broken link building, resource page link building to get the word out because when I published that, I think the week after I published it, we had 8 tweets, 2 comments and 3 Facebook likes. So even though it was a really great piece of content, just publishing it wasn’t nearly enough.

James: Yeah, I want to ask you a little bit about your content style. If I was to compare you to say Seth Godin, it would kind of like be comparing chalk and cheese. He’s got the style that’s very short and precise but your content, typically five pages long, and very detailed style, what is it about your content style that bought it about to be what it is? I am sure you are going to tell me it is by design, right?

Brian: Well, it is by design. There has been a lot of research about what content tends to get shared most often so Jonah Berger who is a researcher and author, he did a study on what content made the New York Times best seller list most often and he did a content that made it to that list versus those that didn’t and he found out that what that content had but not really that not shared content did not have and he found a bunch of different things but one of the most important was content length. So the longer that content was, the most likely it was to make the most emailed list. Another study by these guys called SERP IQ; they looked at what content tended to rank on the first page of Google and they found the average first page result for a piece of content was at least 2,000 words to make Google first page and as you get to the top three, it gets higher and it’s like 2500 words. And then more recently, Buzz Sumo and OK Dork did a case study where they looked at content length and social shares and they found that content that was more than 2000 words or 3000 words got shared more often than shorter styles and from my personal experience, I found that longer content quashes shorter content every single time. And a lot of people try to go the Seth Godin route. I love Seth Godin, he’s a smart guy, but if you try to recreate his strategy today in 2014, it’s not going to work. He’s got a huge start – he started blogging in 2006, you’re not. The world is totally different. Back then, if you updated your blog every day that was enough to get you assigned a position. If you want to do that same strategy today, it would not work. I prefer to publish much as often, and when I publish content, it is really long and in depth. It has worked for me and the data really doesn’t lie on that topic.

James: It is interesting because it is kind of counter intuitive, right? First of all I could see how it could work for search having long form content because the content is more detailed it would give a more in depth search results but in terms of share worthy content you might think that a more consumable content might get consumed more and shared more but that is clearly not the case.

Brian: Yeah, you would. I think two reasons for that is that in another study found that basically people don’t read stuff that they shared. So people, when they share something in social media, nine times out of ten, they have not even read the thing and I know that I am guilty of that sometimes, I don’t want to point fingers but I know I am, I don’t want to point fingers.

James: I wasn’t always, but I have started using Buffer App a lot more and it makes some really nice suggestions, I’ll scan the post if it looks real nice then I’ll share it. You didn’t hear that here.

Brian: But you know what I am saying, right? I would not say they have not looked at it, but they have not read it and one of the other factors that Jonah Berger looked at for what content tended to go viral and get to share on this New York Times most email list was a sense of awe. So if the content has the sense of awe, it was much more likely to get shared, so if you have a long three- thousand words post with screenshots or images and videos. It instills so much awe that it compels someone to share it and I think it is one of the reasons that it gets shared most often.

James: Yeah, perhaps it’s something we should link to in the resource section of this post because Jonah Berger’s got some contagiousness and how stuff really captures on and catches fire and it is really, really interesting especially for us content creators so I’ll make sure that’s included. Now I want to ask you about a little case study you had because in the age of search where it is very much kind of this long term game now where there are not really any short term wins, you’re pretty much able to do the remarkable, right? You are able to have a 110% increase in traffic in about 14 days using the technique and I believe you thus coined the skyscraper technique. Tell us a little bit about that.

Brian: Sure. So the skyscraper technique is basically a strategy of content marketing and SEO for now, so really it’s what you said James, it does work for the short term but it really is a long term play. Basically, there are three steps. The first step is you find content that is already done well in your space, in your niche. So in my case, the Google ranking factors post that you mentioned earlier, I had found a few other posts about Google’s ranking factors that weren’t really thorough and a bit out of date and they had still done really well, so Google a couple of years ago came out and said they had 200 ranking factors, so all these people tried to come up with these 200 to figure out what they were. No one even came close. The closest guy came up with 140 something and the page he listed was very ugly, it was out of date, but it had tones of referring domains and even a lot of social shares even though it came out of because of the age of Twitter and stuff because if people find it now, it is really helpful. The next thing you want to do is improve on that content. So in my case, that piece of content did not have all 200 so it was a no brainer to list all 200, now of course a lot of them are probably totally irrelevant and way outdated but I try to find a resourceful for at least all of them, if not all of them, some basis and not things that I totally made up. And that was basically saying we have all 200 here, that alone will help us stand out but I also made it more thorough. The other ones are just like lists of the ranking factors, I described each one, I added images, basically trying to make something a lot better and basically that is why it is called the skyscraper technique because they had the tall skyscraper and you’re basically creating something taller and stand out and then the third step is to reach out to people that linked to the older content and give them the heads up about mine. And a lot of times, it is similar to broken link building, the link is not really broken right? In this case it’s just linking to something outdated but the idea is instead of just saying, hey you’re linking to this so it’s either I have something that is more up to date or more thorough, you might want to consider adding my link as well and in 0% of the cases has anyone removed the link to the older piece of content but that in mind. So there is nothing malicious going on there like stealing their links. I never ask them because I don’t want them to do that but they add their links as well, it is also a no-brainer. They’re linking to something superior, you have something better, it is a no brainer.

James: Yeah, absolutely! It’s positioning again, isn’t it? It’s like the broken link approach, you’re helping them and offering up something that is potentially more valuable to their readers which they shouldn’t turn a blind eye to. So I’m guessing this whole outreach thing is pretty important but you don’t just do post outreach, you do something called pre-outreach which you mentioned to me earlier. Tell me a little bit how that works and how you go about connecting with influencers before your content is posted.

Brian: Sure. So this is something that I am experimenting with recently because what I would do after I publish a post to sort of build a buzz before I get any link building is that I will email people after it came out, just to give them a heads up, and again I learned this from obviously, Neil, who’s obviously influenced a lot of people cause we talk about him all the time, and I remember he mentioned on a podcast that when he publishes a blog on to SEO, after he published it, he emailed 200 people about it. And he said that made a huge difference in terms of the shares, and the activity around that piece of content and it got me thinking, I mean getting that from Neil who has a hundred thousand Twitter followers, his email list is massive, and he gets absurd amount of traffic, if he is going to do email outreach and that helped him, imagine how much it would help me, someone who has less of all that stuff so I decided to try it out and it worked really well. But it got me thinking that people want sort of an insider scoop, they want to know when something is going to happen before hand so I decided experimenting with emailing people before it came out so about a week before the post comes out, I email a bunch of people and basically say- I’ll just break it down step by step, it is a lot easier. So the first step is to use this tool called Buzz Sumo, I don’t know if you know about this James –

James: I don’t know so –

Brian: It’s awesome. It is called Buzz Sumo and basically what it is, is a way to find content that’s been shared a lot. So you go to Buzz Sumo and you put in a keyword like podcasting and it will show you over what times you choose, content about podcasting that has been shared a whole lot on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest and you can sort by each share on social network or the total number of shares. So what I do is I find content about whatever is my post about that’s done well in the last couple of weeks and another cool feature about that is you can see who shared that on Twitter. So you click a few shares in Buzz Sumo and it shows you all the people that shared that on Twitter, so what I do is I download that list and then I hire a freelancer to find all the email addresses of all these people and then I email them and say hey, basically you tweeted out this piece of content about podcasting last week, I have another piece of content about podcasting coming out in a couple of days, do you want to check it out? And for all the people that say yes, I email it to them, it’s as simple as that. It’s a total numbers game, I usually email around 200 people and from that I get maybe 40 tweets.

James: Nice! Very nice! Well this is kind of in line with the Jonah Berger stuff as well, right? It is getting those people that inside scoop which instantaneously more pre-inclined to share it because they feel like they are delivering value and ahead of the curve on this stuff so I can see how that works extremely well. I am going to check out that, the app is called what? Buzz -?

Brian: Buzz Sumo.

James: Perfect! Buzz Sumo. That will be in the show notes for sure. Now we talked a lot about great content and distribution, what are the other activities that we could be doing in SEO that would yield a high activity that you suggest our listeners invest in?

Brian: I would invest more in keyword research. Back when I used to do client work with SEO, there is this frustrating thing that basically everyone who does client work can understand. You take on a new client and he basically says, I have 5 keywords that I want to rank for, here they are, go do it. And a lot of times, those keywords are just not a good fit for those guy’s business or that woman’s business. The keywords that that person comes up with, they are not only usually insanely competitive, but they won’t even bring customers because they are so broad and general. So for example, if you were selling shoes online, someone searching for red heels is going to convert better for you than someone searching for shoes, right? Shoes make up a lot more searches, it is also much more competitive. But the specificity of the keyword – forget about competitiveness, that person is going to convert and much more likely become a customer. It is like insurance, you sell life insurance and someone searching for life insurance for a 65 year old is going to convert a lot better than someone searching for life insurance that could be a student doing a term paper, right? That could be not your customer. So for me the number 1 high value thing for keyword research. For me that is more important than link building and SEO, for me that is more important thing that you can do because that is sort of the compass that guides the rest of SEO. If you don’t have keywords, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know if you are making progress and you don’t know if you are optimizing the right words. If you don’t have the keyword in line, just kind of write this content and hope people search for whatever it is you put out as opposed to creating content about what people already searched for which is a much smarter strategy.

James: Yeah, so where does keyword research fit in your sort of content development program? Does it come pre-content idea or do you come up with a suitable piece of content and then see what keyword terms are going to be relevant for that particular piece of content?

Brian: I go both directions. So usually I let the keywords sort of guide my thinking, so that is the strategy that I recommend most people do because you don’t really have to wonder the demand for what you are writing if you have keywords that has a lot of search volume. The beautiful thing about keyword research is that even if there was not an SEO I’d still use it because it gives you objective data about what people are searching for online. Not just people but your customers are searching for online so there is really not any reason even if you don’t care about SEO, if you look at keywords, you can see how many people search for the keywords, the trend, whether it is becoming more popular or less popular over time. It is awesome data that you can get anywhere. It is really market research.

James: Yeah, and it guides conversions as well, right? If you understand the psychology and the language patterns of your prospects, you can adapt your content style to fit the wording that they are using themselves.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely! That is a good point. That doesn’t have anything to do with SEO but that’s where keyword research can help, the reason is I’m saying it’s such a high value thing, not just for SEO but sometimes I get a constant idea or a case study will come up, and then I have to go the other way, right? So when I have the case study on hand, and then I look at the keywords and see okay, if someone is looking for information on a topic or a case study, what keyword would they use in Google? And that’s where I go the other direction. So it can go both ways, I don’t think one is right or wrong, it kind of depends. If you have no ideas, you have your keywords, but if you already have a list of stuff, then you can form it around the keywords that are already out there.

James: Yeah, well, let us finish up with a non-SEO related question because I have seen you doing something that’s fairly innovative that I too have been getting good results with, and that is the content upgrade. I think you have been getting pretty good conversions with it recently. Tell us a bit about that.

Brian: Amazing! So this strategy alone has basically tripled the conversions on my site and for months I struggled. I mean, I have a guy working for me and all he does is split testing. And we’ve had some tiny improvements but nothing compared to the content upgrade and I noticed that you are using it and you are using it the exact same way I use it on backlinko. And basically what you do is, for every piece of content that you publish, whether it is a podcast interview or a blog post, you create a resource specific to that post. So what I used to do was at the end of the post, I’d be like, do you like that content? Then sign up for my newsletter. And Neil says it’s not really an enticing offer, like no one is going to wake up in the morning and say oh, I can’t wait to sign up in someone’s newsletter. Fact is, no one cares about your newsletter and no one cared about mine. So I noticed some people doing this and I decided to give this try and it was just an absolutely astronomical increase in conversions when I did and it did not take that much time. I would say it takes and extra 20 minutes to set up this post related resource and using it on the site but I am sure you’ve seen James the conversion difference is insane.

James: Yeah, absolutely astronomical. Completely different! We had Tim Paige as well from Lead Pages a few episodes ago and he was sharing the stats across their site and I think they had somewhere a threefold increase in terms of opt ins per day when they created this post specific opt in bribes so the difference is astronomical.

Brian: Yeah, it is awesome. And I actually use Lead Pages too for the content upgrade and that’s what I recommend because it works really well together like peanut butter and jelly.

James: Perfect! Let’s leave things on peanut butter and jelly and share with our listeners where they can go to find out a little bit more about you Brian, backlinko would be one place, where else can we send people off to?

Brian: Well, that’s definitely the best place to go and then sign up for the newsletter which is good, it’s just that no one is signing up for content upgrade. The other place to check out is Twitter which is @backlinko.

James: Perfect! Well I found you as a result of a referral from Neil and I signed up to your newsletter and I have to say it is valuable stuff so I am going to suggest to you the listener, head on over to backlinko.com, why don’t you try opting in via the content upgrade and then get a hold of Brian’s newsletter. I am sure it will be well worth your time. So thank you for your time today Brian, it has been invaluable and perhaps we can do it all again sometime in the future.

Brian: Sounds good James. Thanks for having me!

So there you go, that was Brian Dean from Backlinko.com. Now to help you get the most from backlinks and guest-o-graphics outreach strategy mentioned by Brian in today’s show, I put together for you a swipe file containing instructions and the exact email copy used by Brian in his own outreach program. Plus as a very special extra bonus, I am also including the email copy that I have used to land regular guest post contributions with the likes of Gulf Business News Magazine and Entrepreneur Middle East. To download these special bonuses plus the MP3 full transcript, and episode artwork for today’s show, go to TrafficJamCast.com/45 where you can also join the discussion from today’s episode.

Thank you for listening in to the show, I will be back again for another episode real soon! Be sure not to miss out on any of the future updates by subscribing via iTunes and Stitcher radio which you can do by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. Remember to also head on over to the main website, Veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and to learn how I can help you get more leads and sales with a range of done for you traffic services.

We end this week’s show with a Traffic Jam chosen by our guest today and he’s gone for the track titled Welcome to the Jungle and it is by Guns N’ Roses. See you soon!

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our guest. Brian Dean has selected Welcome to the Jungle by Guns N’ Roses. The track Welcome to the Jungle was featured on the band’s debut solo album Appetite for Destruction which reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and number twenty-four on the UK Singles Chart. The track was released on October 3, 1987.

Guns N’ Roses – Welcome to the Jungle

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT:

So you can get started with implementing the backlink grabbing strategies featured in todays show, I’ve put together a special bonus bundle for you.

This free bonus includes:

  1. A copy-and-paste swipe file containing the exact email templates Brain Dean uses to get backlinks on high value resource pages and from infographic posts.
  2. The word-for-word email copy I’ve used to land guest posts with top publications like Entrepreneur Magazine. (A bonus strategy not mentioned on todays show)
  3. A full PDF transcript of the interview with Brian, plus MP3 and exclusive episode artwork.

Click the link below for instant access to your free bonus material:

Traffic Jam 45 Bonuses Download

About James Reynolds

James is passionate about helping you get more traffic and sales from search engines. Join 3223+ subscribers who get traffic tips from James weekly