A1.3 How to Research & Create a “Link Magnet”

In this video I discuss:

  • How to create a high-quality “link magnet”
  • Researching link magnets to find out what’s working

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A1.3 How to Research & Create a “Link Magnet” Transcript Below

Okay!

So, you know what backlinks are, you know why we’re doing this, you know what the payoff is. But at some point, you got to sit down and start doing the work.

The first step in the process is creating, what I’ve been calling a “link magnet”. A resource that is so compelling and so powerful that when you start reaching out to other webmasters, some of which may even be indirect competitors, they’re so blown away by your content that they give you a link on their site – because it’s that helpful to their readers.

That kind of beckons the question: “how the hell do I do that?”

That’s what we’re going to talk about now. We can kind of a make it a process, it’s not as intimidating as you think it is. It’s really overwhelming in concept. Once you dig in here after this lesson, I think you’ll find that it’s pretty straightforward what you need to do.

Like I said, it’s not super complicated. Ideally, you want to pick a topic that’s broadly appealing in your industry. You don’t want a super specific article on a very narrow subject because it’s going to really limit you ability to get backlinks, it’s going to limit the webmasters (the website owners that you’re reaching out to) their ability to relate to it, how helpful it is to their audience, broadly speaking.

Typically, you’re going to pick kind of a broadly appealing topic in your industry. You should know what that is if you’re in you’re niche. Something that pretty much everyone in that space would probably be somewhat interested in.

We will look at some examples for all intents and purposes right after this.

You want to find the most linked to and socially shared articles that exist for a topic. Those are both actually pretty easy to identify.

And then you want to blow them out of the water. Whatever someone has done that has been the best up to this point, you want to find it, you want to do much better than it. You just want to blow it away.

Just as a side note: this article will take a lot more time to put together. That’s okay because the payoff is substantially higher for this piece of content if you do it correctly than it is for your traditional piece of content. So, it’s okay if it takes you 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x as long to put together because it needs to be super compelling.

And it really needs to be something that blows people away, knocks their socks of to the point they’re just so overwhelmed at how good it is. That they log in to their WordPress account or their website, they hunt down the article that you’re asking about, they go through and they put in a link, they editorialize a link in there.

You have to think about that’s a lot of action for a busy website owner to do. So, your piece of content has to be compelling enough that it spurs them to take that action. It’s okay if it takes a lot of time.

Step one for creating a really good lead magnet, you may have some ideas coming to mind already (and that’s excellent), but it’s just, generally, researching link magnets from competitors. Things that are already on the internet that have already gotten a ton of traction, a ton of links.

You’ll learn a lot just from looking at these examples.

There are really two ways to do this, both are really effective.

One is just searching the keyword that you’re thinking about on Google, the topic you’re thinking about on Google, and looking at the Moz metrics – seeing what the top-ranked websites are for that topic.

The other one would be BuzzSumo. They have a free and a premium. Their free is limited, obviously, but it’s enough to get an idea of what you might want to write about, what you want to do with your article, etc.

We’re going to look at both of those. You can keep digging deeper and deeper and go overboard on this, but these two things should be more than enough to get you headed in the right direction.

You may end up checking a few different topics before you land on: “this is what I’m going to write my link magnet on.” But you shouldn’t really need to step outside of searching on Google and searching on BuzzSumo.

There are all kinds of tools. You could use premium and free. Once you got past this, in my opinion, it’s just a time suck and it’s just not necessary because you’ll be able to get what you need from just these two checks.

Let’s take a look here really quick. I’m going to hop over here into Chrome and I’ve already got a search term pulled up.

The outreach that I’m modeling this lesson for is an article on StoppingScams. I can’t remember it, like I said, the exact title. But it’s something like 60 free ways to promote your website, 60 free ways to promote your blog, or something like that.

That’s about getting traffic. So, I could search things like: how to promote your website, best ways to promote your website, how to get traffic to your website, free ways to get traffic to your website, free ways to promote your website. I could search all of those and start looking at the contents and see what it looks like.

For now, I’ve just pulled up “how to get traffic to your website”. In a couple of tabs, I’ve pulled up a couple of ones that are really good, really authoritative sources. One of them is Brian Dean, himself, of Backlinko.com, and Neil Patel of Quick Sprout and Crazy Egg, and all kinds of other companies is also pulled up here.

We can see here that this page has a PA of 75, PA of 70, PA of 42, PA of 62, page authority of 62. If you don’t understand what these metrics mean, you need to visit it in the core FIMP training. We talk about these metrics when we are talking about keyword research. So, check that section if this doesn’t make any sense to you.

The page authority here, obviously, is super high. And that means that these guys have gotten some really authoritative links, there’s no other way to get really high page authority.

You’ll see things like: 25 ways to increase traffic, 25 (blank), the top 10 (blank), the 100 best (blank). Those are all really good resources to get links. Those are great lead magnets. Whenever you’re talking about number of, and it’s a high number, an overwhelming number, those do really well.

Another thing that do really well are really good infographics. So, if you have a web design background, go for it. If not, I wouldn’t worry about it too much because it can get expensive and overwhelming. I would just focus on creating a top 10 list, a 25 best ways, or something that’s just super overwhelming, or definitive guides. Definitive guides work really, really well too.

You don’t even have to go that route. Of course, a fair amount of the reason that these are ranking so well is because it’s Brian Dean and Neil Patel, who are two internet marketing thought leaders – very, very established, so their stuff is always going to get a lot of links. They’ve got massive reputations and massive followings, so they don’t really need to play the same games we do.

You could still see, even though it’s not labeled definitive guide, this is a massive, massive resource. This would be a good thing to study and say: “okay, what are they saying? What are these guys talking about? What are they suggesting as ways to increase traffic to your website?” And you could model your own link magnet after that, your own link resource on your website.

Going after referral traffic blah, blah, blah – so these are all really good. And you would just go over these. You would find these, you’d hunt them down, and you would say: “okay, this is what people are linking to. This is the type of content that people are really enjoying and other webmasters are linking to as authoritative resources.” So, it makes sense that you would model yours after that.

You just switch up different keywords, take a look here, we still got PA 64, page authority 33, page authority 25, 45. These are still getting some really authoritative links.

Again, the whole idea here is you would just look at these, read over them pretty thoroughly, and you’d say: okay, this is the kind of resource that people are really seeing as an authoritative thought leader and they’re linking to – because, again, there’s no other way for them to build authority.

This one’s actually pretty brief, all things considered. It probably has to do with the fact that it’s Wix, as well. It’s a website builder.

Again, they’re going to have a huge following and a big reputation and instantly be labeled a credible source.

Usually, when you see link magnets, they’re pretty long. This one’s pretty short too, overall. But, again, Outbrain, really established company.

This is more what I would be looking to model it after. 50 free places to promote your website. Just a long, long list with the description. This takes some time to put together. Someone put a lot of work into this.

You would just look at all these. You’d switch up the keywords, you can do it on Google and you can also come over and you can do it on BuzzSumo – it’s just buzzsumo.com, one word.

Let’s see what’s going on here.

We can see, this has been shared 450 times, 435, 425 times. So, just take a look at these too. This is from Pinterest to your blog. It’s not really what I’m researching, so I’m going to close that one out. Although you can look at it and see what they were saying just to get some ideas.

That’s a dinky, really annoying, crappy website. Page authority not as high, so I’m going to go ahead and close this one out because we’ve already seen things that were much, much better than that, much more authoritative than that.

Again, this is more along the lines of what you typically see for a link magnet. It’s kind of image-heavy but a lot of information. Still not quite as long as some of the other ones.

BuzzSumo can also be a really good way to find inspiration, see what people are sharing. The shorter you keep your search term, the more shares you’re probably going to see for the most part. The longer tail keywords are going to bring up few results.

Also, the more narrow your search term gets, and the more niche-specific your search term gets, you’re not going to get as good a result from BuzzSumo as you’ll get just from searching on Google and looking at the metrics in the Moz bar. Because, again, I can’t overemphasize this: these are effective link magnets because there’s no other way, they got authority as high as 64, as high as 70, 75 without getting a lot of links.

That’s that. It takes some time. This is probably at least a couple hours of research – at least 1 to 2 hours of research, maybe more. Especially if you don’t know a whole lot about this subject, you may end up doing 5, 6, 8, 10 hours of research.

And that’s okay because, again, what you need to do is all of these things you’re seeing, you need to do better, you need to go above and beyond, you need your list to be longer, you need your details to be better, you need the content to be more attractive.

There are all kinds of ways to create a better piece of content. The most traditional and straightforward is to make it longer, make it more in depth, give more detail. You don’t want to get excessive, you don’t want to talk about things that aren’t helpful, you want to stay on topic, but you just want to go deeper than anyone else went. And that’s what we did and what you’ll see we did in the article that I’ll share from StoppingScams that we’ll be reaching out and promoting.

Let’s hop in and take a look at that really quick.

60 Ways to Promote Your Blog – this is the article on StoppingScams. So this is what our link magnet came out to. This is an EXCELLENT example of a link magnet. You can just see right off the bat, this is an overwhelmingly in-depth, helpful… I mean, you could work off of this piece of content for months if you were looking for ways to promote your website for free.

I think this came out to something like 13,000, 12,000 words, something like that – which is a little overboard. Yours doesn’t have to be that long. Your link magnet could be 6,000 words, 7,000 words, 5,000 words.

All of these are okay. It’s not like you need to go way overboard, but let’s see. It’s taking forever to look because it’s a really, really, really long article. Word count: 11,633. Not too shabby, but it puts everything else we’ve just seen to shame. Really goes in-depth, lots of information.

This is the kind of thing you want. Again, especially in an industry like internet marketing, when we’re going to be doing link outreach, it’s just so competitive – you need it to really blow people away. That’s what you want to go for. You really want to blow people away when they check it out, when they click on the link from the email you send them and check it out. Because it has to if you want to get those backlinks.

You’re welcome to check this out if you want to read over it more thoroughly yourself. It’s stoppingscams.com/60-ways-to-promote-your-blog/. I’m not going to go into it in great detail because, again, you’ll learn enough from just researching your competitors to put out a really, really good, really high-quality link magnet.

So, just do the research, search on Google, look at the most authoritative sites, change up the keyword, and then search on BuzzSumo as a supplement, as well, if you want more information and see more examples, and then take everything you see and do better. Do better, go deeper, be better, be more helpful, provide more value, and you’re going to end up with a link magnet.

After we do that, we can get into the really fun stuff. And that’s when we start doing the outreach and starting to get the links. But first, of course, we need to talk a little bit more about what kinds of links you should be going for.

So, that’s what the next lesson is about.

If you have any questions, as always, feel free to write them down post them in the Facebook group. I’ll keep an eye out for them.

Otherwise, I’ll see you in the Facebook group and I’ll see you in the next video!

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