white-hat backlinks Archives - Internet Marketing Project

A1.9 How to Use the “Done for You” Template for Broken Linkbuilding

In this video I discuss:

How this template compares to the one used for the Skyscraper Method
How to use this template (download link in Lesson A1.8) manually vs. how to do it using MailShake, Woodpecker, or another cold outreach automation tool

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

A1.9 How to Use the “Done for You” Template for Broken Linkbuilding Transcript Below

Okay!

Now that you know what broken linkbuilding is, you know how to do it, where to find the links, I’m going to walk you through really quickly how to use the “done for you” template for broken linkbuilding.

You’re going to find, again, that it’s just like the Skyscraper template, but with a few small tweaks. It works the exact same way – where we have a template written in Microsoft Word that you can copy-paste into email, or you can just use that template with a third party tool, and the fields are pulled over from the columns in the spreadsheet.

I’ve mentioned this in the Skyscraper method, I’m going to repeat it, I’m not including any affiliate links, I’m not trying to make more money by telling you this, just it’s for your own good, you will save hours upon hours.

I wish there were a better way to automate collecting all of the information, but at the very least, you can automate the outreach by going with the tool I discussed in the Skyscraper method. These tools change constantly so you can just google email outreach tools, email outreach automation, cold email automation, cold email tools and find the most up-to-date ones.

As I record this video, Woodpecker.co and MailShake.com are both really, really good ones. Right now, they’re reasonably priced. Over the years, the pattern I’ve seen is: it will all start off reasonably priced and they’ll get really, really, really expensive, and then new competitors move in that do the same thing for much less, and the cycle starts all over. That’s why I say you may have to google it.

I still really, really recommend using those because using these templates with automated tools, they work just as well. But if you’re doing it all manually, it’s just so much manual, tedious work that you can cut out for $20, or $30, or $40 a month.

Let’s take a quick look at the template that we were just looking at and filling out in the other video.

I’ve just got a placeholder here: StoppingScams, just to show you how this works. But we filled out a couple of others as well.

The way this is going to work… I’m going to close this down really quick and open it back up so that it populates with all of the fields we just filled out in the last video.

You’ll get a few prompts, you just have to close through them all. And then, you’ll get this opened up. It’s automatically linked to the spreadsheet that’s in the same folder.

If you move these things to a different folder, their link is going to break. You’re going to have to link them back up by hitting select recipient list, get list, open data source, and you’re going to have to hunt down the file.

Just out of the box, they should work really well, as long as you keep them wherever they downloaded to on your computer.

This is what it all looks like.

We’ve got all of this over her. I still need to delete this column out of here. We’ve got all of this in here. You can preview it just by clicking this button right here: “View Merged Data”. And now, it’s filling out the information.

It says:

Hey, Ian!

I was looking for resources about free ways to get traffic about an hour ago, and I found your page of free traffic resources (link to the page) was incredibly helpful! Thank you for putting it together!

I noticed a small problem though – there’s a broken link within your resources”

• Broken Link Label: (the actual URL)

What I’ve put in this field is to help you see what you need to fill out. This is how this field should be filled out to populate this way.

If you just put the broken link URL, that’s okay too. But in the message, it won’t make it as easy for them to see which link it is whenever they go back to their resources page and try to find it, try to track it down.

I just thought, you might like to know on case you didn’t already.

You would sign your name. You don’t actually sign your name. Put your actual name.

P.S. I’m sure you get requests like this all of the time, but I’d be honored if you’d consider adding one of my site’s resources to that page while updating the broken link above!

I recently published (you would link your resource here – you would not only put the title of the resource, but you would make it an actual link before you carry this template over to either the email you’re going to send or to the automation tool you’re using), and I think you’ll find that it’s a great addition to your already incredible list of resources!

If not, I completely understand – no hard feelings. Keep up the great work!

And then, I’d say, probably somewhere around 4 or 5 days later, there’s a follow up message that you could use as well.

Again, if you’re using an automated tool, you would just use this section because the automated tools automatically send your follow up messages as a reply, so you wouldn’t have to include your original message as part of the template. The tool that you’re using should automatically do that.

But if you’re doing this all manually and you’re just taking this all, you’re copying it, and then you’re pulling it over to Gmail or to your preferred mail client, pasting it, send. And then you would come up here and you would say: “okay, next person”.

Interesting. I guess I hadn’t saved yet. Sorry about that. Small hiccup.

So, I’m going to save that and re-open this again so that you can see how this actually works.

This is the prompt word saying: “hey, from the spreadsheet, what sheet do you want to pull this from? What cell range do you want to pull from?”

So we’ve got it back in here. Now we would click the preview again. It goes through to the second entry. And now we have: “Hello, Atlantic Tattoo Removal!”, or we have “Hello, TatAway.com Editors!”.

Or this could also just be, depending on how you put it in here, you could just say: “TatAway Editors”, “TatAway.com Editors”, whatever. I was looking for resources about tattoo removal…

If you’re doing this manually, you would just copy this, take it over to your email client, paste it, send, next one.

Just as I said with the Skyscraper method, do not use your actual Gmail address or your email address from your website’s domain. Create a new Gmail account to do this. Just in case you get some kind of penalty for spam.

If you’re doing a good job with these outreach messages and you’re not just shotgunning them, that shouldn’t really become an issue. But just in case it is, we don’t want to damage your existing email accounts that you actually use for everyday business.

We certainly don’t want your domain, in my case it would be RueTattoo.com, if too much spam get sent from that domain, it can essentially cause email clients to start to punish that domain, to blacklist that domain, and associate that domain with spam – which makes it much harder to get into people’s inboxes. That is not something we want.

Long story short: just create a new Gmail account whenever you’re doing outreach. Just create a Gmail account, use it only for outreach, nothing else. In that way, if it ever gets penalized, you can just open another Gmail account, do it all over again.

That’s how the template works. If you’re doing it manually, you would just scroll through these. And if, ideally, you’re using one of the automated tools, you would just upload this spreadsheet. Very straightforward. Every tool makes it very easy. You would map the fields in the template to the spreadsheet and then it would just automatically send all that information out for you.

I highly recommend those anytime I’m doing outreach for links or anything else, some kind of promotion, I’m absolutely using one of those tools because otherwise, it’s just way too tedious and hard to keep up with.

That’s that.

I hope it wasn’t at all too fast pace for you. I think it’s probably pretty clear. It’s daunting to think about starting it, but again, it is just so worthwhile to do these things.

I cant recommend highly enough that you put in the effort here because this is so powerful for search engine optimization and getting rankings a lot faster.

Again, the Skyscraper method is definitely the better of the two, I would say, but this is also a really good method – which is why I teach it here.

If you have any questions, as always, feel free to post them to the Facebook group. Otherwise, I hope you feel how well this stuff is setting you up for success. I will keep putting it together as much as I can.

If I don’t see you in the Facebook group, I will just see you in the next video.

Talk to you then.

A1.8 How to Find Resources & Links Pages with Broken Links

In this video I discuss:

What you’ll need to find broken links on “links” & “resources” pages
Which search phrases to use to find broken links
A step-by-step look at this process and how to compile the contacts you want to request links from
An introduction to the “Done for You” spreadsheet and outreach template I’ve created for you, which you can download here >>

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

A1.8 How to Find Resources & Links Pages with Broken Links Transcript Below

Okay!

So, now that you know what we’re doing, you need to know how to do it – kind of essential.

In this video we’re going to talk about how to find resources and links pages with broken links on them.

There are a handful of things you’re going to need. The first thing you’re going to need is time. This is definitely a time-consuming process because even once you find the links or resources pages, which I’m going to show you how to find them fairly easily, but it can still take some digging.

You still will find plenty that don’t have any broken links on them or the broken links that they have on them may not be totally relevant. It definitely takes a while to compile this list, just like it did for the Skyscraper method except there are two differences.

The nice thing about broken linkbuilding is that there are no premium tools required. Everything you need to build these links is totally free.

The other difference would be it definitely takes more time to find links through broken linkbuilding, I’d say, than through the Skyscraper method.

Because Skyscraper method, you kind of pull up a list of someone’s backlinks, and you can go boom, boom, boom, boom, and fill them out. It’s still tedious. Especially looking up the name and all of that information, filling out that spreadsheet totally. But at the same time, it’s fast. It’s a little bit faster than broken linkbuilding.

Both are really good, both result in really powerful links. Yes, they’re both time-consuming, but they also both have very high payoff if you see things through and actually put in the legwork.

So the first thing you’re going to need is time. The other things you’re going to need are Google (just the search engine), and a Google Chrome extension called “Check My Links”. Also, inherently, that means that you need to have Google Chrome installed on your computer.

What we’re going to do in Google is we’re going to search phrases like your NICHE + (in this exact string, with no spaces) inurl:links – that won’t change. The niche in all caps there will change but the inurl:links will not change.

And the same thing for this: you would just put NICHE + inurl:resources. What this search string does is it’s searching your niche as the keyword.

The example I’m going to be going through in this video is tattoo removal, assuming sticking back to the original site in the FIMP training, RueTattoo. So it’s tattoo removal + inurl:links.

What that’s doing is it’s looking for websites and pages on the internet that have to do with tattoo removal. And in the URL of that page, it has the word links somewhere or it has the word resources somewhere. And if I remember, I’ll point that out when we hop in to actually looking at this.

You can search for these, just generally without the “inurl” code. You can search tattoo removal + links, tattoo removal + resources. You’ll get a lot more results, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not going to be as targeted and as pinpointing as using the inurl string as part of your search.

The other thing is: say for example, tattoo removal – once I went through tattoo removal, I could change up the keyword that I used for searching to. I could say tattoo removal cream, I could just say tattoo, generally, I could say laser tattoo removal. We can mix that keyword up and get some different results to help fill out the spreadsheet more.

But of course, again, if you’re trying get 30, 40, 50, 60+ of these in a spreadsheet, it’s going to take a few hours of work. But, again, it’s worth it. These backlinks are worth it if you put in the time to get them.

We’re going to hop over here and I’m going to take a look at some of this. I’ve done a little bit of legwork. Typically, I try not to pull too much on screen for these videos before I do them because I want to give you an accurate representation of what the process looks like, but at the same time, this is so time-consuming. I felt like it was a little bit monotonous and not very helpful for you to see the process.

But I’ll show a little bit of it either way. I’ve got a handful of things pulled up here. Of course, the first thing is the Check My Links extension. I have already added it to Chrome. It will put this little button up here in the top right corner. That’s all it is.

Totally free extension. If you just google Check My Links extension, Check My Links Google Chrome extension, you’ll find this. And this is what it should look like. It’s very highly reviewed.

After you’ve installed that extension, you would start searching. You can see the exact string that I’ve used here. I’ve used tattoo removal + inurl:links. I think, I’m on page 2 it looks like right now.

I’ve pulled up a few from page 1 and a handful from page 2 as well. We can see links is in the URL here, we can see links is in the URL here, this is exactly what we’re looking for in links.

The same thing for resources. I will say that in my experience, the links search is going to bring up more relevant results, but resources is also helpful. You can also play with other words here that you would like to see in a resource or you would frequently see in a resources or links page as part of the URL.

In my experience, these are definitely the two most worthwhile. And links, by far, is more worthwhile than resources. But I wanted to show you both of them.

Of course, like I said, you can just change this to tattoo, you can change this to laser tattoo removal, you can change this to tattoo removal creams, you can change this to tattoo removal reviews. All of those are going to change your results a little bit, but of course it’s also going to be helpful because it’s going to give you more pages to link from.

You’ll also know that I’ve activated the Moz bar as we go through a lot of this. With the Moz bar, you’re going to be able to see the page authority of most of these pages. For the most part, they’re going to be reasonably, decently authoritative. It depends on your niche, of course, but a lot of the ones I see here are hovering or around PA 20. The domain authority is even higher for some of them.

Typically, again, these are going to be very worthwhile links. I’d say you can discount the ones that say PA 1, but at the same time, sometimes Moz bar just has a fluke and it doesn’t accurately pull up the page authority for one of these pages.

I wouldn’t pay too much attention to this. It adds in another factor that you have to keep mindful of and it just makes the whole thing much more tedious and complicates it more.

I would say for these particular links, of course, when we looked at the Skyscraper method, we only wanted high-authority pages. All of these links, I would say most of them are going to be authoritative anyways, all of them are going to be relevant as long as you’re using the right search phrases.

I wouldn’t say that you need to keep too close of an eye on the page authority as you’re pulling these onto your list. It’s certainly helpful if you do, it’s just more tedious and it complicates things more.

Personally, I’m going to say if I were doing it, I wouldn’t pay a whole lot of attention because most of them are going to be authoritative enough anyways. It just complicates things unnecessarily. Whenever that’s the case, I’m not going to do it, personally.

I’ve pulled up a handful of these from these results. You could see them here. You could see all of the good links are highlighted in some shade of green. Either they’re totally valid or they are redirecting correctly. But you’ll see the invalid links are pulling up highlighted red.

If I refresh this page, you’ll see that nothing’s highlighted. What you have to do is you have to click the Check My Links extension and it just goes through really quickly and it checks all the links, highlights the bad ones, highlights the good ones.

This right here is a bad link. We’re not going to write the people that own this site. We’re not going to write BadTattoos.com and say: “hey, you got a broken link on AtlanticTattooRemoval.com.” What we want to do is we want to reach out to the people at AtlanticTattooRemoval. We would want to find their contact information.

I’m going to start pulling these into the spreadsheet for example next time. So, I just took the URL of the page on their site, and we’ll go over this more in-depth in the next video where I walk you through the done-for-you tools.

The other thing is we want to take note of the bad links. I’m going to right click it (two finger click on a Mac), and I’m going to go copy link address,and I’m going to paste the link there, I’m going to give it a label too. I’m going to say: Bad Tattoos. That will make sense again more in the next video.

Article Topic: tattoo removal.

Actually, we don’t need this in this particular spreadsheet, so leave that one blank because that’s covered by the broken link. I’m just going to delete this out of there.

We would need to go to AtlanticTattooRemoval and we would want to find their contact information. So, Contact us. There we go – info@atlantictattooremoval.com. And if we couldn’t find their name, which is probably going to be the case for this particular website, I don’t even see an About us.

What you can do here if you don’t have a name is you can just put the company name. You can also put something like company name, website name + editor – something along those lines. Just use your best judgment there.

Since we’re just doing this example really quick, I’m just going to put Atlantic Tattoo Removal and I’m going to put their domain: AtlanticTattooRemoval.com.

Again, that’s the time-consuming part of this process – is you would go through here and anywhere you found a bad link, you would take down this information. Of course, we took down the URL, we took down the company name, we’ve found their email address, etc.

You’ll see how that all comes together in the next video. But I want to walk you through a few more examples to show you obviously every page you pull up is not going to have bad links, unfortunately.

I would say it’s usually somewhat close if you’re pulling up a really good search on Google, at least somewhere between 20% and 30% of these pages is going to have a bad link, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less.

The majority, I would say, of pages you pull up are not going to have bad links, and that’s okay. You don’t do anything with those. You just close them down.

Like this one too has a bad link. This is another one I pulled up from the tattoo removal + inurl:links search. We can see here that on this page, under Friday Links & the Beauty of MindBody, we have Tattoo parties raise the risk of health complications. It’s a 404 link, that page is no longer there. It can’t be found.

It looks like this should link to an article but it doesn’t. We would just take all this stuff again (the URL), we would drop into the links/resources page URL. We could say: tattoo parties raise a risk of health complications, and then I’m going to paste the link there. It’s a long link but it’s a link.

We would just fill the rest of this out. This, again, would be tattoo removal. Page of tattoo removal resources would be the same. Article URL is blank – I’ll actually delete this before I upload the spreadsheet for you all. We’ll just say: admin@tattaway.com. We would actually look it up, don’t just guess.

But just for the sake of getting through this quickly, so that we can see how this all works together in the next video with some real data that I pulled from this video. This is what the process looks like. You just keep going through.

So that’s another one. There’s another broken link here, so I would take the information for Northern Cosmetic Laser Practice. I would add this to the spreadsheet too. This is just what the process looks like.

I’ll close these out and then I would keep going through my search here. The next one on the list would be Cat Tattoo. I would open up Cat Tattoo, and I would click this button – it’s going to check all of the links. There are no invalid links here, so you close it.

BayAreaLaserDoctor.com, I’m going to open this one up, check links. All of the links here are good. Nothing.

That’s what the process looks like. Whenever someone pulls up a bunch of examples and just shows the examples it can start to feel really wrong when you’re doing it yourself, and just like: “this isn’t what it looks like when Ian did it. I must be doing something wrong.”

No, that’s not the case at all. Most of this is just you opening up new tabs. you’re opening it up, you’re clicking it, you’re finding that there are or are not any bad links.

It looks like there’s another bad link here. We would take down the contact information, fill up the spreadsheet for Aurora Plastic Surgery, LLC. We would fill all of these details into here, and then we would just keep going. That’s what the process looks like.

Again, ideally, once you get things on their way, if you’re doing a lot of outreach, ideally you would have a virtual assistant helping with a lot of these tasks that you were paying somewhere between $3-5 an hour, and they were just going.

You could write the articles, and then you could train them how to look up resources for outreach for the Skyscraper method, and you could say: “hey, I want links to this article.” And they would do all the work from there, whether it be Skyscraper method, or the broken linkbuilding, or any other linkbuilding method.

Because this stuff is tedious work and for the most part, it’s pretty unskilled labor. So you could train someone to do it pretty easily. You could even just give them access to these videos and they would be able to learn how to do it pretty easily with a little bit of assistance from you, email or Skype calls back and forth.

Ideally, this is something you hand off in time because it is really tedious. But again, just because it’s tedious, does not mean it’s not worthwhile. When you get these links, it builds your authority so much faster than if you just let it all happen naturally.

They’re definitely worth getting. Don’t forget that. As much as it feels like that’s not the case when you’re going through it, if you’re promoting a really good quality article that you’ve written as a link magnet, whether using this method or the Skyscraper method, and you’re following this training closely, you absolutely should end up with some really high-authority links, which most people take at least 18-24 months to get.

If you’re following this training, you could probably start getting those links within the first 3 to 6 months. That’s going to help a lot with your website authority and your search engine rankings.

That’s that. That’s the process of actually finding these links and filling out the spreadsheet that you’ve been provided. Of course, this spreadsheet is linked below this video, so download it there. The spreadsheet plus the template together are in a compressed file, which you can download.

In the next video, the final video for broken linkbuilding, we’ll go over exactly how these go together. It’s exactly how the Skyscraper method templates worked as well, just with a couple of small differences.

If you have any questions, feel free to write them down, post them to the Facebook group. I’ll keep an eye out for them over there. Otherwise, I will just see you in the next video.

Talk to you then.

A1.7 Introduction to Broken Linkbuilding

In this video I discuss:

An overview of broken linkbuilding
How broken linkbuilding applies to what’s shown in this training vs. other pages
What you need to make sure broken linkbuilding efforts ACTUALLY pay off

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

A1.7 Introduction to Broken Linkbuilding Transcript Below

What’s going on, folks?

So you know everything there is to know about Skyscraper method. Ideally.

If you haven’t watched A1.1 through A1.6 and you’re just skipping ahead to A1.7, or 1.8, or 1.9, don’t do that because there’s some foundational information.

Even If you’re not using the Skyscraper method, which wouldn’t make all a lot of sense to me since it is the BEST method for getting white hat backlinks these days.

But if for some reason you were thinking about skipping ahead, go back because there’s some foundational content in the first 6 videos in this section that are pretty essential to your success in white hat linkbuilding at all.

Assuming you’ve watched the other videos up to this point, we are now going to dig into another method for white hat linkbuilding. And that is Broken Linkbuilding.

Before we dig into the actual how-to, of course I want to give a high-level overview, just so you know what’s coming.

Basically, what Broken Linkbuilding is you want to find authoritative pages in your niche or industry with broken links on them. So they’re linking to pages that are probably no longer there – is usually what a “broken link” is.

Either that’s because the website has gone dead or because that page was moved to somewhere else on another website or somewhere else on the same website. Anyway around it, now they have what’s known as a “broken link” – which is not good for the user experience.

Webmasters, website owners typically don’t like having broken links on their website but it’s not really something that’s easy to notice. If you have a website that’s hundreds or thousands of pages deep, you don’t know when there’s a bad link on one. Unless you do a link analysis regularly – which, I’d say, less than 1%, certainly less than 5%, but probably less than 1% of website owners do.

Essentially, what we’re doing is we’re finding these pages for them as kind of an active charity, we’re doing them a favor, and then we write the website owner to notify them: “hey, you’ve got a broken link or broken links on this page.” And then, you want to request a link to your own resource while they’re updating the page. We’ll see this in the email template within the new couple of videos.

Basically, what you’re saying is: “hey, I found this problem on your website. Really enjoyed the resource page but it’s got a broken link on it, just want to let you know. And hey, by the way, I actually have a really good resource that I think your readers would enjoy. They’re going to go perfectly on that page. While you’re updating it, you may consider adding it, if not, no hard feelings. But it would be pretty cool.”

There’s a linking method too where you can just find people with resource pages and reach out to them and say: “hey, I noticed you had a resource page. Would you mind to add my resource on there too?”

It’s not remotely as effective as if you reach out with an olive branch of doing them the service of finding the broken link, and then asking for a link to your own resource. It’s much, much more effective this way because you are offering value and requesting value in return, at the same time.

Not going to be 100%, right? Nothing is. But it’s definitely more effective than just reaching out and asking for a link.

There are a couple of things that I want you to keep in mind as you’re doing this. We’re going to be covering resources and links pages, mainly. Meaning that the pages we’re going to be looking for are pages that a website owner has put together and said: “hey, here are the links in this industry or resources on other sites that are really helpful to you, my website visitor.”

These are typically high-authority. A lot of the time they’re really high-authority and they’re easier to find broken links because it’s a collection of links where maybe these people have 5, 10, 15, 20+ links on one page.

Whereas a normal piece of content on their website, for one: there’s a ton of them to comb through if you’re looking at a website. On top of that, most of those pages probably aren’t going to have more than 3 or 4 outbound links to other sites. Whereas resource and link pages typically have a lot more links on them, so the statistical likelihood that they’re going to have broken links on them is higher.

It’s also worth noting that this works for all broken links, not just links and resource pages that I’m going to be showing here in this training. If you want to do this for other pages on people’s sites, that’s fine too. But definitely the lowest hanging fruit when you’re looking for broken links is going to be the links and resources pages.

The only other thing that I want to make sure you keep in mind, it’s similar to what I discussed in the Skyscraper method, if the article you’re requesting link to isn’t really high-quality, there’s no way you’re getting the link.

If you have an everyday, fairly average article, or even slightly above average article, it’s not going to be too compelling for them to include on this page of resources that is supposed to be some of the best resources in the industry, in the niche. So if you don’t have a really, really high-quality resource, you’re much less likely to get a backlink.

If you’re doing this, and doing this, you’re going: “man, I’m not getting any results! This stuff sucks!” you may just question whether or not you have a high enough quality resource.

Of course, we discussed that extensively in Lesson A1.3 – how to find the link magnets in your industry that are working really well already and modeling your link magnet after that.

Just make sure you’ve gone through that training. And do a good gut check before you start doing this because this takes a lot of time, takes hours upon hours to even compile the list of people you want to reach out to.

The last thing you want to do is do all of this work, all of this outreach, and the foundation wasn’t set properly because you didn’t have a good enough piece of content that was compelling enough for these website owners to link to from their pages.

That’s that.

That is the bird’s eye view of broken linkbuilding.

We’re going to get into the nitty gritty and I’m going to show you how to find these sites, the tools you need to find these sites, how to do it. And also, just like the Skyscraper method, I have created a spreadsheet and a template that you can use to reach out to these people, and just make it a lot easier on yourself.

One of the hardest things to do is write these templates, especially for people that have never done it before. I’ve already knocked that out for you. We’ll cover that in the next couple of videos as well.

Otherwise, if you have any questions at this point, feel free to post them in the Facebook group, I’ll get to them as soon as I can. Otherwise, I’ll just see you in the next video.

A1.6 Reaching Out to Get Backlinks (Skyscraper Method)

In this video I discuss:

How to use the “done for you” template tool I linked in Lesson A1.5
The premium tools you should use to cut out a lot of the tedious, time-consuming work (if you don’t want to do it manually)
Why you should setup a separate Gmail account for outreach efforts
How many contacts you should compile if you want to see decent results
Discussing whether or not this very time-consuming process is worth it

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

A1.6 Reaching Out to Get Backlinks (Skyscraper Method) Transcript Below

Okay!

So, you’ve put in all the tedious work to gather the list of contacts, and it’s just time to start outreach. I want to show you how to use the done-for-you template that I’ve put together, the spreadsheet, and the Microsoft Word document combined.

There are other ways to do it too, which I’ll show. But it’s important to realize that the trickiest part of this entire process has been taken care of for you.

For whatever reason, while I totally understand why a lot of people really struggle with writing these email templates and figuring out how to outreach correctly, that’s already knocked out for you. You have a professionally-written email template, you’re ready to rock, you’re ready to start getting backlinks.

At this point, of course, you should have your link magnet written, and you should have a list of highly-targeted prospects that you want links from.

It’s just a matter of gathering their name and email address to finish off that information and sending the emails.

When you’re sending the emails, you have 2 options here. I’ve set the system up so that you can do it free for as easily as possible. It’s tedious. My opinion is that: the premium subscriptions, depending on how much you’re spending on them because there’s a broad range, they’re very much worth the money because they save you a lot of tedious work.

I’m going to go over both options here.

I’ve designed this to be a free system for you – with the spreadsheet and the template (the outreach template you have). It will be the most tedious option, but it will also be free, which I know is important for a lot of people.

You would just use the provided Microsoft Word email template that’s already merged with the contacts list. So if you fill out that contacts list correctly, it should all move over. I’ll show you exactly what that looks like with the Microsoft Word template that I’ve created for you.

You would just go through each one of those previews and you would copy it, and you’d paste it over to your email, you’d hit send. Again, I’ll show what that looks like.

The other option is to use something like MailShake.com. I’ve used multiple services like this. I’ve used NinjaOutreach. There’s another one called PitchBox – that’s super expensive now, it’s like $300 a month. It’s an awesome software but it’s way overkill for what we’re doing here. There’s one called BuzzStream, that I want to say, they’re like $100 a month per user.

This changes fairly often. Two years ago, these guys were reasonably priced. I’ve done some research, and at the time I record this video, MailShake.com is only $20 a month per user. It may go up to $30 or $40 a month, then it’s still very much worth it.

Another one that I’ve used is Woodpecker.co. That’s another really good one. Just check those options and find the price point you like. I would say if they are still reasonably priced, MailShake.com or Woodpecker.co are the ones that I would recommend the most – just because they’re reasonably priced and they do what you need to do.

The cool thing about these is that you just import the same spreadsheet that I’ve given you access to, the template I’ve created for you. After you filled it out, you would just upload that spreadsheet and it’s going to do all of the hard work for you.

It’s going to automatically send follow-up emails. It’s also going to automatically send those follow-up emails as replies to the previous message, which is a pretty cool, little feature.

Whenever you’re going through it… I’ve written it so that you can manually do this as well. But if you’re using something like MailShake or Woodpecker, it’s going to automatically do a lot of that work for you and automatically send replies. So it looks much more natural, it looks like you’re replying to your original email. Which the more natural you can make these things look, the better your results are going to be.

One of the coolest things about these premium services is that you’re going to get metrics on how many people are opening your message, how many people have replied, how many of them have just bounced because you don’t have the right email address, etc.

I’d recommend MailShake but, also, you can do it manually. I think you’re going to find when you start doing it manually, that you really want to spend $20 a month to not do it manually anymore, but I wanted to give you the options.

Regardless of whatever method you use, if you’re doing it for free (which what I’m going to show), but also if you get on MailShake, it’s really easy to use their software. They always have really good training videos too.

Basically, you’ll just upload the spreadsheets and you say: “okay, this column is the email address, this column is the name.” And then you can also specify the custom columns that are in this template and say: “okay, in the email template, swap out here for the value in this column.” It functions the exact same way – the free set up I’ve given you, except it’s all automated, it all sends automatically, etc.

Regardless of whether you’re using free method or you’re using a premium service like MailShake or Woodpecker, set up a separate Gmail account. For the love of God, set up a separate Gmail account. Because what you can do if you’re not careful, it doesn’t happen if you’re not being really spammy, but you’re risking this Gmail account getting shut down.

If it’s not a Gmail account and it were on your own domain, you would be risking that your domain gets too much spam associated with the domain, and you start going in this people’s spam inbox.

When it comes to Gmail, you can just swap out to a different Gmail account if and when that ever happens. But in my experience, if you’re sending really well-written outreach templates, this isn’t really going to be an issue unless you’re just blasting way too much.

You really don’t want to send more than probably 25 or 30 of these emails everyday. Again, because if you start doing, like, 500 in a day, or even if you start doing 100 in a day, it starts to leave a pattern that can get you flagged for spam more quickly and lower your deliverability.

But again, the nice thing about a service like MailShake or Woodpecker is it automatically does that for you and it will stop sending those emails if your account gets limited because you’ve sent too many emails.

Again, it just cuts out a lot of the annoying fine details of doing it manually. But any way around it, whether you’re doing it manually or automatically, set up a separate Gmail account. Absolutely.

The other thing to remember is remember that the template is only as good as the information you put into it. If you’re just putting in a bunch of links that you look at the site and you’re just quickly pulling them and the site is a kind of site… you know like I looked at FeedBurner, I was like: “it’s going to be hard to get a link from these.” Even a couple that I’ve put on the list, it’s going to be hard to get a link from them. The most likely links that you’re going to get are individual bloggers, not companies.

That’s the majority the data you want in your spreadsheet. Of course, you still want it to be relevant, you still want them to be as high authority as possible, but the template is only as good as the information that you’re putting into it. That’s very important to remember.

You want to compile a list of at least 100 to 150 contacts, like I said, you can go more. If you get really sick and tired at 50 and you just say: “this is burning me out”, you can go less. But if you want to get a substantial amount of links, if you want to get at least 5 or 10 high-authority links – which there’s a lot to be said for that from this campaign, you probably want to compile at least 100 to 150 contacts.

Let’s take a quick look at this and then we’ll tie off this entire lesson here.

If we come in here, I wanted to show what this would look like if you just copied from the template that I’ve provided.

If we come in here, of course the first thing we need to do here really quickly is we need to come in and finish filling out this spreadsheet because we are missing the first name and email for the contact for a handful of these. We want to complete that really quickly.

You’re not always going to get good results out of this but we can put in the domain that we put in the spreadsheet, so we would just take this over to hunter.io. Again, with hunter.io, I think you get 100 free searches per month. So it’s limited unless you’re paying.

There are several different options here. For the sake of this video, I don’t want to bore you. What would probably be best if you were doing this yourself is to look some of these guys up and figure out who would be the best contact. Because it’s probably not Neil Patel, himself, he’s probably got a team member handling a lot of his content, and marketing efforts, and stuff like that – so that would be the right person to link out to.

hunter.io gives some really cool information here and just shows where they’ve pulled this information from.

I will say, again for the sake of this video and to not bore you, I’m just going to drop in Neil’s here. It looks like Neil’s is probably np@neilpatel.com. It looks like there’s also neil@neilpatel.com (20+ sources), we’ll pull this one instead. We’ll just pull this one over really quick so it’s neil@neilpatel.com.

Same thing with Brian Dean at Backlinko. We’ll just put in backlinko.com. It looks like brian@backlinko.com. Again, I would probably research if I were going to start sending these emails from this spreadsheet. This is just for teaching purposes. I would research who dmarc is. I would find out whether or not that’s the better contact, and I would reach out to him if I needed to.

We’ll come over here and do copy CopyBlogger. I would need to find out which one of these guys is the right contact for CopyBlogger. For now, we’ll just say it’s jerod@copyblogger.com. We would fill in the first name. I’m not going to keep doing these because it’s boring (I know), it’s monotonous (I know), but it’s what you have to do.

Once you you’ve filled out all this information, you have all of the contacts in here and you’ve filled it out fully, you want to save it.

If you’re doing this the free way, you want to open up the template. You’re going to get some notifications. You’ll get different notifications based on what form of Office you’re using, or all different kinds of things.

But you just want to click through the messages. I always get this message, I just click OK. And then it will pop this little dialog up here. This is already preset for you, so you don’t have to adjust anything. You just have to hit OK.

I have 2 messages in here. I have one message, and then another message that’s written to be sent 5 or 7 days later, maybe 3 or 5. You would play around with it, figure out what works for you.

What I’ve done here is I’ve done a mail merge in Microsoft Word that’s tied to that Excel spreadsheet where all the contacts are. If you want to see what this looks like, we can hit preview results and I can go right here. You can see now it reads:

Hello, Neil!

I was researching increasing traffic without SEO about an hour ago, and your article about increasing traffic without SEO was incredibly helpful!

I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you very much for putting it together…

You want to fill out your name here, and you want to fill out your resource here. You would not only do it in this message, but you also would do it if you’re using this free and you’re just copy-pasting over and over again, you would not only do it over here but you would also do it over here because we have the pasted reply over here.

My resource is right over here. 60 Ways to Promote Your Blog. So I’m going to label this 60 Free Ways to Promote Your Blog, and I could change that to website, whatever I wanted to do. Then I would insert the link.

Now this first message is ready to go, it’s all synced up with the mail merge. You’ll notice that these fields change depending on who it is. That’s the idea – is it’s a template.

You could just click through here and you’d say: “okay, this is the email to go to Ian.” So, you would copy, you’d come over to whatever mail client you were using, you’d paste in the message – it’s formatted in a way that it should paste over really, really well. We would pull the email from this spreadsheet. Like I said, it’s tedious, especially if you’re doing it for free.

We would pull the subject, which again is dynamic. This is dynamically updated, it’s part of the template. Pop that in there, and boom! You would just hit send. This is going to me, so I’ll hit send.

That’s it. You would do that over and over and over again.

Again, the better way to do it is definitely using a software to help you out. That takes a lot of this burden out and it will save you, literally, hours upon hours from this process. So it’s worth $20 to $40 a month, depending on who you’re working with, what site you’re working with.

I can’t recommend that highly enough. You can watch the demo here on MailShake’s site to see what they do.

You upload the same spreadsheets, and they’ll say: “okay, where is the name field? Where is the email field?” And you’d upload that spreadsheet, and then you would take this template in to MailShake and this template as well. You would just paste it in there and say: “okay, the article description field, I want it to be placed at this point in the email, here is the column in the spreadsheet”. And you would just match it up to this column in the spreadsheet.

For article topic, you would just match it up to that part of the spreadsheet. You can see them clearly labeled in the template. Article topic is article topic. Article description is in here a couple of times, but it’s article description. Article URL, I actually don’t have in here, but I have that information for reference and in case you wanted to work it in to your own template.

You can just adjust these for what works for you. You can tweak any of this. It’s a really good starting point. I think it gives you a really good head start, and that was my intention.

So, whether you’re doing it manually, which is tedious and time consuming, or you’re paying 20 or 40 bucks a month for the outreach software… and if you’re not using it, like if you’re just doing one round, just subscribe for a month and cancel and then come back a couple of months later when you want to go through this process. It’s not like you need to keep that subscription recurring.

That’s how you do it. That’s how you do that. Hopefully, it’s all really clear in your mind. Once you start doing this, it is totally, totally, totally worth it.

I want to tie off here and conclude this section. You’re probably seeing this and going: “Holy crap! That’s a lot of work!” It seems really tedious it seems really time consuming.

Gathering the information is tedious enough. And then, if you’re not paying for a premium subscription, just send each one of those emails individually. And then a few days later, just send each one of those follow ups individually.

Even just doing 25 of them or 30 of them a day, it gets really tedious and you’ve got to be asking yourself: “Is all of this worth it?!”

The answer to that question is absolutely! This is going to take somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks for you to do all of this. If you’re working 15 or 20 hours a week, it’s understandable that it’s going to take you some time. Set that expectation.

This isn’t something you’re going to knock out in a whole week. Even if you were working 40 hours a week, this might take you towards a full week, if not bleeding into the second week for you to do all of this.

You have to think about the payoff. If you email 100 or 150 people, and even if you only get 4 or 5 really high-authority links, we’re talking about something done in the span of a couple of weeks or a month that would typically take (especially in new website) a year, a year and a half.

I mean, you were cutting out a dramatic part of your growth cycle. It is a very good way to fast track and a way to growth hack authority quicker than you ever would have, otherwise.

The other thing to keep in mind is after you’ve done this link building campaign, and you’ve gotten the links from these guys, don’t forget to go back into that article that now has… it should have a decent amount of authority even if it has only gotten 5, or, 7, or 10 really high-authority backlinks.

Add some internal links to other articles in your site that you want to boost the rankings for because once that page on your site has high-authority, you can then… in the industry, it’s called “passing the link juice”.

It’s got all of this link juice coming to it from high-authority websites, then you want to sprinkle in maybe 2 or 3 links throughout that article to other pages on your site, which will help that link juice, that authority trickle down to those pages as well – which is why internal linking is important.

Don’t forget to do that because it’s the way you get the most ROI out of your efforts here. You may be saying there’s no way I can continue writing 2 or 3 articles per week, or even 1 really high-quality article per week if I’m taking on these efforts too.

Once you’ve gotten your site to the point where it’s established, it doesn’t look bare anymore, it’s totally okay to produce less content and spend more time promoting and getting backlinks like this. It’s still a very effective, I would say an even more effective strategy.

Yes, it’s tedious. Yes, it’s frustrating. Ideally, again, as quickly as possible, you would hand this off to a virtual assistant that’s going to do a lot of the link gathering and stuff like that.

Because at the end of the day, that’s something you can train someone to do really easily. It’s not really what we would consider “skilled labor”. Anyone can go and find these pages with the tools, as long as you teach them how to do it.

You want to get those things off your plate as quickly as possible, so you can focus on the things that only you do and that have really, really high ROI. But it’s okay, in the mean time, to take a step back from creating content to do this.

It may feel slow going at first, but the payoff is huge. Again, you’re getting high-authority links that would take months, if not years to come across otherwise, and you’re spurring that quicker, you’re shortcutting your way to getting those links.

Just like anything else, stick with it. Try it for a while. You’re going to get better over time. You’re probably not going to kill it the first time around, you’re not going to do incredibly well even with the done-for-you templates, but you should see results.

As long as you stick with it, you’ll start to see tremendous results from something like this.

That concludes the Skyscraper technique. Again, there are other backlinking strategies that work very similarly. You could even use the same link magnet that you’ve already created, you would just do research and compile the list of people you want to reach out to, you would also edit the template.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the most powerful link building technique to build really highly relevant and really high-authority backlinks. By far, it’s the most powerful white hat backlinking strategy.

I strongly recommend you leverage it if at all possible. Like I said, I know it can be intimidating, I know it can be tedious, but once you do it one time, or you do it a second time, you’re going to notice: “okay, I’m getting really good at this. I’m settling into a flow”, and the return on investment can be tremendous.

In time, we’ll dig into some of the other methods, but even if this is all you did, as far as building white hat backlinks, it should be enough. This is really, really powerful stuff. I don’t want to belabor the point too much, but I also want to really emphasize how valuable and how powerful this technique is.

If you’re interested in getting results twice as quick, or three times as quickly as you would have if you were just pumping out content non-stop, this is how you do it, this is where you should be focusing your efforts.

That’s that. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group. Thank you so much for being a FIMP supporter. I can’t tell you how much I sincerely appreciate that.

If you have any questions, I’ll keep an eye out for them in the Facebook group, or I’ll just see you in the next training series!

Talk to you soon!

A1.5 Finding and Compiling Links You Want Using the Skyscraper Method

In this video I discuss:

How to find the exact backlinks you want to pursue
How to find the backlinks your top competitors have, and the websites most likely to link to you
How to get the premium tools for this process at over 90% off
Please download the provided spreadsheet and email template for this process (I personally created them for you)

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

A1.5 Finding and Compiling Links You Want Using the Skyscraper Method Transcript Below

Alright!

It’s time to start gathering links, and this is how you do it using the Skyscraper Method.

Of course, now we know what types of links we’re looking for. It’s just a matter of finding them and compiling them.

You basically want backlinks from the competitors you researched earlier or similar articles, anyone you looked at that was inspiration for your link magnet, or a site you looked at that had a lot authority for that particular topic. If you didn’t find enough, you can always dig back in and go find more.

You want to find those authoritative pages on that topic and very closely related to that topic because we can pull up their link profiles and see where they’re getting all of their backlinks. We can compile a list of people to reach out to from those links and say: “hey, I saw your article. Can you link to mine too?”

Your list could even include the people that you drew inspiration from for your link magnet. I would say the odds of them linking are a little bit lower because your article probably directly competes with theirs, but it doesn’t hurt to put the on the list.

This information is actually super easy. I say, it’s pretty easy to find. It’s super easy to find with the right tools. It can be a little bit tedious, but it just take some time and some work.

The Moz Site Explorer and SEMRush have limited free searches. Unfortunately, that’s as good as it gets with free stuff. I think, Moz Site Explorer, you get, like, 3 searches per day for free (if you have a free account). I want to say, SEMRush, you get, like, 10 searches per day.

You’re not going to be able to do a whole lot with that. You can try your best but unfortunately, the absolute best way to do this is going to be through Ahrefs. Unfortunately, it’s not free.

I talked about in the first hotseat session day-after analysis (I think it was the second one) extensively about SEO group buys. I know there are some moral and ethical implications that a lot of people have issue with or struggle with. Totally up to you if you want to pay, I think it’s $100 a month, it’s like $97 a month for Ahrefs’ individual subscription, that’s fine.

SEO group buys offer them for, like, anywhere from $10-15 per month, as an individual, and they package it with other tools like Moz and Majestic (that are also very helpful) for, like, 20 bucks a month.

This is the one that I’ve used in the past. They used to be seogroupbuy.com and then they got shutdown by PayPal. They couldn’t accept payments anyway. And then they moved over to something called majesticnsst.com, and they were only there for a month. And now they moved to BrightFieldSolutions.com.

In my experience, this has been the best company to do work with as an SEO group buy. If you’re watching this video and you’re like: “BrightFieldSolutions.com is no longer in operation”, just contact them. They have a contact tab on their website. Just reach out to them or just do some Google research for what the best SEO group buy is at that time.

Unfortunately, this has become one of those things that changes very often and I’m not going to be able to update this video every single time it changes. But if you’re interested in SEO group buys, you’ll be able to find a good one. But for now, the link is BrightFieldSolutions.com.

I’ll be showings some of that, and that will get you an Ahrefs subscription for substantially cheaper than out of pocket, typically. That’s the best I can do.

I don’t make any money off of that. I want to make that very clear. I’m just giving you the best resource because I know you’ve already invested so much in your future and in your training, etc. I want to keep those expenses to a minimum. SEO group buy is a really good way to do that.

You take all of this information and you compile it into the provided spreadsheet, which I’ll show in this video as well.

That’s it. Then we move on to the next lesson. I’ll show you how it all comes together.

Let’s take a look at this in real time. I still have few of the pages pulled up from when we were doing research for the link magnet. WordStream was up there at the top, so as Backlinko, Neil Patel was in here too, there were couple of others.

If you’re doing this the free way, and again, there are going to be a lot of restrictions here. But the nice thing about the Moz bar is you can just click this Link Analysis right here. And, like I said, this is going to be a good thing to do for anything with really high page authority like this. Any one of these pages are going to have links that you could reach out to and try to get links from, as well.

You just click on the link analysis, it’ll pull it up. It takes a few minutes to load. You’re going to be limited, of course, with this link analysis. You’re only going to get a handful of them, but still pretty decent.

You can see the page authority over here for these links. All of these would be great to get links from, if you can. This is a FeedBurner article, which is going to be a little bit harder to get information from, but looks like a great resource. This is probably how one of these guys got the backlink. This probably how they got the backlink, was through the infographic. CopyBlogger would be a good one. SocialMediaToday.com.

What you would do is you would start taking a look at these. And again, this is tedious, this is tasking. Ultimately, in time, ideally, this is something that you would hand off to a virtual assistant.

You would just come over here. I’m going to cut off FeedBurner because it’s going to be really hard to find an email address for them. You’ll get a feel for those things in time.

CopyBlogger would be a good one. Let’s see. We can come over here and we could put CopyBlogger.com, we don’t know the name yet, article URL. You would just fill these out. I’ve already filled in a few that are pre-populated. When you download the spreadsheet, they’ll be in there. Just to give you an idea of what the content looks like.

We’re not going to worry about email addresses right now. We’ll worry about that in the next step, because if you’re going back and forth between all these different tasks, you grab the article, and then you grab the name and the email. You’re just going to end up running in circles over and over again.

I’d like to do it all in a straight line, and then we’ll come through and we’ll get name and email in a straight line down the road.

Article page description. So, I’m going to say: article about CornerStone content. That’s going to come and you’re going to see how that works in the next video. But all of these fields play into the email template I’ve written for you.

Actually, I can say: CornerStone content blueprint. You want these two fields to be pretty different because they pop up close to each other in the template. So, instead of saying CornerStone content blueprint and CornerStone content, I’m going to say writing high-quality content.

You’ll see again in the next video how these all play together. You would just go through here and you would just keep pulling these. I’ll leave that open because we’re going to need it here in a minute.

I’ve got SocialMediaToday.com – also a really, really authoritative link. You can see over here: page authority, this has a 53 (which is excellent). I was going to say this maybe really difficult to get a link from, but I don’t think so. It’s worth a shot, right?

Their article is about 3 Free Tools to Help You Understand Your Online Audience. It might be hard to get a link from that. That may not even be worth trying.

Remember, you have to keep in mind what your link magnet is. In this case, my link magnet is 60 Free Ways to Promote Your Website. It would be a great link, don’t get me wrong, but if I reach out to them how likely are they to link to me, probably not super likely. You can still throw them on there because it’s going to take you no effort to send these emails, practically no effort. I’m just going to cut it out for now.

Redesign to Increase Website Traffic, and that is a page authority 44, it looks like. That’s a pretty high authority link. Lots of pop ups. But it’s super short – super, super short. Related articles around the web – so this is where they got this link. Not a bad idea. They’re clearly linking out to articles.

We’re going to go: RebelMouse.com. And again, you want to fill this out as completely as possible and with high-quality responses, otherwise your template’s going to fall really flat. I’m just going to fill this last one out and then I’m going to show you how you would do this with non-free tools if you hit your daily limits using these free tools, like the Moz Site Explorer, or like SEMRush.

By the way, in SEMRush, if you have a free account, you can just punch in the URL then you come over here to Backlinks, and then you click the Backlinks tab, and you get some information.

But as far as how high-quality their results are compared to Moz and compared to Ahrefs (which we’ll get here in a minute), they’re just not as reliable as far as how they research authority and they display the authority.

You’ll see that the top sites for SEMRush are not the same top sites, as far as authority as Moz. And Moz is more dependable than SEMRush. I’d say Ahrefs is more dependable than Moz, and Majestic is also more dependable than Moz. That’s why Ahrefs is a paid tool. You can get this information for free from Moz.

Let’s finish this really quick and then I’ll show you Ahrefs.

Article about redesigning your website for traffic, getting more website traffic. Again, you’ll see how this works in the next video, not to leave you hanging.

I’m going to re-save that and we’ll fill in the name and email, again, later.

Say, you were going through and you were compiling all these things, you hit your daily limit with Moz. So, what that looks like is if we hit Link Analysis… you do this enough and it’s just going to stop. At some point, you’ll hit a limit and you won’t get the information in here that we’re getting that we can work off of for free.

If you get to that point and you’re just frustrated by it, Ahrefs would be the place to turn. And again, you can get that for much cheaper through an SEO group buy. And we would just do the same thing.

We would come in here. We were just looking at the WordStream one. It’s probably best to keep the examples all as close as possible to one another so that we’re getting similar data, so that you can see the differences between Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, etc.

You can just come over here and click on their Backlinks profile, and it should sort by authority by default here. You can see the domain rating and the URL rating. By default, it’s sorted by the URL rating – which is what you want. It’s Ahrefs version of page authority.

You can see that they have social-bookmarking.dk, which was different than the one we saw. Interesting. Neil Patel is linking to this article on WordStream, which is kind of cool because we have one of his articles pulled up as well.

It would be the same thing. You could just come through here, and you can click and see what the page looks like, and you would just go through the same way that we were just doing it. It looks like this might be a gray hat link, frankly. It looks like this may be artificially boosting authority.

We wouldn’t really reach out to them, but of course we could put Neil Patel on here. He’s already on our list for another article, though.

You just want to keep going through. You want to keep going through this data, whether you’re doing it in Moz, or whether you’re doing it in Majestic. You just wan to compile, I’d say somewhere between 100 and 150. I know your heart probably stops hearing that because it’s going: “this takes time”. I know it does. But again, this takes time but it has incredibly high payoff, as long as you put in the work.

Again, in time, it’s something (ideally) you would hand off. You would train someone and hand off to a team member. Which, once you start getting traffic and you start making money from these efforts, is pretty high-priority and something you could do pretty easily.

You would just keep going through these list, again, whether it’s through Moz Link Explorer (the free version), or whether you decide: I am tired of all of these restrictions I’m hitting. Because if you’re doing this for several hours a day, you’re doing this 3 or 4 hours, you’re going to hit your free limits with a lot of these companies.

There are no really good free tools outside of Moz, outside of SEMRush that you can use to get this data, so the next step would be Majestic. Wherever you’re compiling from, you would just continue filling out this spreadsheet over and over and over again, as tedious as it is. And then we can start the link outreach.

You would get, like I said, somewhere probably between, at least, 100 and 150 links. When I’ve had VAs do this for me in the past and I’ve trained them to do it, it’s typically, I’d say somewhere between 15 to 25, 30 hours of work. It takes some time to put this list together.

If you’re only working part time, just know that it’s okay if it takes you a week of work everyday, a couple hours a day, to put this list together. That’s perfectly fine. And then we would move on to the next step, which is actually reaching out.

I guess we’ll stop this video now because I think we’ve covered the point. I don’t want to belabor it and bore you. You’re probably already bored compared to the other videos in this section, how quickly they went.

Moral of the story is: you want high authority pages, compile a list of them, find their information, fill out the fields for the template, and then I’ll show you exactly how this all comes together in the next video.

You would just spend lots and lots of time compiling this information. After you do that, you’re ready to move on.

If you have any questions, as always, feel free to post them to the Facebook group. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the Facebook group or I’ll see you in the next video.

A1.1 Introduction to White-Hat Backlinks

In this video I discuss:

What backlinks are and why they’re so important
Dispelling backlinks myths
Pre-requisites for building white-hat backlinks

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

Introduction to White-Hat Backlinks Transcript Below

What’s going on, everyone?

We’re about to dive in to some really cool stuff – if I’m censoring myself.

Today, we’re going to start talking about backlinks – white-hat backlinks, specifically. The kind that aren’t going to damage your website if you have some reservations about that stuff, you’ve heard about that in the past. We’re going to talk about that. We’re going to address it head on.

I don’t want to dilly-dally. I don’t want to dance around. I just want to jump right into it and get straight into the meat and potatoes.

What we’re going to talk about first is what backlinks are. I know it’s basic and a lot of you probably know what they are, but a lot of people start training like this and they go: “what are backlinks?” So, I’m going to do a quick recap.

Backlinks are the most important part of off-page SEO. Off-page search engine optimization – it may be a term you’ve heard of, maybe not.

But when you optimize your meta title, your meta description, how many times you use your keyword throughout your post, all that stuff – that is on-page SEO.

Off-page SEO pretty much always refers to backlinks.

A backlink is when one site, that’s not your own site, links to a page on your site. If you created YouTube link or someone else creates a link from YouTube that links to a page on your website, they have created a backlink to your site.

Basically, a backlink is an off-site link, where someone links from their site or from another site to your site. That’s what a backlink is.

In case there’s any confusion (just in case), a link – when you hear the word link, it’s what you click on the internet and it takes you to another page. I think we all understand that, but you’d be surprised how many times, over the years, I’ve heard that question too.

So, just in case you’re watching, I’m not trying to make anyone feel like dumb, or behind, or anything like that. But it’s really basic stuff and I just want to make sure I cover that.

In search engine optimization, the best place for you to focus your efforts outside of content creation is backlinks. And you have to be careful.

I want to talk really quickly about why you have to be careful. But first I want to dispel some of the backlink myths that if you’ve read stuff over the years, if you’ve digested link information from other sources, you’ve probably heard some mixed signals because it’s kind of a controversial topic in search engine optimization.

Some people say that Google no longer looks at backlinks, backlinks no longer matter, backlinks are dead – total BS! There’s no other way of putting it.

If you’re tuned in to the SEO community, if you’re watching the studies that people are doing, if you’re reading the interviews that Google engineers are providing themselves, every single indication is that Google is still heavily dependent on backlinks. And as I record this training, they anticipate being heavily dependent on backlinks for years to come. So, that’s just total BS.

It’s frustrating every time someone writes me and they say: “oh well, that so-and-so said that backlinks no longer matter, Google doesn’t use backlinks anymore.” That’s their ultimate vision but they still, as far as I know, are very far away from achieving it, and I’m not even sure they’re really certain about how to go about it yet. It’s aggravating to hear that because it’s just not founded in anything that’s factual.

Backlinks will get your website punished – you hear that a lot. If you do it right, they won’t. That’s all there is to it. There are ways to build backlinks that will get you punished. If you build backlinks the old ways, which we’ll talk about later in this section, you will get your website punished. And that’s not something you want.

But if you follow this training very closely, you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re not gaming Google’s algorithm, you’re just essentially getting plugged in to your community really well, there’s no reason for you to get punished when you do that – as long as you stick very closely to this training.

Another thing that you hear a lot is: you’ll get just as many backlinks if you just focus on high-quality content. You will, over time, see traction and get links if you focus on high-quality content.

You can accelerate the process dramatically by shifting, I’d say at least half of your time, once your site’s a little bit established – which, again, I’ll give a clear benchmark on that later.

You can really fast track your website’s success and growth hack your way to authority in half the time, a third of the time, a quarter of the time as if you just focused on content.

So, just focusing on content, I referred to it in the foundational FIMP training as the “post and pray” method. It works, it’s very effective. There’s a lot to be said for just focusing on one thing, doing it really well, keeping your focus there, and just cranking out really high-quality content. It’s very effective, don’t get me wrong.

But if you have the bandwidth and it doesn’t totally mess you up to pursue backlinks as part of your strategy as well, it’s going to get you there a lot quicker. And that’s what I want this advanced training to be. I want this advanced training to be the thing that gets you there faster.

There are some pre-requisites before you begin white-hat linkbuilding – and that’s what this section is going to cover.

A website that doesn’t look “bare”, it has at least 6-8 high-quality articles already – that’s pre-requisite #1. I’m not going to teach that in-depth because all of the training you need to do that is in the foundational core FIMP training that’s available for free.

Once you’ve gotten through that and you’ve produced at least 6, or, 8. or 10 high-quality articles, then you can start shifting your focus to knocking out the things that are in this section.

The reason is: when you start doing this backlink outreach, you don’t want people to come and see a totally bare, unestablished website because it’s going to be hard to get links if that’s what they see.

You need to have a little bit of background… I don’t want to get really into the weeds here. It’s easy to, but I want to give you a foundational understanding of the search engine algorithms – how they’ve changed over the years, and how you can build backlinks now without getting punished, and give you some confidence to know: “hey, this is why Google was punishing people. I’m not building links like that at all, according to the FIMP training.” So there’s no reason you would get punished.

We’ll go over that really quickly, I won’t get in the weeds there.

I also want to talk about the first step in this process after you have an established website is: creating a “link magnet”. You’ve probably heard of a lead magnet – that gets people opt in to your email list. This is similar concept but different application.

A link magnet is a piece of content on your site that is just glorious. It’s, hands down, the best thing anyone has ever seen regarding that topic. We’re going to talk specifically about how to get inspired to do that, how to research that, how to come up with your topic, and how to come up with that. We’re going to have a video on that here.

An understanding of which links you should be going for – we’ll talk about that in detail as well because it’s important. Not all links are created equal, that’s a very important thing. You could get that tattooed on your forearm and it would probably not be a totally bad thing. All links are not created equal.

We’re going to talk about the links that you want, the types of link that you should be pursuing and where you can find them, how to compile that list of people that you want linking to you, and then, how to reach out to them.

I’m providing all of that as part of your advanced membership because that’s, I think, the best thing I could do to set you up for success.

A lot of people struggle with writing templates like that. Over the years, I’ve kind of gotten a knack for it.

If you want to write your own email templates, it just comes down to it shouldn’t look like an email template, it should look like a real message. And so, the template I’m providing will, and that will give you a rock solid outreach strategy. It’s just very, very straightforward from there.

The final two points that I just discussed: which links you should be going for (how to compile sites) and rock solid outreach strategy and template – those are going to change depending on the types of links you’re going for.

So, you’re going to need a different template, obviously. You’re going to be reaching out to different websites and choosing different pages depending on whether you’re using the Skyscraper technique, which is something that I learned from Bryan Dean of Backlinko.com – has a lot of really good resources on white-hat linkbuilding. I’m not sure if he’s the one that started it or if he’s even the one that coins Skyscraper technique, but that’s where I learned it and, I think, he’s the one most famous for it. That’s what we’re going to start with.

If you’re going for broken linkbuilding, which is where you’re looking for pages on the internet that have broken links, and you’re trying to email them and say: “hey, you got some broken links here, I think that my resource would go really well on there if you want to swap them out.”

If you’re just looking for resource pages, pages that have link after link after link after link for any given topic.

Who your emailing, your templates, stuff are going to change depending on what your objective is, as far as your backlinks you’re building. But we’re going to start with the Skyscraper technique and then, in time, we’ll get into the others.

I say we’ll start with the Skyscraper technique because it is, by far, the most effective and just really, really powerful, really potent. I think it’s where we’re going to see you best return on investment, as far as the time you put in, by far, especially with the template that I’m providing you.

With all that being said, that’s the introduction.

Welcome to linkbuilding! We’re going to get deep, we’re going to go through it quickly. I want to try to get through this efficiently and respect your time, but also make sure that it’s really thorough and doesn’t leave any gaps.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to write them down, post them in the Facebook group. I’ll see you there, and I’ll see you in the next lesson.