Link opportunity types

 

– Yo, yo, yo, what up? Back again with chapter, I think this is number six and in case you’re wondering, yes, that is my hands that smell like pumpkin latte flavoured hand soap, it’s delicious, I keep sniffing my hands with it. Anyway, today is about Finding Link Opportunity Types, this carries on directly from the last one, so if you didn’t watch the last video, Linkable Assets, go check that shit out immediately. Eric Ward, again, more Eric Ward, little bit of Dan Ray at the bottom, because I just wanted to make sure you had a full list of link opportunity types and Eric just says the most popular ones. So, going from linkable assets to link opportunity types, in the last video, this is what we went over, so find all of your assets and create any new asset ideas, once you’ve done those two things, then you need to, this is the content of this video, so we’re going to brainstorm link types for every possible asset that you have, so for example, almost every single link campaign, you’re going to have a thought leader, so we’re gonna use me as an example, I consider myself a thought builder in the link building industry, obviously because I’m giving you my thoughts. So using me as an example, assuming that I have agreed to do two content pieces, two content placement pieces, one hosted piece for my own sites or YouTube or whatever and give up my time for stuff like roundups, interviews and podcasts, etc., these are the opportunity types that are available to me and then Eric gave another example at the bottom, so guest posts obviously, these go here for one of the two content pieces, expert roundups, they’re my time, podcasts, my time, interviews, my time, industry, that should be industry news, this is if I’ve come up with something new or something that nobody’s ever thought of before, so some sort of unique mindset or unique new link type, a new way of finding links, something like that, it would be worthy of news, these are very hard to come up with, but you know, if I had some unique data, so if I discovered something that nobody else has discovered before, I had data points on it, people will happily link to my data and cite it within their articles, ’cause there’ll be a lot of, if I come up with something brand new, that blows the world apart, people are gonna be like citing it in their own information, their own writings, their own videos and you’d think that most people, most moral people will say, “Dan raised the information, “here’s a link to the original source of it,” where I will have published my unique data. Blog comments, I can go to other blog posts about what I talk about, link building and stuff like that, I could even go to On-page type articles and give a little bit of link building information, yeah, this would be great if you backed it up with this, it would be a super powerful tactic, whatever. Broken links, so if stuff’s gone missing, quite recently, not quite recently, about 18 months ago, a huge blog in the SEO industry went missing, there was a mad scramble to sort of… garner the links that that site had, so you would create a piece, that was worthy of being in there, that replaced a piece that was linked to you on that site, go and approach all the people, who linked to it and say, yo, I’ve got a replacement piece, that’s just as good, do you fancy it? I got a shitload of links off that and resource pages, so essentially just sites that say, you know, here’s some good link building blogs, whatever, we’ll go into these a little bit more in the next part. Eric Ward said if you are selling a dog brush, a particular type of bespoke dog brush, I don’t know, I’ve not got it available to me, I bought my cat this thing called a LICKI Brush, so you put it in your mouth and you like stroke your cat, as if you’re licking him, like their mum, she fucking hates it, but anyway, I guess we’re talking about something like that here, so an eCommerce store, that sells a particular type of dog brush, a couple of link types available, pet-related charities, thanking donors, so you could donate to pet charities, they’ll say, you know, “Thanks Dan Ray for your 100 pound donation,” whatever, pet product reviews, you would send them the thing to get reviewed, doggy video sites, so you’d show how much dog, like make videos of how much dogs love this new brush type thing, bloggers who own dogs, because obviously bloggers have authority, they sometimes write about their dog, you know, it’s worth a link there, it’s a relevant link and contest, you can sort of say, you know, get a dog brush, write us a, you know, dog fucking fan fiction, some shit like that, very decent examples there, you need to do this for every single possible asset, that you have within your organisation, so we’re talking about all of the linkable assets that we spoke about in the last video, you would determine all of the ones, that you have, what they are and then determine, sort of make mindmaps of the opportunities that are available for that particular thing. So let’s talk about a couple of common link opportunity types, I just went through a few there, but that was more to show you them in relation to what the linkable asset was. So content placements, such as guest posts, educational pieces, so you and somebody else writing an article together, that type of thing and How To sort of articles on news sites, company profile listings, so this is not so much directories, I have written directories there, but it’s not so much directories, we have that later down here, but this is more like… stories type thing, so this is what this organisation does more like a featured piece, you know, you might have, give them some PDFs, give them some videos, give them some coupons, you know, things like that and they’ll say, you know, this company does this and here’s some free shit from them. Open conversation opportunities, so we’re talking about forums, question-answer sites like Quora, Quora, Quora, don’t know how to say it, and sort of blog comments, things like that, anything where you can take part in or start a conversation. Editorial mentions, so these are my favourite type of link, I’ll put a little star next to them, so you all know, these are resource links, so people saying, “This is a useful resource,” but don’t get it confused with resource page links, it’s not a page listing out resource, it’s just saying you know, “I’m writing about outreach emails, “there’s good systems for outreach emails, “check out Dan Ray’s system,” that sort of thing within content. Actual directories, so these are just curated lists of companies, right, they’re not always curated, curated ones are the best type, but just lists of companies, here’s all of the the dog, fucking dog products eCommerce sites out there. Resource lists, so you’re looking at the best, the top, this week’s best, you know, that type of thing. Sponsored links, you know, these are just paid for, make sure they’re always no followed and make sure they’re disclosed within the article, just to stick with Google’s terms of service, you can sometimes get away with it, sometimes they won’t do it naturally, but you know, just to be safe, I mean, the link’s not like porn, you’re trying to drive traffic through, right. A couple of the ones that Eric didn’t mention, that I just wanna split into sections and tell you about, so calling types, so a couple of the ones that haven’t been mentioned here, these are the ones, that are used most often, so we’re looking at broken links, link expert roundups, local links in a bridge method, so you’re looking at things that are just other businesses within your town, niche links, so things that are not quite related to you, but might have your same audience, online PR type links, very, very long term, I’ve talked about all these before in previous videos, so I’m just listing them off quickly, local bloggers and uni student blogs, these are sort of calling types, you wanna do pillow links to sort of diversify your link types and stuff like that, manufacturers, video sites, professional organisations, conferences and events and Wikipedia, those type of things, they’re good links, but like just used to mainly diversify the types of links that you have, extra link types such as competitor links, infographics, the skyscraper method, that is quite possibly too good for this methodology, but it’s very, very hard and expensive to do, so I don’t recommend it regularly. With that in mind, tomorrow’s should be a little bit more exciting, a little bit more complicated too, so I might just split it into two videos, I’m gonna show you how to find link types, I believe, don’t quote me on that, but yeah, that’ll be it for today and I’ll catch you tomorrow.

Linkable assets

– Yo, yo, yo, what’s up? Today we’re gonna talk about linkable assets, which is the most asked question in my group, it’s always is what content we’re gonna have, what can we create for this and people message me specifically and say, “Yo, Dan, what can I do with this?” rather than asking the group, just asking the group, more minds are better than one, right? And if I have something to add, that hasn’t already been there, I’ll find it and put it in. So with that little moan out of the way, let’s talk about Linkable Assets. Again, as per usual, the Eric Ward side, the Dan Ray side, we’ll get into Eric’s first. I have added a few of my own little snippets to this, because I feel like this particular section of Eric’s book is not that well… filled out, so with this Asset Analysis thing, it’s basically just… like a one-sentence chapter, so I’ve filled it out for you, sort of condensed it down and given you what I think Eric was trying to get at with it. So without further ado, the first step in the Erik Ward system is asset analysis, so this is just determining what you already have and stuff like that, in terms of online assets and linkable assets. With asset analysis, it’s important to take your time, don’t rush this, because you are gonna end up not finding the right stuff, that you’re looking for. Be honest with yourself and I can’t stress this enough, you need to honestly ask yourself the next two questions and if you can’t answer them properly or honestly, you’re just gonna fail a lot of the time, is it good? And that’s not you going, “Yeah, it’ll do,” it’s, is it good? Like we want good stuff, not just, “It’s good enough.” if you were your target prospect, would you link to it? If you wouldn’t, why the fuck should they? Do you see what I’m saying? Very, very simple set of questions, ask these, answer them honestly, I know it can be very hard, to be honest and sometimes you can think, “This looks good,” ask your mates, post it in the group, ask them, actually no, don’t post it in the group, but ask your friends, send it to them via PM or whatever and yeah, that’s how you do an asset analysis. Now, I’m just gonna tell you a few of the common asset categories, Eric gives you these ones and it’s pretty hard to argue with any of them, so free apps and tools on your site, I will give you some examples of what I’ve done in these later on, I don’t know how I’m gonna show you that though, maybe I’ll just post links, but free apps and tools on your site, so if you have something that’s useful to your target audience, a tool or an app or something like that, it’s bound to get links, right, if it’s useful to people, they’re gonna get links, apps and tools, something that’s fairly easy to do, think of something that people have to do over and over again, think of a way to automate it, systemize it, release it as an app or a tool. Products and services to review or as contests, so this is your basic review type link, send it to people, who have your audience and get them to review it, perhaps hold a contest for you know, you’ll win, dunno, like a MacBook or something, something relevant to your audience, it will attract the type of people, that I don’t, personally, I don’t run contests, because I believe that it’s just a way to get a lot of freebie hunters and generally someone who doesn’t even care that much he’s gonna win the contest, I’ve done a few in my group, small things like DCWD Access, but I just wanna, mainly I just wanna embarrass you guys, by making you make me stupid videos, which some of you did, so well done. Widgets, tools, images, data to publish, so these are all great things to have on your own site, but Eric’s talking about them here, in terms of you giving other people access to use them on their sites, so widgets, things like, it’s not so much done anymore, but sort of like the Amazon affiliate thing, so if Amazon, if you want to embed Amazon products on to your WordPress site, you instal the Amazon widget and it can generally have a link back to your site, I suggest not doing that, ’cause a lot of people have been fucked by it lately, not lately, but in the last five years or so. Tools, goes without saying, something useful, a tool for people to use, images, sort of viral images, infographics, stuff like that and data, data is my favourite one of these, because if you have unique data, that nobody else has, people have to cite you on it, if it’s useful to your audience and people want to publish it, use it as part of their articles, which you know, they do, because they don’t want to do it themselves, they have to cite it, they have to cite where they got the data from and guess where that is? You. Right, thought leaders and subject matter experts, this is something that people don’t really take that much notice of, but people themselves can be a linkable asset, so I consider myself to be my linkable asset, right, if I’m pushing the Dan Ray brand and trying to get links to Dan Ray, I’m sending sort of a personality-filled video, you’ve seen the way I write probably, so I’m teaching, I’m positioning myself as a thought leader or at least a subject matter expert, in terms of the link building, you can’t always do this, because there is an element of charisma involved, if your client doesn’t have charisma or you don’t have charisma to speak of, it can be very difficult to position yourself in these places, so not everybody can do it, but give it a go, put yourself on video 10, 15 times and we’ll see what you’ve got. Partner relationships, so this is little things like a lot of sort of boring niches, right, so if you have a client, who’s in what’s considered to be a boring niche, they’re gonna have sort of trade organisations, other businesses that they’ve partnered with in the past, even clients and stuff like that, any relationship that your client or you already have with manufacturers and stuff like that, you can absolutely use them to get links as well. Job listings, events and coupons, I don’t really need to explain that one, it’s very, very simple, I’m sure you’ve all seen these things, where it’s like, come and be the mayor of fucking some, you know, backwater town in New Guinea, is that a place? Job events and stuff like that, there’s things that are interesting and out of the ordinary, people will generally link to it, they’ll get shared on Facebook and stuff like that, not something that I would use regularly, but you know, worth a go. Here is where my wheelhouse is, or where my wheelhouse tries to be, consistent publishing, you can do this with blogs, videos, podcasts, etc. what I would advise against with this is to take a lower frequency, but higher quality, so I’d rather you publish one really good thing every three months, than a piece of shit every week, right, it kind of goes without saying, but a lot of people think, “Oh, all I need to do is hit that, you know, “get that one article a week out, or that one video a week,” that’s all well and good, if you’re doing it, but if you’re seeing it as a chore, “Oh, like I’ve gotta do a video this week,” it’s not gonna be the best quality and therefore it’s gonna be fucking useless to you, ’cause nobody’s gonna link to shit. The final one, which is something that a lot of people don’t discuss as well is budget, fucking monies, right, it’s not an accident that the richest people in the world have the most attention, right, the people who have the money get the attention, that’s because they can afford publications, they can afford to position their selves in certain ways and get themselves attention. If you have a bigger budget than your competition, you will generally outrank them, whether the, the only sort of ways, where the lesser wins is if they’re using better techniques and tactics, but even in those situations, I would say that you can just hire the person, who’s doing the better techniques, so if you have enough money, you can always outrank people, outrank, out traffic, out whatever. Ching! The next step is identifying competitor and other market-determined assets, generally this is just, I’m not gonna go too much into this, because you should buy Eric’s book, if you want to see how to do it, but you’re asking yourself, what gets links already in your industry and what gets shared? So we’re talking about social stuff here, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, that type of stuff, maybe LinkedIn to some extent, I don’t love LinkedIn though, so what’s already getting links, what type of content is already being linked to? Obviously then you can sort of Brian Dean it up and skyscraper whatever that piece of content is, make yours better than everyone else’s, you’ll get links from it, very easy and what gets shared on social, why not be getting your stuff shared, instead of sharing other people’s stuff, right. The next step is the process for identifying and evaluating your current assets, again, I’m not gonna show you how to do this, because I just don’t wanna give you Eric’s book in a video of mine. Inventory your current online assets and then inventory your current offline assets, online assets are stuff like content pieces and do you have any spare domains lying around, that haven’t been used for years, but have got some content on them, generally all of these things are gonna fall into one of these categories online or offline, for example, partner relationships, that’s an offline asset, thought leader, subject matter experts, offline asset, you know, it is what it is, it kind of speaks for itself, buy Eric’s book, if you wanna know more about it. And now for the fun bit,fun bit, it’s link building, there ain’t no fun bits, this is the Dan Ray side, this is how I teach it, we’ve done many trainings before in, there’s a couple on YouTube for free, there’s a couple in DCWD, which is my paid membership, being a hub, we spoke of that in the last video, this is the best, in my opinion, the best kind of linkable asset, because it works without you having even to do outreach, if you’ve become a hub and you’re known within your industry to provide good information and people share your stuff without you asking, that’s the ideal link building type, ’cause that’s, really it’s the only white hat type of link building, because you’re not doing anything, people are doing it on your behalf, just because of the quality of your information, but you’re gonna have to do some sort of promotion to get people in front of it in the first place. Micro sites, something that I don’t see many people doing, I wanna give you two examples of this, or do I? Yeah, I will, I wanna give you two examples of this, I’ll put the links up here on Facebook, down here on YouTube and I think they go below on the blog, wherever the fuck you’re looking at, find the links, they’ll be up there. Two of the best link building assets or linkable assets, that I’ve ever created were micro sites and one of them, I didn’t even create, they already, the client already had this, so I found this in the inventory of your current online assets, it was a… I don’t know about America or whatever country you’re from, in the UK, there are sort of, there are office laws, like that you have to abide by, you have to hit some certain goals, they’re called ISOs, I believe, one of them is to do with sort of ergonomics and how comfortable people are, so you have to pay the government to take this ergonomics test, it’s just to show like how far the mouse is from your arm, if you have, you know, comfortable wrist holders, that type of stuff, if the chair is flexible and comfortable, that type of thing, just to ensure that you’re not causing damage to yourself being sat in it for fucking eight, 10 hours a day, however long a work day is, you have to pay the government 10 pounds per employee that you have, so if you have 100 employees, you’re paying 1000 pounds a year just for this, not everyone’s got that kind of money, but you know, you’d hope that they would have, so my client had created the same exact test, certifiable and everything and they paid the government on behalf of every person, who did it, the only catch was you had to display the certification, so this is kind of like a widget or it would be more like an image type link, but it’s a cross between a widget and an image, because it was like, the government automatically updated it, but it had the link to the company, who you had passed the assessment with, so every company who did it for free, which every single company in the UK would want to do, because why the fuck would you pay for it, when you can get it for free, right? You have to display this on your website anyway, this, the way that it was displayed from this site gave them a link, which is very clever. The second one, it’s just a really, really free… informational site, the idea was that we would have different, very specific scenarios within categories, so for example, this was a cleaning product company, if you’re selling, we’d have a section on the bathroom, right and then different surfaces in bathrooms, so wood, tile, concrete, stuff like that and then specific scenarios within them and really detailed, high quality videos and informational posts, infographics, that type of stuff, to explain how to clean specific things, so like living room carpet, red wine on the carpet and then we would show you how to do that stuff, right, underneath that, we would then have, you could use these products, if you didn’t always use the products, that they were selling in the videos and stuff, but we said if you wanted to, these are the products we recommend and link back to the seller’s site, which was just an eCommerce site selling stuff. The core 10 by 10 strategy, fantastic, if you’re trying to start a hub, which you all should be, the core 10 by 10 strategy is perfect for you, 10 pieces of content, 10 good quality links to each one, it tests the theory for you, it tests that you actually have a hub, you have good enough content for a hub, because 10 links to 10 things, pretty good. Okay, let’s talk about the skyscraper technique, I did mention it earlier, it’s very useful in… where was it? Right, very useful in this section, if there are pieces of content, that are already being shared, the same sort of stuff, you make it better, you should get links to it, right, it’s not quite as easy as Brian Dean makes it out to be, it’s called the skyscraper technique, now, can’t take that away from him, so fair fucks Brian Dean, but it works one in 10 times at best, in these specific scenarios, it’s okay, I suppose you could make it work more regularly, but in general, one in 10, we’re currently doing a test of this for my survival niche site, all the people in DCWD are coming up with ideas and creating content outlines, based on the training and then I’m just getting them made and we’re gonna try and create a hub using those, we’ve got some cool shit, like… some really cool angles have come out of it actually, I’m not gonna share it with you, ’cause it’s private. What I want to stress here is that no matter what you do, all of this stuff, you want to make sure it’s the absolute best version of that piece of content, that exists anywhere online, what is the point of making something, when there’s a better version of it out there? Just don’t do it, like don’t be lazy, don’t be cheap, if you don’t have the money, do it yourself, do some research, make something unique, it doesn’t have to be the biggest and best and brightest thing, it could just be a unique thing, but make sure whatever you have is the best version of that, don’t ever want to be second place, right. When you are creating these types of pieces of content, you need to ask yourself a couple of questions, so what’s needed in your community? You can, I did leave this part out on purpose for this part, because I should have put this here, but asking, finding out on sort of forums and sort of community based sites what questions people are asking is fucking essential, right and then you need to answer absolutely everything they ask, so if it is a single question on there, you make sure you have a resource that answers that question to them, as this is generally your audience saying, “I need this content and it doesn’t exist,” you then need to determine what’s needed, so you can generally find what’s needed, if I go onto any SEO fucking site, they’re interested in linkable assets, they’re interested in how to do guest posts for free, a lot of metric questions, I choose to avoid those, but I know what questions my audience need, I produce content to answer those questions, you could also ask yourself, what doesn’t already exist? There are very rare occasions, when you Google something and you can’t find an answer to it, I believe in those situations, it’s my duty to find somebody who can answer that question or who should answer that question, get them as a client, create a linkable asset, build links to them, that’s what I did for a long while to sort of try and get clients, it worked fairly well, I’d say, yeah, we have this question, here’s the content I did, here’s the links I could probably get to it, you interested, you wanna pay me some monies? And a lot of the time, people just say yeah, ’cause you’ve already given them the whole strategy, right and they’re looking at it, going, “We could implement this, we don’t wanna, “let’s pay this guy to do it,” I’m too expensive for this sort of strategy now, but if you’re just getting started, decent way to get clients. Another important question is why doesn’t it exist? So, it’s all very well finding something that doesn’t exist, there’s a lot of shit, that doesn’t exist, you need to ask the important question of, does it exist because people don’t want it, does it exist because it can’t be done well, or you know, some variation of why are people, why are people, who should be answering this question not answering it? So you generally find that people answer the questions around it, but not that specific problem and it’s generally for a reason, like perhaps it’s behind a paywall, that thing is worth money, so people don’t give it away for free, if things are worth money and you give it away for free, that’s a fantastic linkable asset, that’s generally what I do. Look for gaps in the market, this is just things where, what we were just talking about, people haven’t found answered the question yet, bridges, so things that, I call it bridge content, because you’re sort of, here’s your core thing and you build a little bridge to reach something else, there are very, very relevant things, people who have your audience, who you can answer questions for, who don’t have access to you at the moment, so they may have access to a plumber in your local city, right, he’s got a huge database of people, he’s got a good site with traffic, you’re a gas engineer, this is a real scenario, by the way, it’s something that I dealt with, so you can contact the plumber and say, your clients probably need me at some point, let me make something for them and it was just a guide on… wood burning stoves, very simple piece of content, but his audience needed it, he didn’t have it, he didn’t have the information for them, so created a bridge and got us quite a few links. What else do your audience need? This is basically what I was saying with bridges, you can approach other people to bridge to you too, so they’ll sort of say, you know, “We’ve published a piece of content on their blog,” or whatever, worth a link or a share, not something I do that much, but an option for you guys. So even if it’s not directly related to your site, but it will help your audience, create that content or have somebody, who knows that thing, have them come in and do a guest post, that type of thing. Keep in mind if, what, one, two, three, keep in mind the four most important aspects of any of this, the entire point, relevancy, don’t just put the shit, that isn’t relevant, we had a conversation earlier today about, in the Dan Ray, super cool, Dan Ray link building, white hat link building group, on clickbait, don’t fucking do it, pointless, links like that are not gonna bring you the type of traffic you need. User experience, so you need to make things that your users want and they need and conversions as well, relevancy is the key here, if you have relevant traffic, having a good experience on your site, they will convert and the most important thing of all, the entire point of SEO and my entire existence, traffic, all of this shit, no matter what you’re doing here, it needs to send traffic, if it’s not sending traffic, why are you doing it? You see what I mean? That’s the daily insight in to linkable assets, I’ll try and link, I’ll write this here, so I remember, five links, I’ll send you, I’ll give you five good examples of linkable assets in different variations, either up or down, or at the side, depending on how you’re looking at this. I will catch you tomorrow, where I don’t know what the title is.

Effective campaign metrics

– Good day my fellow link building enthusiasts. That’s like a total of none of us. This is chapter three and it’s – I’ve forgotten the title of it. The title is “Effective Campaign Metrics.” As said, by Eric Ward. Eric and I differ on this again. This is his side, that’s ya boy’s side. And Eric argues that there are two types of campaigns, two types of link building campaigns. Search engine impact and market engagement. I’m just gonna quickly explain what those are to you, and then I’ll talk about why I don’t do them. Not that they’re bad. Why I don’t do them personally. And then how I do shit. So, Eric says search engine impact, is these are things that directly effect traffic from SERPS. So, essentially raising your rankings, right? Market engagement is stuff that sends traffic through perceived authority and trust. So, basically raising your profile. If you wanna see how to do that, I did a video last week. So, check it out on YouTube. I’m gonna put a link somewhere. Don’t know where. Don’t know how it works yet. So, I’ll quickly read out what the, what the merits are of these things, and quickly what Eric says to measure. I was gonna write them down, but the lists are fucking huge. So, I don’t want to. And check out these things, they’re so cool, aren’t they? It’s like static white boards. Hey, I like ’em. Okay, so, search engine impact. Some of the benefits of that. Increased perceived trust and authority of your site to search engines and searches, more traffic and showing the prior research, this gives … If somebody searches something, and you come up in the first few results, they generally trust you a lot more. Excuse me. Perceived relevance of your site. So, links from … If you’re trying to change the market space that you’re working in, links from trusted authorities in that space are gonna help you merge into them. Direct SERP keyword impact through anchor text manipulation. So, essentially if you want to anchor for a specific keyword more anchor text of that exact thing from relevant or authoritative sites are gonna give you bumps in those things. Eric says to measure in these things. Excuse me, again. To measure, what to measure in a search engine impact campaign. So, search rankings for key terms, percentage of increase in converting traffic, percentage of increase in search traffic from geographic regions, increase in pages on domain that yield traffic, percentage increase in non branded search traffic, percentage fluctuation in engagement metrics, such as time on site, time on pages and bounce rate, number plus location of links from sites/people deemed authoritative, number plus location of links from sites/people deemed relevant. The market engagement type campaigns, this is sending traffic through referrals and stuff like that, it will obviously, it will build your organic rankings, as well, but you know, that’s just a nice side effect of all types. This is much closer to the way that I do things, but still way more work than I like to do. So, some of the benefits of this type of campaign are to build your company and personal brand, so trust and authority from sites linking to you. You know, you borrow a little bit of trust and authority from anyone who links to you. People trust them, they then trust you. Building your lead (inaudible links equal traffic, which equal sales and inquires, that type of thing. Engaging the expert community in guiding conversation. I did speak about this last week, in the Raising Your Profile video. So, this is more about finding the level of conversation, then matching that level, and then once you’ve matched it you can start to move it and change it. Eric does make sure that you say, “This is for the benefit of your market,” and not for the benefit of your individual company or site. Which I think is fair enough, because Eric’s like the most wholesome or was the most wholesome link builder I’ve ever spoken to. He says that in these type of campaigns, you should measure the percentage increase in targeted referral traffic, the percentage increase in referral traffic conversions, which is extremely important, percentage increase and engagement metrics, such as time on site, time on pages and bounce rate, note that this is percentage increase and not percentage fluctuation, as in the last type of campaign. I’m not sure of the relevance of why he’s changed those things, but I’m sure if you buy his book, you’ll get a more deeper understanding of it. Percentage increase in branded search terms, so this is stuff like, people searching for your business name. Where am I? Percentage increase of mentions in target media over competitors, which is hugely important. We just did a training on this type of stuff in DCWD last week. Number of blog posts and articles about your site or organisation. So that’s just sort of like organic, natural links without you having to do outreach for them. People just, they have an awareness of your company or site, and they just start writing about it. And you know, use you as sort of a hub of information, as in the last video. Number of customers indicating that media provoked their inquiry. I disagree with this one, because I don’t really think it’s our job to do other things in the organisation. That’s more of like the sales persons job, or whatever. Number of third party mentions and community pass alongs. Standard, just people giving you referrals. Number of positive responses in conversation thread exchanges. So, I guess that’s just when you’re talking on Twitter and stuff, and in forums. Number of key influences known to actively suggest your products or services to those who trust them. That’s a fucking huge one, which I love. Some of the big dogs, they’ll sort of back you, and say, “Yes this person knows what they’re talking about,” and you get a chunk of their authority then. People just trust them so they then trust you. Same as we spoke about earlier. Number of positive goal-focused emails exchanged. Again, I don’t think that’s the job of an SEO, but whatever. Number of newsletters/RSS subscription increases. Does anyone really care about those type of things now? Newsletters? Yeah, fair enough. It’s gettin’ people on your sales list. But again, not really the job of the SEO. More of like a marketing manager’s type job. So, now I’m gonna quickly tell you the way I do things. So, the reason that all of this is not the way that I do stuff is just simply because it takes a lot of time. It’s way more effort and time. And I would say that it’s more suitable for sort of the owner of a business or, you know, if you’re like a one man band. Or a deeply invested in-house staff member. So, if you’re like a founder member, you know, you have a percentage of the profits and stuff like that. Because this is fully engaged. Like I kind of imagine running either of these types of campaigns the way that Eric does and being able to have more than one client at a time. Just my way of thinking. It’s not fitting with my sort of minimal or productized way of offering services. I will be doing a video about this next week, which is gonna be a fucking mammoth one. Cause that’s my new positioning for myself. The way that I do things, is that i want to sell one thing and one thing only. But that doesn’t mean that all of the stuff that Eric just mentioned we can’t use some of those to build links. So if we’re selling link building as a service some of the shit that Eric just said, we can absolutely use those. And this is how I do things. It’s way, way, way more of a traffic focused strategy. And we’re gonna call it the Dan Ray Way, because, you know, everyone loves a fucking huge ego. It’s gonna be very close to this one, but much, much less effort in my opinion. So, I track four things and four things only with clients. The rise in organic clicks. So this is the number of people who are clicking on your results in search engine. The rise in organic impressions. So, that’s the number of times that your site shows up when somebody searches something. It’s the amount of times that your domain shows up in the search results. Three: the links placed. Which is, you know, pretty standard link reporting. This is how many links we’ve got, and here’s where they are. You know, you can have metrics and stuff like that. I don’t. And four: the referral traffic increases. So, this is for all of these links placed, how many people click on those links and come through to your site? This is my primary goal. This is the traffic that I want to get. This is just a nice like side effect of doing this sort of link building. We can monitor these things using a mixture of Google Search Console. I was going to say Webmaster Tools then. Google Search Console for this and this. And we keep this one in a spreadsheet, just on Google Docs. And this one here, Google Analytics. Pretty simple, straightforward. I don’t really think this is, it’s not super relevant to this video, but I think it was worth having done anyway. So, a lot of you guys come to me, and I see a lot of your offerings. You know, you send me your website. I check it out. Describe it. Tell you how to do better. That’s just the Dan Ray way. But you sell based on either keywords or rankings. So, selling on keywords is sort of like when people go you know, I’ll rank five keywords on page one for, you know, I’ve written four x’s there. A lot of you guys are mute for three, which is fucking useless. Selling based on rankings is sort of tracking specific keywords and getting paid for like where they are. So, it’s like, you know, I’ll rank this keyword number one for you, and you’ll pay me when it hits number one. Not on the traffic that it drives. I disagree with both of these types, because you don’t get credit for sort of long-tail keywords, referrals, etcetera. Rankings for me, they’ve very, very important, but not as a metric themselves. They’re mainly just a path to traffic. Traffic is the goal, always. Increasing your keyword rankings do help that, but I think to sell based on them is fucking useless. Because what if you can … I’ve had sites where you absolutely cannot rank for the number one keyword. Whatever it is, you can’t rank for it. So, the strategy is more to rank for long-tail. And when you’re trying to do that you happen to just rank for thousands of other keywords. To not get credit for that is fucking stupid. So, if you go and look at the video I made on the core content strategy, that’s how I do things. Because I just think it’s a very systemized thing. You say you’re doing this, this, and this and this. Here are the expected results of that thing. You’re traffic will go up. You’ll make sales. It’s a much, much better value concept than you know, I’ll rank five keywords, or let’s track this one keyword for you. That’s mine. This is Eric’s. This is mine. And I’ll see you tomorrow. Which, I don’t know the title of the video, so. Oh, I think it’s linkable assets. So, a fun one. This might go across a few videos, so, enjoy it. It’s gonna be probably be the most interesting one to you.

Designing a link building campaign

– Yo, welcome to day two of the Eric Ward series. Today we’re looking at designing a link building campaign. I’m gonna show you the way that Eric teaches it, the way that I teach it, and how I put it in the middle, it’s a little bit of a contradiction in this one, so if you’re gonna do one… Where’s the mic? Do it my way. Do it my way. Right, so, Eric teaches that there are 6 factors in building a link building campaign. I’m gonna go through his and then I’m gonna show you how I’ve adapted them to be a more, sort of, systemized implementable actionable way for you guys. So the first one: What’s working well for you currently? This is a sort of, way, of looking at what your sites already doing. Most people’s sites, the reason they find people like me, is because nothing is working for them. But, on occasion, you will have something that’s working. You’ll be getting a source of links from somewhere. You’ll have relationships to take advantage of. Advantage. Let’s say, let’s reframe the word advantage as, utilise. So you’re already getting a type of links, you have relationships that you can use, you know relationships with bloggers in your industry. You have customers, you have sites that are good links. Sometimes that’ll give you, sort of, testimonials and that type of thing; give you a mention on their blog. You do charity work, stuff like that. All these type of things are fantastic for, um, links. It’s good to determine what you’ve already got in place. I don’t do this personally, but it’s a good strategy, regardless. The second one is sort of, where Eric and I differ a lot. Primarily because I only have one aim and one goal. Eric teaches that you need to determine whether the site itself needs traffic, sales, or links. There can be other stuff as well, but those are the three that your mostly gonna fall in. I’ve underlined links here, because the way that I teach is just to sell links. Basically people should know, which one of these they need before they come to you. Um, you’ll get less inquiries, but if you do it for your own sites, it’s a good question to ask yourself. Next, you’re gonna look at what assets you currently have. So this can be… It can be quite confusing because assets, I can never tell you every single possible asset that you can use to build links. You’re looking at money, content, expertise, free tools, resources, info, data (which data is always a great one, if you have unique data that you’ve collected yourself, fantastic), and even charisma. If the owner of the business has a good charisma, you can get them on video, maybe have them talking to people. That’s a linkable asset, too. The fourth question is: What opportunities are available to you? So, Eric looks at the type of things that are, sort of, the easy wins, right, the path of least resistance sort of thing. You need to use your own logic to determine what linked apps are available to your site and he teaches never to, sort of, push. I’ve written here, although you can, behind. An example of this is of resource pages. They’re generally not gonna link to a product page on an e-commerce site. You’re gonna have to make something worthy for them. Use what’s available for you, don’t force it. But you can force it, I teach ya how to force, a little bit. You then need to determine what the chain of command is. So, as an example of this, I once had a client who lived in Wakefield, which is a small town near Leads. In order to get anything done, content approved… So to make pieces of content, we would have to come up with an angle, a title, and then sort of a content outline. Each three of these things need to go to them for confirmation before I was allowed to actually do anything. So, the chain of command looked like.. It was me, to the people of Wakefield, their bosses in London, to their bosses in Germany, back to London, back to Wakefield, and back to me. This is a huge fucking nope. Never, ever working in that sort of environment again. I need it to be me, the decision maker, straight back to me, so I can get shit done quickly. We’re then going to determine what the available resources you have. So, in this we’re talking about things like time, money, people, access to writers, that type of thing. You need a good workable and reliable balance in all of these things. If you don’t have enough time to do the work, it’s gonna be shit. If you don’t have enough people to do the work, it’s gonna be shit. If you don’t have enough money, to be able to afford enough time for you, it’s gonna be shit. Um, you need to really make sure there’s a good balance here and that it works for you upfront. Um, there’s Eric’s 6 Factors, I’m gonna show ya mine now. So the way I’m gonna teach you is perhaps a little bit more simple than Eric’s and I’ll talk to you about why it works better. It’s a little bit more actionable in a minute. So, these are things you need in order to have a good link building campaign. First you need an angle. So this is sort of, who are the people who are gonna be interested in what you’re gonna sell. We’re gonna have to come up with an angel to attract people. I teach the Core 4 Method. There is a YouTube video on this. I’ll, if I remember, link to it. You look at the Core 4, which are elderly people, children, learning disabled and physically disabled. If you create content or an angle that attracts those type of people, they have really vibrant communities and they’ll always give you links. You’re also looking at current stuff. Right now, if you can relate something to crypto-currency, it’s gonna get a shit load of links because people are hungry for that sort of stuff. We’ve spoken about Star Wars in the past. Whenever there’s like comic book films coming out and stuff like that, if you can relate to those communities, you’re gonna get loads of links. You then need an idea. This comes directly off the angle. So, most of this is gonna be done for you, you just need to make it unique. So, whatever everybody else is writing about in your industry is probably means because people are hungry for that. Use your angle, find an idea that’s gonna attract those people and you pretty much got the idea. I made this into one YouTube video where I went through this, as if I was doing it for a client. You can check that out in a minute, if I put the link in. Remind me if I don’t. You’re then gonna need a bunch of targets – people who are interested in your angle and your idea and a way to find them. I put these together because they’re both available in my free trial system. Um, what is that, yes, it’s: DanRay.me/free-training. Go and grab that, it’s totally free and it will give you a good look at this stuff that we’re gonna talk about later and how to put all this together. You then need to decide on the type of links you’re gonna use. I’ve again, made a YouTube video on this, which I’ll try and remember to link to. So you can decide what types of links you need to be building. Because this all changes depending on this. You need an angle that people are gonna be interested in, an idea to express that angle, a list of targets, a way to find those targets and the link types you’re going to use. This is pretty similar to basically this whole section of Eric’s, so we’re just a more systemized way. You need to ask 2 questions. What are the sites strengths? And what are the sites weaknesses? If you don’t have good info and good linkable assets, so this part here, then it’s gonna be shit. What are you weak at because we’re gonna need to work on those strengths. We need to work on those and, weaknesses are a difficult one to discern because you can either improve that or you can just completely ignore that and focus on the strengths. Two different mind sets, but I’m not gonna say which one to do. Next, all of this comes together in my project tracker. It’s just a basic Google sheet that the client has access to. I have multiple tabs, so within those tabs, it’s sort of, it just has fields, and as you fill in those cells, it will fill out this project plan for you and your strategy, sort of, writes itself from there. If you look for existing lists of targets, you can cut down the time it takes to do this part, very, very quickly. If you use stuff like my free trial, the angle and the idea are the only hard part. If you come up with a good angle, come up with an idea, I’ve pretty much done the rest for you, so if you haven’t already signed up for it, um, get it now and if have, then just fucking use it. A lot of you aren’t using the stuff that you signed up for. I can see what everyone does on the backend of my WordPress, so yeah. What does it all look like when it’s completed? I have written here to show you my project tracker, but it didn’t occur to me that if I did that, then you could just copy it for free, so. Check out the free one, it’s a good example of what it looks like. There’s a content info tab in there I believe? I don’t remember. I think so. There’s a content info tab and that’s the one that becomes your plan. And that’s how you plan link building campaign.

What makes a website link worthy

Whiteboard recreation:

– Good day, young fellows. Today is a start of a new video series. It’s loosely based around Eric Ward’s book. I’ll put a link somewhere. What makes a website link worthy? It’s a very, very important question that a lot of people ask me a lot of the time. So, I figured the best way to do this rather than give specific examples, we’d give the philosophy so you can create your own examples. I’ve never seen a better quote that sums up my entire philosophy. Okay, this is one from Eric, “The less useful”, and we’ll go into what useful means in a second… “The less useful your content, “the less likely you are to ever receive a link to it”, from Eric Ward. This is sort of, not the foreword, cause’ he does have a foreword as well, but this is like a subtitle of his book. By useful, it can be something informative, something funny, controversial, there are many, many ways to define that. Well think of, is this thing that I’m producing interesting to people? Will they have a use for it? Very, very difficult to define as I said. Maybe we can get a description going in the comments. A couple of examples of types of links, and there is one that I… There is one that I want to add that I forgot. We’ll just throw it right there. So, banner ads on websites, you can buy these, you can have them alternate placement and sort of things. Any sort of text ad, so that’s just your standard link with anchor text. But, the word ad, generally signifies that it’s been paid for. A tweet that contains your link, that counts. Facebook shares, it’s all the same thing. Links in a sort of email newsletter. Pay-per-click. So, this is… And just cause’ people sometimes struggle with my accent, pay-per-click not paper click. I know, someone stressed me on that last time, so, pay-per-click. These are all the forms of links. And, as I’ll go into a minute, these don’t all count as link building if you do them. Well, pay-per-click is also a type of link. You can get links on directories, Instagram posts; not so much within the post itself, but you’ll generally get these sort of traffic driving sort of teasers. So, I’ll be like, “Yo, check out my new teeth strips. “Link in description.” That sort of thing. And, widgets, not so much done anymore, but Amazon used to do this in a huge way. You could input onto WordPress sites where it would say, here’s all of the survival based ad products that we have that people might be interested in. You could also do it based on the personal preferences. They also include the links. And, basically anything where a page is mentioned by another page. There’s millions and millions of different things that could’ve been here. These are just the ones that Eric used in his book, so I’ve stole them, but added Instagram because it wasn’t such a big thing when Eric wrote it. As I said earlier, all of these types of links, they don’t all count as link building. Cause’ pay-per-click and email, they’re not gonna help you with your organic rankings. But, they will all drive traffic, and that’s the whole entire point of having a website, right? And, as soon as you start thinking of link building and SEO as a way of generating traffic rather than a way of ranking stuff, we’ll get into that in a future video, why I don’t sell based on rankings. Yes, I’m just making sure it’s the next one, but it is. All of these will drive traffic to your sites. Traffic generally means sales of whatever the fuck you’re selling, whether it’s yourself, attention, whatever you need, traffic equals that. So, that’s the end of chapter one. The best way to go about these sort of campaigns is to create a HUB. I say it as HUB, because there are many different ways of saying it. I use the word, HUB, because I probably heard it once and liked it. A HUB will answer every question that anybody has about that specific thing. And, they can niche HUBs or bigger. It has any upcoming news about that thing, you’ll see a lot of people at the moment selling that cryptocurrency sort of HUBs. And, it should be a little… It should do something that other places aren’t doing and you have to stand out, right. My core 10 by 10 strategy creates a HUB to begin with that could start a good foundation for a HUB and also test it. Because, what you’re doing is creating 10 really effective pieces of content and then building 10 links to them. If you can build 10 links to them, that’s a way of testing that people are interested in that thing. So, it gets you a good basis for a HUB. There’s another video that I’ll try and link it below. I’ll probably forget. But, you can find that on my YouTube channel. It creates 10 pieces of content and 10 links to each of those 10 pieces, creating a HUB and then testing that the HUB is effective. And, good examples of this, me. Known to be the arrogant person. Donray.me is a very, very good example of a HUB because, obviously, I made it with this in mind. So, the website itself is a formal way of presenting my information to you. It’s a way of getting what I want to say across to you guys. I do this in three different ways; theory, how to, and case studies. Those are the only three types of posts you’ll find on my website. So, keep that in mind. YouTube answers large questions, so things like this that are a little bit bigger than a 10, maybe five minute video. I don’t really want you to think about that much, but it’s also important. I’ll answer on YouTube, because it gives me the video platform. And, plus it has extra… It has an audience which helps generate money for me. Facebook itself uses three different ways. So, people can ask me questions, I can answer the questions, and I can could use it to sell. Let people know what I’m doing, it’s just a community builder. If you have all three of these things, that’s a great example of a HUB. Ta-dah! Sites that generally aren’t link worthy are eCommerce sites. They generally just, they only have their products. Maybe an about page, a concept page, stuff like that, but no actual information. I make these things better by creating content to help the people who want your product. So, for example, I recentlybought, like a weird little egg omelette making thing. I’ll show you when it’s actually ready. I’ll show you in the Facebook group, not on YouTube. So, these guys sell the egg thing. Luckily for them, it was something that I was already interested in, so I bought it. But they should do stuff like this: give recipes, workout tips, nutrition, things that are related. People who want eggs generally using it as a source of protein, and therefore are interested in other things such as nutrition and workouts. Eric, in his book, uses the example of a magic star. And, he gives an actual example of this. I don’t want to take too much of Eric’s content, but a searchable database of information, biographies of 700 magicians, magic world records, glossary of terms, and directory of magicians. All of these things add to the HUB element of this general magic. So it just sold a little magic tricks and stuff. And, the aim of this entire sort of strategy, making your site link worthy, is when somebody asks a question on a forum like Quora or like the old warrior forum, things like that, other people use your content as guides. So, they’ll say, “Oh, here’s the answer to your question.”, and share your content. Because, the best HUB around that thing like this. There are many, many, many, many, many ways to bypass all of this to get links. So, it’s not the only way, but it’s just the best way. Some examples, guest posts, you don’t need a HUB to do that. Money, you can pay for links, obviously. PBNs, build your own links. But, this is the ideal solution and results in much more organic ways of getting links. And that, my friends, is what makes a website link worthy.