– 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.