– 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.