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In this article, I will be covering the topic of link building for your eCommerce website, as well as lay out a few tips on how to run a more effective link building campaign.
If you ended up on this page, you’re probably at least familiar with the entire concept of link building, but I will keep this guide of sorts simple and beginner-friendly.
So, What is Link Building?
The idea is very simple – link building is the process of acquiring backlinks that point to your resource.
Why is it beneficial? Because the more arrows point in your direction, the more people are going to follow them. Especially if those arrows are pointing at you from huge websites with a lot of traffic.
Not all backlinks are equal in worth. Generally, links from resources with high domain ratings (DR) are much more valuable for your own site, but you shouldn’t focus your aim only on those. It is healthy for a site to have a mix of backlinks both from large and small resources.
Let’s divide the entire Internet into three simple categories depending on their traffic amount:
- the tiny,
- the moderate,
- and the huge websites.
Getting backlinks from bloggers that have only recently started and don’t yet have a large audience would be easy but since they have practically zero influence it isn’t really worth your time.
A backlink from a resource like The Washington Post would mean the world for your own site and you would get an extreme traffic boost from it. But getting it would be challenging to say the least. Of course, there’s nobody stopping you from trying, but getting noticed by a huge site like this one would require you doing something out of the ordinary like writing a legendary piece of content.
The golden zone for you would be right in the middle. The people who have managed to build up a considerable audience but who aren’t up there so high you need to build a rocket to reach their level. Backlinks from such resources wouldn’t be too difficult to get and would still boost your traffic quite considerably. A little bit of blogger outreach would be just enough to acquire backlinks from this group of sites.
And so, we move on to outreach.
What is Outreach and How to Do It?
The name speaks for itself, really.
The entire process is literally reaching out to people with link building in mind.
The idea is really simple, however, in reality, it can sometimes be a little more time-consuming than it sounds.
Most of the time, outreach is done by email and it can be very effective if you know what you’re doing. So, how should you do it? Let’s look at the process step-by-step.
- First, you’re going to need to find your outreach prospects. Select sites relevant to your own niche that are in the “golden” zone I talked about earlier.
- Once you have the list of your prospects ready, you will need to start looking for their email addresses. If your prospects have them displayed on their sites, you’re in luck. But it isn’t always the case. If you can’t find your prospect’s email on their sites, you have two further options: to simply guess it or to use an email finding application.
Now, by guessing it I don’t mean you have to take a gander and try various combinations by hand until you come up with the real email. Not at all. There’s this amazing Email Permutator that will do that for you.
Just feed it your prospect’s name, surname, and domain and you will receive a whole list of possible combinations. Paste them into Gmail and you’ll more than likely find the real one among them.
The other option is, of course, email finders. But keep in mind that they are not perfect and will not necessarily get you all of the emails you tell it to find. But they will provide you with at least a 90% find rate.
Writing Your Pitch
Now that you have all of your prospect’s emails, there’s nothing stopping you from writing them a message. So, time to start writing your link pitch.
Sometimes a friendly conversation will be enough to build a relationship between your sites but remember that your offer has to be interesting for both of you. It goes like this: you offer something valuable like a good piece of content to the website owner and in return, you get a backlink to your site.
When it comes to your outreach email, make sure you don’t sound like a generic template and put a little effort into customizing it for your prospect. Show respect, interest and don’t forget that both of you are living people. It can sometimes be easy to forget when most of your work is looking at a computer screen.
Bad Outreach Example: Upscale Clothing Retailer
Hello,
My name is _____ and I recently began working with an upscale clothing retailer who is attempting to increase their online presence. I came across your site (what-the-frock.com) and think it would be a great fit for my client. I am particularly interested in sponsored posts, but would love to hear what else is available. Please let me know if you have any information on your sponsored post rates.
Thanks so much! I look forward to hearing back from you!
Sincerely,
Pro Tip: What They Did Wrong:
- This example of a blogger pitch email is not personalized. She could’ve taken 30 seconds to find my name – it’s only in the footer of every single post on my blog, as well as on my about page. And she used my URL instead of my blog name in the post, which is an obvious clue that this is a form email.
- She didn’t tell me upfront who the brand is. This is no good for two reasons: first, it requires an additional step in communication and second, there’s a trust issue. Additionally, does she not trust me enough to tell me what the brand is? Or is she trying to pull a bait and switch by telling me that it’s an upscale brand, only to reveal that it’s something low-quality or otherwise shady?
Pro Tip: What They Did Right:
- It’s brief, to the point, and seems to be a relevant brand to pitch to a fashion blogger.
Source: How to write an outreach email: good vs. bad email examples
Guest blogging is the surest way of getting backlinks but it is definitely on the more time-consuming side of things and far from being the only one.
Other Link Building Strategies
There are quite a few ways of acquiring backlinks that don’t necessarily involve outreach. One such way would be participating in forums, question boards and answering questions asked by other users while plugging your own resource in the process.
If you have some content that can be turned into other formats, such as video, by all means, do it! Uploading it to places like YouTube with a link back to your original site in the description works great too!
I won’t get into much more detail about ways of getting backlinks to keep this article relatively short and beginner-friendly, but if you’re interested I highly recommend that you check out this article for some amazing link building strategies that anyone can take advantage of.
Looking for a shortcut? You can use https://www.outreachmama.com link building services to do everything on auto-pilot ;-).
Let’s Wrap This Up
I hope you learned a thing or two about link building in my article and I really hope you enjoyed it! Until next time and good luck with your link building campaigns!
