Simple Strategies for Building Links Without Creating Content

Let’s face it. Creating content and backlinks for your website is a very time-intensive activity. Many webmasters often make the mistake of creating tons of new content for their website without any link building and then give up when their website doesn’t rank for anything. In this article, we are going to show you how to generate links to existing content on your website, which means you can take a break from creating new web content outside of your regular publishing schedule.

Repurpose Dated Content to Get More Backlinks

If you have a good blog that you wrote from five years ago, this is a prime example of content that you could repurpose. Some of the information in a blog post might be a couple of years old, but a lot of the information might still be good. On some occasions, you may want to research ways that the content might be updated. On other occasions, this might be a good opportunity to lengthen the article. Make sure that you make it so that the content says “Updated for 2020,” or add a date when you last updated the article.

Now is the time to go and find some more backlinks! When you are getting backlinks for dated content, here are some things to consider:

• Use Quora to promote your page. Answer a highly relevant question. When people see that your blog has a history, but is updated, they might cite it when writing content for other websites.
• Harvest other websites for broken links and contact the webmaster to promote your article.
• Try to share your updated article in email newsletters to your readers. Some people might share your article and then it is likely to get linked from other websites.

Consider Curating High-Quality Videos and Infographics on Your Website

Sometimes this is a good strategy for generating links to your website. In fact, Neil Patel invites readers to curate his infographics! You can create a unique embed code for this purpose. This will generate follow links to your website. Be sure that if you find an infographic to promote, you consult with the creator to make sure it is okay to publish it on your website. You can also do this with video. If you find a good video on a topic, you can download it, host it on your website, and then create an embed code. Just make sure that you have the creator’s permission.

Keep a Wealth of Free Resources for People to Use for Their Websites

This strategy works particularly well if you have a photography website, PDFS, or white papers on a particular topic. Often times, you can create an embed code that will generate a link back to your URL. For example, one of the common things that some photographers do is create Zoom background photos. Sometimes, they will make these free for people. On occasion, someone writing a blog on “free Zoom background photos” might share your photo in their blog, creating a natural follow link to your website.

Create Forum Personas

This is another way to naturally get more links to your website. We are not talking about the old days of forum spam. There are a ton of ways to use forums if you are an expert in your area. We recommend joining a forum and naturally participating as a regular member for several months. Every once in a while, answer a question that is highly relevant to the product or service that your website promotes. After a while, you can reference an article on your website. This will likely create a no-follow link, but if someone features your article as a link on your website, you might get a high-quality follow backlink.

Leverage Backlinks To Your Aged Domain By Reclaiming Them

Do you have an old domain? Often times, when you purchase an aged domain, you can leverage existing backlinks by fixing them. Let’s say you have a backlink that pointed to an article that the previous webmaster wrote. Go to the Wayback Machine and put in the URL. You can then republish this article on your website. Make sure that the aged domain and its links are relevant to your current business model. Many times, people will often purchase an aged domain simply because it’s an aged domain. Google does not particularly like irrelevant links.

Utilize the Wayback Machine to Find Content That No Longer Exists on the Web

Over time, websites get taken down. There used to be a tool on the web called “Domain Graveyard,” but this website has been taken down. This website would update whenever domains expired. Nowadays, we recommend using a website called expireddomains.net. When a website goes out of existence, go ahead and check on the Wayback Machine to see if that website had any good articles that related to keywords that you might want to rank for. After some editing, you can publish this content on your website. This will help you start to get some rankings, as well as attract some backlinks. You can also stick the URL into a tool like Moz to see if the expired domain had some backlinks. If it did, you can reach out to the webmaster of the referring website and tell them that their link is outdated and you have a new article to replace it.

Build an Affiliate Program to Get More Links For Your Ecommerce Store

This is a common technique that is often overlooked. Google regards most affiliate links as either “sponsored” or “no-follow.” That being said, sometimes, your affiliates list the programs that they participate in on a page on their website where they don’t use the affiliate URL. They will often drop this on their website with the follow attribute.

Do you have other ideas about building links without creating any content? Feel free to share them in the comments below. If you have a great idea, we’ll publish it in this blog and give you a link back to your URL!