How to build backlinks for free
In this article, I'm going to show you how I build 1000 links per month for free to exploding topics.
Link Building: How to Get 1000 Backlinks for free
Now, I know we're not going to talk about SEO all the time, but I couldn't help myself because this strategy is just working super well, and I'm learning so much about how to build links at scale that I wanted to share with you.
So what is this strategy and how does it work? Well, I actually published a blog post about this strategy about a year ago, and I called the strategy Reverse Outreach because of course, I had to give it a unique name. But I published it around the time of the Backlinko sale to Semrush.
So I don't think it got the attention that it probably deserved in terms of strategy, which I think works really well. And it's working actually better now than it did back then.
So what is reverse outreach and how does it work? Well, it's basically you creating content that gets in front of bloggers and journalists automatically and content that they're very likely to link to.
So how is this different than just like creating great content? Well, most people create great content that's meant to get in front of their target audience and a target customer. Nothing wrong with that. That's what you should be doing. The problem is, in most cases, your target customer isn't someone that's going to link to you.
Like, say you target dentists. Even if a dentist reads a piece of content from you, that blows their mind. They don't really have a website where they're going to link to you. As opposed to creating content specifically for bloggers and journalists to link to.
And not just specifically for bloggers, journalists to link to, but content that ranks for keywords that they're searching for while they're writing or editing an article.
So here's an example. On the Explaining Topics blog, one of the blog posts that gets the most links every month is a blog post about how many people own Bitcoin. It's pretty simple. It's just like, basically, how many people own Bitcoin? With a few stats about bitcoin.
This post has got thousands of links without sending one outreach email. And why? Well, when bloggers or journalists are writing about cryptocurrencies or bitcoin, they want to know how many people own Bitcoin. It's an important stat or fact to include in the article.
So they Google how many people own Bitcoin. And instead of searching through an article that's just 101 crypto facts. We just tell them straight up, here's how many people own Bitcoin and they want to reference that stat, so they link to us.
Another example from exploring Topics is a post we have about mobile web browsing. Like how many mobile web users are there and what percentage of traffic is mobile?
And that post also has quite a few links, probably a thousand. And it's literally just a stat that we found online and made it really easy for bloggers and journalists to find when they're writing about mobile.
And specifically, a lot of them are writing like why mobile is important or why your site needs to be mobile optimized and responsive and all that stuff.
And instead of just saying a lot of people browse the web on their phones, they're specifically saying, here's a stat, here's 60 something percent according to Exploring topics. And they link to us when they cite that statistic.
Steps to Link Building for free
Step 1: Find journalist keywords
The first step is to find what I call journalist keywords. And they're basically this very small set of keywords that journalists search for when they're looking for stats or data to include in their article.
This is something that is a little bit nuanced it's hard to just say like, here's a bunch of them, because it depends on your niche. But the key is to look at pages from competitors in your niche or even your own site that has received lots of links. And you'll probably discover that a lot of them are linking to one specific statistic.
So I first sort of discovered this strategy when I was running Backlinko. I found a page on the Moz blog about keyword research and noticed it had a ton of links.
And when I looked at all of the links that were pointing to that page, I would say 75 to 80% of them were citing one statistic about how many keyword searches were unique. They weren't citing the article like, this is a great article to check out or this is a great resource. They were citing that stat.
And I realized that when you have a stat and you become the source, that's the best way to get journalists to link to you. But I still didn't really know how to get journalists and bloggers to see the post in the first place. It's one thing to create it, but how do you get in front of them? And that's when I discovered journalist keywords.
Now, it depends what this will look like in your niche, but in the case of exploring topics, we tend to focus on technology.
So some our best performing pages are things like I mentioned, how many people own bitcoin, how many cryptocurrencies are there? Or just simple ones like how many SaaS startups are there? This is one that gets tons of links for us every single month. And it's just something that took a researcher a few hours to look up to write about it.
Bulk up the article with some supporting stats about different categories of SaaS startups are in. But the main stats, how many SaaS startups are there. That way when someone's writing about how big SaaS is, they can cite, there's, you know, whatever, a thousand number of SaaS companies that come out every year and they cite us as a reference.
So people are literally searching Google, you know how many SaaS companies are there? And we rank number one. Now this is a keyword that in a keyword research tool is going to show like 10 searches or 20 searches or 50 searches. And it's not something a target customer search for. It's a keyword that most people ignore. But when it comes to link building, it's an awesome keyword to be targeting.
Step 2: Outline how you want it to look
So the next step is, once you find that journalist keyword is to outline how you want it to look. And basically what you want to do is front load the value as much as possible, have a really short intro and then give them the stat they want as high up on the page as possible. We really spoon feed it when it comes to how we structure the content.
So when it comes to, you know, the percentage of traffic that's mobile, it's literally like what percentage of traffic is mobile with the answer right underneath? That way the journalist doesn't have to sift through these long, you know, stat pages to discover the stat they want. They have it right there.
Step 3: Create your stats page
So the third step is to actually create your stats page. Now how do you want to set these up? Well, most of these stat pages that rank for these journalist keywords are these long list of stats like crypto stats or digital marketing stats or whatever. And these are fine, like there's nothing wrong with creating those.
I do create those on occasion, but they don't do as well as these very hyper specific posts that just give someone the stat they want.
So say you're a journalist searching for how many people own Bitcoin. You could go through this long list of 100 crypto stats or you could just land on this page and just see right away, okay, this many people on bitcoin, it's simple.
So when you outline your post and write your stats page. Make sure that first stat, that feature stat is at the top and then underneath kind of give some supporting stats around it.
So in the case of the Bitcoin stats page, it would be things like how Bitcoin has grown and how many wallets there are, and things like that supplement it a little bit. So the page isn't like you know, 50 words or whatever.
If you are creating data that's really like recent and well structured and just easier to find your competitors, you have a good chance to rank even above some big brand competitors.
I'm surprised at how well these pages do, even against pages that already have hundreds of links, just because they're way better search result than giving someone a big long stats page.
So yeah, this isn't to say that every single one of these, you know, pieces of content that you create will be a hit and rank number one or racking the feature snippet or whatever, but they have a good chance of doing so, even if the keywords competitive.
In fact, when I'm looking for these journalist keywords, sometimes I actually look for competitive keywords. So I'm looking for keyword difficulty. That's really high because that shows that this topic has a lot of links, right? There's a lot of people linking to content around this topic.
And then what I look for when I look at the serps themselves, is there a page that's specific for this query? Like if someone's searching for how many SaaS companies are there, is there a page that already answers that? Or if there is, does it answer it towards the top of the page? Is it recent? Like maybe it's out of date, Maybe the stats out of date. Can you create something better?
So for me, that's sort of how I'm evaluating these journalist keywords and we're finding new ones all the time.
So one of the things that I realized when I started this process is it can be tricky to find them. But as long as you have a list of competitors, or even not necessarily competitors, but other sites in your niche or adjacent to your niche, and you just look at what are people already linking to as opposed to trying to create something that is just a great piece of content that hopefully people will link to.
In reality, most people link to sources, to numbers and data. You want to be the source. And that's really the ultimate goal of my link building strategy with exploring topics is to be the source, to be the site that people are linking to when they're linking to and referencing something in any niche that we cover, whether it's E commerce or technology or marketing or whatever.
Step 4: Funnel authority to important pages
And then really the last step is to funnel that authority from your stats page to pages that are important.
So even if you didn't do this, you would still probably see an increase in traffic in your so called money pages because your site authority is going up. Right? Like more people linking to your site, that's a huge sign for Google and all of your pages are likely to rank higher.
But if you want to be more strategic about it and get the most value out of this strategy, you want to link from your stats page to another page on your site that's relevant further down the funnel.
For example, with our list of how many SaaS companies are there, we're linking to other SaaS related content on exploring topics that's a little further down the funnel or even on the funnel at all.
Because again, this content isn't necessarily designed to rank for keywords that your customers are searching for. Right? Like that's a nice bonus if you're able to do that.
But the real goal is to get in front of bloggers and journalists that cover your space and get them to link to you. And then once they do, you want to funnel that authority to pages that matter. The those can be blog posts, those can be landing pages, those can be whatever.
The important thing is you have that authority to sort of funnel around, which is the hardest part. So yeah, that's really the strategy when it comes to reverse outreach. When I first started this strategy, I really focused on these statistics pages and we still do them, they work well.
So for example Fintech stats or E commerce stats or things like that. And those do fine, but first of all they're really competitive because a lot more people are doing that.
But the other challenge is they don't really have that great like traffic to link ratio because that person is just looking for like general stats. They're not necessarily going to link to you as opposed to like how many SaaS companies are there? That could be obviously some random person, but it's also very likely to be a blogger or journalist that's writing about the SaaS space. And when they land on your article, they find exactly what they need right away.
So they're going to reference you. They're busy. They're not going to necessarily go down to the rabbit hole to the original source. Of course we do cite the original source and if they choose to cite them instead, that's totally fine. But most journalists are busy or lazy and they're not going to do that. They're just going to link to the first source that they find.
Conclusion:
So yeah, that's pretty much all there is to reverse outreach. It's a strategy we're using most at exploring topics.
We do have some other stuff like product led growth. We're getting a lot of links from the tool its and some other things. You know, I go on podcasts now and again for the most part. This is the cornerstone of our link building strategy.
And now I'd like to hear from you. Have you ever tried creating stats pages or getting in front of journalists using reverse outreach or some other passive strategy? If so, I'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment in the comment section below.
