What an awful label, “content based link building”. Doesn’t exactly fire you up to run to your keyboard and bash out ass achingly good linkbait does it?
Labels are interesting, within them you can find out lots of stuff.
What I specialise in has many labels, linkbait, content, magnetic content, etc.
None of which really capture the essesnce of what we do.
At the recent SASCON conference people asked what I did and I told them I produced content such as “13 Kittens on Crack go on Holiday to Holland”. How can you put a label on that?
The interesting thing is there is quite a strict process to creating linkbait, highly creative people tend to have patterns of behaviour which allows them to tap into their creative resevoir. Sometimes the headlines seem like they were thought up in minutes, but the reality is a casual headline which works has usually been crafted for hours if not days.
I am still shocked when people are surprised I work on a specific headline for days, I am sure most bloggers take about 30 secs. It is possible to come up with a great headline for 30 secs, but you will probably find that your sub-conscious as been mulling it over for years.
So, back to the question, What is content based link building all about?
Most of it seems to be about mediocrity, most content is medocre. I guess by pure definition that would be the case, if everything was exceptional then it would become average.
The important thing to focus on then, is successful content based link building. This is not that hard to backward engineer.
- Look at the niche
- Identify the content with most links
- Deconstruct content
- Analyse backlinks to identify patterns
The data you need to end up with is, why did these people link to this content? It’s difficult to be definitive and some of the gaps must be filled in by instinct and guess work. But you will notice certain interesting things:
- 80% of the links come from 20% of the linkers
- The links are given by real people, not machines
- Human contact increases the chance of a link
- Linkers may not agree with the content
We can divulge a lot more information from the why did these people link to this content question. And this data can help shape your own link building strategy within the specific niche.
But is content based linkbuilding all about relationships? I don’t think it’s “all” about that, there is a whole lot more to it, but it is a very important part of the mix.