Today we’re going to show you how to use linkbuilding to TRIPLE your daily traffic… With just one email!

In fact, this is the same strategy we’ve used to transform the results for one of our client’s sites (a local event and culture site for the Daytona area).

By applying these strategies to your next linkbuilding campaign, you can see the power of laying a good foundation before you ever send that first outreach email.

This way, when you do start messaging people, your response rate will be truly impressive.

Linkbuilding is hard, everyone knows that. But it’s one of the most important parts of SEO that your company can do.

(And SEO is one of the most important components of digital marketing!)

Don’t get me wrong, we had trouble getting started too. There was always so much more work to do in other areas, it never seemed like we had the time to do linkbuilding.

But at some point you need to just bite the bullet and plunge right in.

And when you finally do, the results may pleasantly surprise you.

On day one of link outreach recently, we sent out a total of 26 outreach emails and received a total of four responses. Of those responses, we managed to receive three links.

Now those results may not sound super impressive, but hear me out:

Not only did we receive those three links, but one of the companies also shared the link on social media. Our client’s social media page had only one like at the time. The company that shared them had over 5,600.

When the company shared us, their post received truly overwhelming engagement compared to what we were used to:

• 29 Facebook likes
• 9 Shares
• 70 Page visits from the shared post

We received half as much traffic as the entire last month in a single day from social referrals.

There was also a similar increase in direct traffic coming to our site as a result of the post.

So, what’s the secret? How did we do it?

The numbers may be small, but it’s important to reiterate that this is the result of just one email and that they occurred in one day.

You hear it all the time:

In order to be found, you have to create “shareable” content.

But what does that really mean?

There are a lot of ways content can be “shareable” – it all depends on your target audience. In our case, the site we were working on was a local event and culture site.

You hear “Content is King” all the time – but he’s really just a puppet ruler. The real power behind the SEO throne is fulfilling user intent. Creating relevant and helpful content is simply the means to this end.

Our audience was people who lead a certain lifestyle revolving around a shared interest in one consumer product, and who gather in the local area in large numbers every year.

In order to appeal to readers and businesses alike, we compiled a list of the top businesses in the surrounding area that people in our audience might be interested in patronizing during their visit.

While we primarily wrote the article to help readers plan their trips, the lists were a perfect case of shareable content – particularly for the companies we featured.

When we compiled a list of websites to contact for potential links, our first targets were the businesses we’d already featured.

Since we already had content featuring (and linking!) to them, we could point to it to prove we weren’t asking for something for nothing.

This proved incredibly popular with the companies we spoke with. Remember, just within the first day, we’d contacted 26 companies and received 4 responses – that’s a response rate of 6.5%.

Even when we didn’t receive a link, companies were happy to hear from us and thanked us for the feature.

Remember that outreach isn’t just about building site links, it’s also about building relationships with the people behind the sites.

A link not won today could easily become a link won tomorrow – as long as you lay the groundwork today.

We already laid a good foundation for link building before we ever started sending out emails.

As you may know, linkbuilding is almost always quid pro quo. So by building content that’s valuable to our outreach partners, we already had a good chance of receiving a response.

But just putting content out there isn’t enough – you have to ask for attention (and links).

This is the email we sent that received a link on the first try.

Let’s break down what made it so successful:

• First, as we’ve said, the content we sent featured them in a very prominent position (ranked number three in the region) which they wanted to highlight to their customers.
• Second, we framed this outreach as “letting” our outreach clients include an “As featured on ___” badge.

Rather than asking them to do us a favor, we framed the entire process as us doing them a favor.

While the website is small and doesn’t receive a lot of traffic yet, distributing a custom “Featured on ” badge makes us seem a lot more authoritative – to the people we reach out to as well as their own clients.

By first featuring this company on our site and then doing them the “favor” of letting them include our seal of approval on their site, our own request to be linked to and shared on social media seems small in comparison.

Now, not every outreach email is going to get a response on the first – or second – try. But laying the right foundation in advance will provide a much easier path to success in your linkbuilding campaigns.

But never forget that you need to be constantly creating new content, following up with emails and monitoring links as your site develops.

Remember also that making excessive use of the “link-for-link” approach is bad SEO and bad business. We only employed it here because it made sense for the website. But the general principles are the same:

You need to give the other party a reason to link to you, something that is inherently valuable. If you don’t add value, you won’t get a response.

Tell us about your own linkbuilding campaigns! What are your responses like? What brought you success when you reached out to potential backlinkers?