Home / Blog / Weekly Guide to Building Backlinks (Step-by-Step Guide) – Chapter 9

Weekly Guide to Building Backlinks (Step-by-Step Guide) – Chapter 9

By John E Lincoln

Chapter 9: A step-by-step Guide to Link Building

Chapter 9: A step-by-step Guide to Link Building

Now that you’ve nailed down all of the techniques and tactics, let’s go over your step by step process for getting started.

This chapter is basically a timetable and checklist for your back linking strategy that will help you get up and running.

Remember, each of these steps is described in more detail in an earlier chapter, so I am not going to go into great detail here. Just use this chapter as a checklist and source of timing to keep you on track.

One more word of caution: this is an intense schedule. That’s because successful backlinking is hard work! But stick with your plan, fix problems as they arise, and you’ll see results. You can do this.

Week One: Planning your link building campaign, Part 1

[We are starting with the assumption that you have already done the right keyword research for your link building (and the rest of your strategy). Obviously, keyword research is its own topic entirely, but before we launch into your step by step plan here, just realize that having done this keyword research is a prerequisite to your link building.]

Refer to Chapter One for the extended details of planning your link building campaign, but in brief, this week you will need to complete the following tasks:

Basic research

  • Set your back linking goals
  • Conduct Domain Authority research for the search queries you hope to use for your back linking
  • Make a list of pages that rank well for your relevant search terms

Competitor research

  • Use Open Site Explorer, Majestic or Ahrefs to reverse engineer the back linking strategies of your top three competitors
  • Create a target list of sites with the information you find in your reverse engineering work

Choose metrics for measuring progress

  • Domain Authority is how well Moz calculates a given page will do in a Google search based on link counts and trust, among other factors.
  • MozRank is an approximation of popularity, and high mR is correlated with better search engine rank. Links from important pages increase popularity faster.
  • Referral traffic is a signal of how useful people find your site. Use page views or number of visits in Google Analytics to estimate this metric.

Week Two: Planning your link building campaign, Part 2

This week you will choose which basic strategies you’ll employ for link building. You will refine each piece of the puzzle later, but this week you need to have the plan in place in a general way.

You may not be employing every strategy I mention here, but I will include them all on this checklist so you have them in your timetable in about the right place.

Basic tasks

  • Start generating a topic list for blogging and other content creation. Refer to Chapter Two for more detail about blogging and content creation, or to my Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing.
  • Create an outreach list for engaging with customers, clients, vendors, suppliers, and others you interact with as part of day to day business so you can easily create mutual links.
generating topics

Try using the Answer the Public to map out your ideas.

Content tasks (Chapter Two)

  • Decide on your core message that will guide your content for link building purposes.
  • Choose 4 to 8 sub-topics that support this core message.
  • Perform a competitive analysis of the core message and sub-topics of your top three competitors who are already succeeding with content marketing.
  • Identify your differentiator.
  • Choose which types of content you will create, ideally at least three kinds.
  • Identify which advanced content-based link building strategies you will use, ideally at least two.

Week Three: Begin content creation and prospect for guest blogging opportunities

Content creation tasks

Set these for yourself based on the types of content you’ve chosen to create. Remember, each piece of content must support your core message. Don’t forget to make use of your sub-topics. Staying organized will help you assess progress and efficacy.

You should aim to start publishing content in Week Four, next week.

Guest blogging tasks

  • Research and create a list of sites you can submit guest posts to using the Link Research Tools SERP tool, social media, my list of places to guest blog and a simple Google search (Chapter Three).
  • Research each site on your list by checking blog comments, using FollowerWonk, SimilarWeb.com, and social shares (Chapter Three).
  • Check the guest blogging guidelines of any sites that remain on your list after your research is done.
  • Check each remaining site for red flags (Chapter Three).
  • Analyze the content success of your remaining target sites with tools like Impactana, LinkTally, and Open Site Explorer. Check the most popular posts.
  • Eliminate all but your best prospects.

Week Four: Publish Content and Pitch Guest Posts

Publishing tasks

  • Publish your content on each platform that’s part of your plan.
  • Share each publication socially. Don’t forget to watch for comments and interact with others.
  • If you mention someone in a post, let them know and ask them to share on social media.

Pitching tasks

  • Take the time to craft a tailored guest posting pitch for only the best fit sites on your list (Chapter Four).
  • Send your pitches.
  • Prepare your follow up so you can send it next week.
  • Reply personally and quickly to any responses you get. Build relationships.
create-follow-up-emails

When crafting the perfect pitch it is important to also create catchy follow-up emails.

Content tasks

  • That’s right—you still have more content to produce! Produce your goal pieces of content for the week.
  • Don’t fall behind on your content calendar or your topic list; stick with both, and generate new ideas as often as you can. There’s always more room on your topic list.

Relationship building tasks

This week you will add in relationship building tasks to your schedule. These you’ll want to keep up with on an ongoing basis as you nurture relationships and build your authority as an influencer. The details surrounding all of these tasks can be found in Chapter Four.

  • Look for press requests from journalists that dovetail with your guest posting goals.
  • Offer useful, constructive feedback to a blogger in your niche at least once.

Week Five: Measure progress, make changes, and troubleshoot

By this time you should be getting into the groove somewhat with your ongoing tasks:

Publishing tasks

  • Publish your content on each platform that’s part of your plan.
  • Share each publication socially. Don’t forget to watch for comments and interact with others.

Content tasks

  • Produce your goal pieces of content for the week.
  • Update your content calendar and topic list.

Relationship building tasks

  • Look for press requests from journalists that dovetail with your guest posting goals.
  • Offer useful, constructive feedback to a blogger in your niche at least once.
  • Monitor social media for comments on your work and activity surrounding your keywords and in your niche.

Pitching tasks

  • Craft any new guest posting pitches needed and send.
  • Prepare your follow up so you can send it next week.
  • Reply personally and quickly to any responses you get.

We also stop to measure progress and fix any problems that have arisen at this stage:

Assessment tasks

  • Use any or all of these metrics you chose to see how you’re doing.
  • Check the more general signs such as your rankings, traffic rates, referral link traffic, and how often search engines are crawling your site.

If those numbers are moving for you, your links are working. If they’re not, you may need to adjust your link building strategy. Try not to make too many broad changes at once; instead, change one thing at a time and see if it helps. This way you know what’s working and what isn’t.

Troubleshooting tasks

Find the details on these tasks in Chapter Six.

  • Identify broken link building opportunities in your niche.
  • Use a software tool such as SEO SpyGlass to audit your link profile.
  • Conduct any needed outreach via email to remove bad links. Make a note of when to disavow if you receive no response.
  • Look for and repair dead links.
  • Start actively monitoring your site for bad links if you’re not already.

Week Six: Start email outreach and creative strategies

This week you continue all of your tasks from before (I’m using more shorthand now because you should be a pro at this by now):

Publishing tasks

  • Publish your content.
  • Share socially and interact.

Content tasks

  • Produce your content.
  • Update your content calendar and topic list.

Relationship building tasks

content marketing

Content Marketing RoadMap – Provided by Business2Community

  • Look for guest posting opportunities.
  • Interact with an influencer in your niche at least once.
  • Monitor your niche social media universe.

Pitching tasks

  • Craft new guest posting pitches and send.
  • Prepare your follow up.
  • Reply personally.

Assessment tasks

  • Check metrics and general signs of your site’s health.
  • Tweak strategy as needed. If you do make changes, make note of what you changed.

Troubleshooting tasks

  • Monitor your site for bad links.

This week you’re also going to work on adding in email outreach (see details on these tasks in Chapter Six):

Email outreach tasks

  • Choose which email outreach methods for link building you want to employ.
  • Create a tailored email outreach list.

Finally, add in your creative backlinking tasks (details on these tasks are in Chapter Seven):

Creative backlinking tasks

  • Decide which creative strategy you want to try first.
  • Create a detailed plan for how to implement the strategy so you can add it in next week.

Next Steps

Once you have the basics down, it is time to start doing two more things.

Item 1: Competitive backlink analysis and link aquisition

Click the link above to read more or watch the video below.

Item 2: Creative link building 

Get started now!

That’s it! In six busy weeks, you implemented a detailed, comprehensive back linking strategy for your business.

All that’s left the complete list of back linking resources in Chapter Ten.

About John E Lincoln

John Lincoln (MBA) is CEO of Ignite Visibility (a 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 Inc. 5000 company) a highly sought-after digital marketing strategist, industry speaker and author of two books, "The Forecaster Method" and "Digital Influencer." Over the course of his career, Lincoln has worked with over 1,000 online businesses ranging from small startups to amazing clients such as Office Depot, Tony Robbins, Morgan Stanley, Fox, USA Today, COX and The Knot World Wide. John Lincoln is the editor of the Ignite Visibility blog. While he is a contributor, he does not write all of the articles and in many cases he is supported to ensure timely content.