Be Bold: 4 Uncommon Types of Content That Attract Hundreds of Backlinks

If you want great backlinks in the modern SEO world, you need great content.

It’s as simple as that.

Those links improve your search engine rankings and send you droves of referral traffic.

Really, all the posts you read on content marketing come down to two things:

• how to create great content
• how to promote it

They can both get pretty complex when you dive into them.

Here, I want to focus on the first point.

Specifically, I want to talk about what types of content outperform all others.

I get hundreds of emails a day from bloggers asking for links to their latest “epic” guide.

I check out as many as I can, but most aren’t nearly as epic as the creators believe they are. In fact, they’re all almost identical.

If you want to be successful with your promotional efforts, you need to have something truly worth promoting.

That means you have something that’s unique, special, and valuable. And it needs to be something that people care about.

It’s no easy feat, but that’s your goal.

Out of those emails I get every day, 99% contain links to your standard blog post/guide type of content.

I love blogging—I really do—but if you want to stand out, you should also consider creating other forms of content.

There are four in particular that are really effective, and I’ll reveal what they are in this post.

Be warned, though: the reason why these types of content aren’t produced as much as others is because they are much more difficult to create than your standard blog posts.

They will cost much more time and money to produce, but they will also produce exponentially more links and revenue.

They’re not for the lazy, but if you’re ready to put in some work, let’s get started. 

Type #1: Tools rule in terms of value

It’s tough to define what a member of your audience would deem valuable, but it correlates with the usefulness of your offer to them.

Blog posts can be very valuable if they help a reader overcome a big problem.

This very post could be worth tens of thousands of dollars to you if you actually implement the advice. I’d say that’s valuable.

But many blog posts aren’t actionable even if they’re well written.

On the other hand, tools are almost always useful because they have a specific purpose and use.

How many bloggers or businesses do you know that have created tools for their audiences?

My guess? Not many.

Not only are such tools useful but they are also rare, which makes them even more special.

Let’s look at a few so you have a clear picture of what I’m talking about.

Take a look at the tool from Keywordtool.io:

This was made back in May of 2014.

According to Ahrefs, at the time of writing, it had over 25,700 backlinks, coming from 3,860 linking root domains.

Can you imagine getting this many links from a series of blog posts, no matter how “epic”?

This keyword tool takes a simple concept, but it executes it well. You enter a keyword into the text box, and the tool will generate a list of keyword suggestions based on autocomplete suggestions.

Basically, it goes to sources such as Google, enters your keyword, and then looks at the suggestions that pop up.

If you hire a typical developer, this kind of a tool would take about 2-3 weeks to create and cost around $5,000 (my estimate).

Based on that cost, the creator has been able to get links for 19.4 cents a piece. Or, in terms of linking root domains (LRDs), it’s $1.75 per linking root domain.

And these aren’t low quality links. On top of that, I’m sure he’s been able to sell a good number of premium memberships (a few extra features), while also drumming up some advanced keyword research projects for other businesses.

One more example (a personal one…): If you go to the Quick Sprout homepage, you’ll see the Quick Sprout tool, which you may or may not know about.

It takes your domain name and generates an incredibly detailed SEO and site performance report:

It wasn’t cheap to make. In fact, it cost me over $100,000.

I include it here to illustrate that you can go as big or as small as you’d like with tools.

Small tools that cost a few hundred or thousand can still get a great amount of attention, but bigger tools usually get more.

Even though the tool is free, the leads that it has generated have already produced several times what I paid to have it created.

That’s the most important conclusion here: Tools can be used not only to get backlinks and traffic but to also produce revenue.

Blog posts convert at lower rates, and while they can produce a solid return on investment (ROI), it doesn’t compare to tools.

Are tools perfect? It’s only fair that I tell you about the potential downside of tools as well.

First is the potentially high cost. You’ll need to invest quite a bit before you ever see returns.

Secondly, results are never guaranteed. Not all tools are well received or popular, so you risk creating a tool that your audience doesn’t love.

However, if you really understand your audience and apply lean marketing principles, you can reduce the risk of this considerably.

Type #2: Viral story videos (almost commercials)

I think many people forget that videos and commercials are still a form of content.

Yes, people don’t like most commercials they see on TV, but smart marketers have figured out that there are certain types of ads that people love.

They’ll share these, link to them, and help them go viral.

My favorite example of this is Dollar Shave Club’s ad campaign.

Their first video came out of nowhere and was enough to establish the company as a household name:

This wasn’t a typical commercial about shaving blades, with all sorts of close-ups. You know the ones I’m talking about…

Instead, it’s an immensely entertaining video starring the founder.

They don’t include the standard platitudes that viewers are sick of hearing. Instead, they’re authentic.

I strongly encourage you to watch the full video now, before moving forward:

This video alone has received almost 22 million views along with 9,520 backlinks from 1,760 domains:

It’s true, creating a video like this isn’t cheap.

It will cost tens of thousands of dollars, and that’s why most businesses don’t even attempt it.

However, if you have the budget, it’s a great option. Just remember to also budget for the initial promotion (that hopefully pushes the video viral).

Type #3: High quality images are more valuable than ever before

I’m not sure why this idea did not take off in the past.

It’s not new.

The strategy is to create a whole bunch of custom images that bloggers in your niche would love to use.

Once you do, you let them know about the images and say they can use any of them free as long as they link back to your site, giving it credit.

If you’re a blogger, you know how hard it is to find great custom images, let alone free.

That’s why this is such an easy sell.

But now, I think this strategy is more effective than ever before.

There have never been more bloggers creating content on a regular basis. That’s one factor that raises the demand for images.

Additionally, most of those bloggers are realizing that quality is the most important factor in their success. That applies to both their writing and the images they use. This creates even more demand for high quality images.

If you can provide that, you will be successful.

Stock images suck, go for custom: There are tons of free stock image sites out there with the same old pictures of models dressed up, faking some pose.

There’s a reason why readers hate these: they look fake and unrelated to the content.

You could customize those stock images, but that’s more work than most bloggers are willing to put in.

Your best bet, when using this strategy, is to create a ton of custom images relevant to the topics that bloggers in your niche write about.

Here’s an example of one that I used on one of my past posts:

As you can see, it doesn’t necessarily have to be complex to look nice and enhance the content.

Take image building a step further and make images for stats: One specific approach you could take is to create images, essentially mini-infographics, that summarize important industry stats.

This approach has one huge bonus.

Think about a time when a blogger is searching for a good stat to use.

They head to Google and search for something like:

content marketing challenges stats

A good portion of the time, they will look for good images to include with the stats they find (I know I do):

If they see a good one, they’ll click on it and go through to the page that hosts it:

In this case, that page would be your gallery.

As long as you ask nicely for a link in exchange for the picture, you’ll usually get it.

The big benefit is that it’s easier to rank in image searches than regular results.

On top of the links you get from emailing specific bloggers, you’ll get links naturally from people who find your image gallery through this process.

But don’t rely on image traffic: If you want to control your ROI from this project, you need to promote your gallery to bloggers yourself.

Make as big of a list of bloggers as possible, and start emailing them with a message like this:

Subject: I made a free gallery of custom (niche) images

Hi (name),

I know that it’s tough to find or create great images to use in blog posts, so I thought I’d do something for the (niche) community.

I’ve hired a designer to create a ton of custom images, some of which will probably be perfect for future posts you write. (I can’t use them all myself!)

The only catch is that I’d appreciate a link back to the gallery when you use a picture.

I’ll also be removing each picture once it’s used a few times so that none of them become too common.

If that sounds like something you’re interested in, let me know, and I’ll send you the link.

Cheers,

(Your name)

Type #4: Stats will drive the future

The final type of content that isn’t created as often as it could be is a list of stats.

Good bloggers love stats and will link to a source when they use a particular statistic in their content.

If you collect a ton of stats on different topics in your niche, they will often link to your page as a reference (on top of the original research studies).

For example, in a health niche, you could create stats for things like:

• junk food consumption in 2016
• average amount of protein in diets of different countries
• number of vegans in 2016 (or over the years)
• average minutes of exercise that people get per day

Think of stats that bloggers will be looking for.

To make it even more effective, conduct original research: The real power comes when you conduct your own surveys and data analyses.

Then, when a blogger wants to cite a stat from that research, they will link back to your site every single time.

You can easily get hundreds of links (or many more) if your research provides a useful, interesting result.

One business who does this sort of thing is Buzzsumo.

You may remember them because I wrote a post that summarized their research on over 1 billion Facebook posts.

Since they emailed me their findings directly, I didn’t link back to a specific page on their site. Instead, I just linked to their homepage multiple times, which is even better for them.

While I can’t say exactly how many links that research got them, I can confidently say that it’s in the thousands by now.

That kind of research is difficult, but if you’re willing to put in the effort (and maybe hire a data scientist/programmer), it’s possible.

Conclusion

I warned you, none of these content types are easy to produce—that’s why they’re not common.

However, they all can produce tremendous ROIs.

When done right, each of these types of content can attract hundreds (or thousands) of links and lead to greater profits.

I realize they’re not simple to do, so if you need some guidance, let me know where you’re stuck by leaving a comment below.

from Quick Sprout http://ift.tt/21W6y1v

5 Ways to get SEO Traffic in a Hard Niche

It’s one of the biggest challenges when it comes to SEO.

You can read about tons of different SEO tactics on various blogs, but will they work for you?

After all, that’s the important part.

Not everyone wonders about this because they know that common SEO tactics will work for them, no problem.

But you might be different.

Your business may operate in a “hard” niche.

And it’s true, SEO is more difficult in these niches, so not all tactics will work.

However, I’ve worked with many clients in hard niches and have been able to achieve great SEO results with them.

That’s why I’m confident that there is an SEO plan out there that will work for you.

I’m going to help you make that plan for your specific business by showing you 5 ways to improve your SEO efforts in hard niches.

But before we start…

What is a “hard niche?” There’s no formal definition, but I’m referring to businesses that operate in niches that:

• have small online audiences 
• have lots of SEO competition
• are hard to get links in (there aren’t many blogs or sites that seem to link out)
• are “boring” (I’ll expand on this throughout the article with specific examples)

If your business falls into that category, I believe that by reading this post, you’ll learn at least a few ways to improve your SEO traffic. 

1. Competition depends on the scope (hint: change your scope)

We’re going to address those problems individually, starting with competition.

It’s easy to rank highly for a term when only a few pages on the Internet are optimized for that term.

However, if you’re going up against 10 experienced SEOs, you’ll have a hard time.

If your business is in a hard niche in the sense that traffic is incredibly valuable so competition is fierce (think loans, insurance, etc.), you’ll find that scenario often.

The very core of your SEO strategy needs to shift because you won’t be able to beat all your competitors.

Instead, you need to find keywords that they don’t even target because they don’t think that those words are worth their time.

But you’re smarter than that.

We’re talking about long-tail keywords here—longer, more descriptive keywords that have lower search volumes.

Even though they have lower search volumes, because they are more specific, the traffic they bring is usually more targeted and valuable.

While long-tail phrases don’t get as many searches per month as shorter ones do, there are way more long-tail phrases than the popular short-tail ones.

This isn’t a new concept by any means, but it’s an important one if you’re targeting a competitive niche.

Even a phrase that only gets 50-100 searches a month may be worth it if it’s for a term with high commercial intent (reader is likely to buy something from you).

How to find long-tail keywords: Sure, some SEOs are smart and target long-tail keywords because they know they’re easier to rank for, but there aren’t very many of those SEOs.

And since there are so many long-tail keywords, you can always find some new ones to target if you’re willing to dig.

Why?

Because the best keywords aren’t easy to find.

Most bad SEOs (and there are a lot) and business owners simply use the Google keyword planner (or a similar tool).

They plop in a broad keyword and choose keywords to target based on the results:

But thousands of people have done this for just about every niche imaginable. You’ll find more competition than seems reasonable for almost all of those terms.

Google has data on just about every search phrase you can think of but doesn’t always show it in these broad search results.

So, while using the keyword planner is fine, you need to enter seed keywords and phrases that are different from those everyone else is using.

There are many ways to find these, but one of my favorites is to head over to Reddit.

Type a broad keyword into the search bar. I typed in “drywall”:

Now, start looking at the results for keywords.

I quickly found “how to screw drywall” in one of the threads.

Put that into the tool, and it turns out that the phrase gets about 90 searches per month in the US:

No, that’s not a huge number, but it’s nothing to sneeze at either. If you rank for that phrase, you’ll also probably rank for other very similar phrases (e.g., “how screw drywall” or “how to screw in drywall”). Each of those will have small search volumes, but they’ll all add up to something substantial enough.

Put together 50-100 articles for long term phrases like those, and you’ll be getting a few thousand search visitors fairly easily, without the insane competition for popular keywords.

Look at the search results for that phrase:

The #1 result is a YouTube video, and the top content results don’t even have the phrase in their titles.

That’s as easy a keyword as you’ll find, and it’s because it’s not a keyword that comes up in those obvious searches.

If you put the time into finding great long-tail keyword phrases, you’ll make your SEO plan significantly easier and more effective.

There are many ways to find good long-tail keyword phrases. Here are a few resources with other specific tactics:

• 5 Modern Keyword Research Methods to Uncover Hidden Gems
• How To Generate 20,000 Monthly Visitors Through Long-Tail Search
• A Step by Step Guide to Integrating Long-Tail Keywords Within Blog Posts

2. If links are hard to find, think laterally

In some niches—such as marketing, recipes, and entertainment niches, for example—it’s very easy to get links.

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs that are willing to link to you if you make a good case.

But in some niches, those blogs just don’t exist.

That’s when you need to get creative.

One very effective strategy is to get links from related niches.

For example, if you’re a plumber, related niches would be:

• home DIY
• home decor
• beauty/life (e.g., a proper way to unclog sinks or prevent clogs)

Basically, think of any other niche that you can add your expertise to.

Then, all the typical SEO tactics come back into play: guest posting, forum posting, etc.

Let’s go through an example.

Let’s say that you’re a home decorator.

One related niche is home buying and owning, which has a different audience from your typical home decor enthusiasts.

You could write about how home decor could add value to your home. In fact, that turns out to be a good long-tail phrase:

What could you do with this?

You could create content for your own site and then reach out to home buyer/owner blogs asking for a link. That’s a standard SEO tactic.

Alternatively, you could use the idea for a guest post on a popular site.

Not only will it rank for the long-tail keyword that you target (sending you continuous traffic), but it’ll also send you a lot of immediate referral traffic from the site you post on.

Start by thinking of as many related niches as you can, then generate as many ways as possible to add value to those niches.

3. Boring niche? Here’s how to make it more fun

What can you do in a boring niche?

Can you really make painting homes fun?

If you approach the subject with a notion that it is, in fact, boring, then you probably can’t.

But usually, there are ways to make content at the very least entertaining.

Brian Dean did a great case study of this exact idea. Mike Bonadio, who runs an SEO agency based in NYC, had a client who worked in bug control—boring.

However, he created a high quality infographic on an interesting topic: how bugs can help you defeat garden pests. That infographic got picked up by a few prominent blogs:

Gardening is a related niche for pest control (just as we discussed in the previous section).

But Mike took it a step further by creating “fun” content.

Bugs aren’t supposed to be fun, but he made it fun by focusing on the benefits that bugs can provide.

And you can do this in every niche by focusing on exciting benefits and surprises instead of the boring parts.

For example, do you seal driveways?

Well, that seems boring at first, but what if you created content like:

• How many gallons of sealant would it take to seal Leonardo DiCaprio’s driveway?
• Choosing the wrong driveway sealant will cost you money: A comparison of the true cost of paving a driveway

I’m not so sure that all of those are real things, but the point remains. Turn the boring parts into an important element of a story, but not the main focus.

Back to the case study—how did it go?

Extremely well, I’d say. After Mike reached out to sites in that related niche, he was able to get over 60 referring domains and hundreds of links:

On top of that, he got over 2,100 views from referral traffic in the short term. His client’s site still ranks #4 for the term “exterminator NYC.”

Can you make your niche interesting to your customers? I know this is difficult and requires some thinking, so let me give you another example: Blendtec.

Blendtec is a company that sells…blenders.

Not exactly a sexy product.

However, you might have heard of their “Will it Blend?” video series.

In these videos, they blend all kinds of crazy objects, like iPhones, superglue, and even skeletons to answer the question: “Will it blend?”

They now get millions of views on each video they produce.

More importantly, those videos get linked to a lot, and those videos link back to Blendtec’s website, which makes them rank highly for all sorts of blender-related terms.

4. Don’t start from scratch

If you’re in a hard niche and you also have a brand new website, it’s going to be a long journey to SEO success.

For some types of businesses, most notably local businesses, you have an alternative: use another site’s domain authority.

For example, if you search for “plumbing Chicago,” you get these results just below a map of a few plumbers:

Notice that these listings aren’t of sites that actual plumbers own but of review sites such as Yelp.

Any business can create a page on Yelp, which will automatically have more search authority than your brand new site.

More importantly, these sites have that authority because they already have good search optimization and huge quantities of backlinks.

All you need to do is show up highly on their important pages, and your page (on their site) will rank highly in the search results.

You don’t need links to do this. Usually, you just need reviews.

If you run a great business, these aren’t too difficult to get. Just ask all your happy customers to leave a review (and give them instructions).

In addition, here are some more resources that will help you get more online reviews:

• 5 Techniques to Get 5 Stars: How to Get More (and Better) Online Reviews
• How To Get Great Online Reviews of Your Business
• 7 Secrets to Getting Positive Online Reviews

5. Competitor analysis is always an important first step

The final complaint that I hear is that “no one links out in my niche.”

Well, I’ll tell you something: everyone else is getting their links from somewhere.

And with the tools available to you today, there’s no reason why you can’t get many of those same links.

This is not a new technique, but it remains one of the most cost-efficient and effective ways of getting backlinks and improving your search rankings.

It’s not difficult either, but it will take some work on your part.

Here’s the simple procedure.

Step #1 – Make a list of competitors: First you need a list of sites similar to your own—your competitors.

If they are similar, you should be able to get most of the same links they have.

To make this list, start searching for popular terms in your niche, and then write down the URLs of the top 10 results (or fewer) in a spreadsheet or list:

If it’s a site on a specific topic, you can write down just the domain name, but if it’s a huge site (like hgtv), copy down the exact URL of the page.

Step #2 – Get a list of their backlinks: Next, you need to sign up for either Ahrefs or Majestic.

Those are not affiliate links; those are just the two best link databases by far.

The small monthly cost is more than worth it if you’re serious about SEO.

Go through your list, one by one, and enter the URLs or domain names into the site explorer:

Then, go to the “backlinks” panel on the results, and you’ll get a list of all the backlinks to that page or site:

Step #3 – Determine if it’s possible to get any of those links: Here’s where the work really comes in.

You need to visit each of those pages that link to your target page and see if it’s possible for you to get a similar link on those pages.

For example, one of the above links looks like this:

It’s a page that links to tons of resources.

If you had an appropriate resource page, it would be simple enough to email the owner and ask to be included.

Other times, you might see that the link is from a guest post. You can email the owner pitching a guest post of your own.

While you won’t get a 100% success rate, you will be able to duplicate a good portion of the links for each competitor.

The links are out there, and this is one of the best ways to find them.

One final note is that I recommend you batch each step to improve your efficiency.

Don’t try to get each link as soon as you find it. Instead, record it in a spreadsheet, and do all your link outreach at once.

Conclusion

Not all niches are created equal.

Some are in fact more difficult when it comes to SEO.

However, that doesn’t mean that it’s not doable.

I’ve shown you 5 ways that can help you improve your search traffic in almost any industry (hard ones included).

Start by trying out at least one of these, if not more.

If you have any success stories about SEO in a boring niche, I’d love it if you shared them in a comment below.

from Quick Sprout http://ift.tt/1UEYb8x

A Step-by-Step Guide to Protecting Yourself Against Negative SEO

You’re checking the backlinks pointing to your site, as you do occasionally, when you see it:

a huge spike in links.

At first, you’re not sure whether to be excited or scared, but when you look closer, your fears are confirmed—you’re being attacked.

Someone is bombarding your site with spam links (like the ones below) in the hopes that you will be penalized by Google.

It’s likely a competitor, but it’s almost impossible to tell who.

While this type of scenario is most likely to happen in competitive niches, it can happen anywhere.

The term for it, as you may know, is negative SEO.

Will it hurt your rankings?

It can. There are many stories in forums of negative SEO causing organic search traffic to crash.

However, you should first understand whether there’s a real risk to your site.

In order to get penalized by Google, the number of spammy backlinks would have to be overwhelmingly huge compared to the number of good links.

For a site such as Quick Sprout, there’s almost no risk that a negative SEO attack would be successful because it has hundreds of thousands of quality links pointing to it.

If your site has only a few hundred links, or even a few thousand, that’s when you need to be concerned.

I have some good news for you (among the bad): If you do get attacked, it sucks. It will cost you weeks or months of lost revenue. However, you can almost always recover from negative attacks.

Additionally, if you follow the four steps that I lay out in this post, you’ll be able to prevent negative SEO attacks from causing any real damage most of the time. 

Step #1 – Automate your data updates

The first thing you should do is get regular updates about your site’s health.

To do that, log in to your Google webmaster tools account and go to Preferences. Next, make sure that the “Enable email notifications” box is checked:

While you can pick specific issues to be notified of, it’s best to set the type to “all issues.”

You’ll immediately get notified if there are any signs of foul play like getting hacked or having malware on your site.

Next, get email updates about new backlinks: The longer you wait to address a negative SEO attack, the more likely it is to be successful.

If you get a daily email that gives you a quick overview about new links pointing to your site, it will be obvious when someone spams your site.

If you see an abnormal quantity of links or tons of links with anchor text such as “pills,” “payday loans,” etc., you have an issue.

There are a few tools that can help you track your backlinks.

A free option is OpenLinkProfiler.

As a free option, it’s limited, but it’s still a decent solution for small sites.

Once you create an account, go to the Backlinks panel, click “Link Alerts,” and then input your website and email:

You’ll then get a daily email that lets you know whether any new backlinks were detected.

Alternatively, Ahrefs (a paid tool) also has this feature, but it has a more reliable (and sizeable) database.

You can either look at new links manually by going to the “new links” page:

Or you can also go to the “email notifications” section and change the status of new/lost backlink notifications to “Daily”:

Again, you’ll get a nice email summary every day.

You don’t need to do anything big with these email summaries. Just take a 10-second scan of them for anything out of the ordinary.

Step #2 – Monitor your top backlinks

There’s one more type of negative SEO attack you should be aware of although it’s far less common than the ones I mentioned above.

Sometimes, someone doing negative SEO will create a new email account similar to yours (e.g., Neil.Patel38388@gmail.com) and then email sites that link to you asking them to take down the link to your site.

This is clearly unethical, but some people don’t care.

While you can’t monitor all of your links, you can keep track of the best ones.

You can find your best ones with any backlink database tool. On Ahrefs, you type in your site in the “site explorer” tool, and then click on “links” in the sidebar:

This will bring up a list of links to your site, sorted by URL rank by default.

Get to know your top 20 or so links well because they’re likely the ones that will be targeted.

From here, do two things:

• pay special attention to them in the “links lost” section of those emails we set up in step 1
• check all of them manually once in awhile (maybe once or twice a month) just in case one slipped by. You could create a tool to do this for you if you’d like.

Finally, you may be able to prevent a negative SEO attack from being successful by doing all your outreach from an email address for your domain (e.g., Neil@QuickSprout.com).

Then, add a line to your signature that reads something like this:

This is the official email address I use for all matters regarding (site name).

That way, some of your contacts may notice something fishy when they get a removal request from a different email.

Step #3 (if applicable) – Monitor and report fake reviews and mentions

This next step applies mostly to local businesses although any website can implement it to be safe.

Many businesses get links from review sites such as Yelp:

These links often carry a lot of weight since Yelp is an authoritative site in the eyes of Google.

However, the quality of the link you get from Yelp depends on how your business is weighed compared to other businesses in your industry.

For example, if someone searches for plumbers in Florida, they get a page like this:

That’s the page that’s most authoritative to Google, not the individual profile pages for each business.

But the profile pages are the ones with links going back to the businesses’ sites.

Finally, the higher up on the page the link is within the search results, the more authority is transferred to the profile page, which is then transferred to the actual business website.

This is because links higher on a page are generally more important than those lower on the page.

A competitor involved in negative SEO has an opportunity to hurt you in a few ways here.

The plan will be to leave negative reviews on your profiles, which will lower your rankings on sites like Yelp. This in turn hurts you by:

• lowering your search engine rankings
• lowering the number of customers who hire you based on those reviews

If someone resorts to those dirty tactics, react quickly.

Since you should know all your customers, it should be easy to spot fake reviews right away even if they’re well written.

Dealing with them is pretty easy in most cases. Sites like Yelp usually have a “report this review” button available to the owner of the business profile:

The tricky part is finding the fake reviews in the first place and doing it fast enough so that you can remove them before they cause any damage.

To find them, use some sort of a monitoring tool.

Google Alerts is an amazing free tool that is enough for most, but there are also advanced tools you can use if you feel that you need more.

Once you’re signed in, enter the term you want to create an alert for into the text box. Then, click the Options link below to expand your options:

I recommend getting these alerts at least once a day.

You should set up alerts for all the names that could be used for your brand. For example:

• Quick Sprout
• QuickSprout
• Neil Patel
• Misspellings – e.g., Neal Patel, Quik Sprout

From the emails you get, you can quickly find reviews of your brand and its mentions in groups and forums.

This will help you not only protect yourself from negative SEO but also maintain a good brand image in general.

Finally, you also might want to manually monitor specific review sites that are really important to your business.

They could be Yelp, Amazon, Angie’s List, etc. If they send you customers on a regular basis, check in with them once every day or two.

Step #4 – Disavow bad links

The final step is a last resort.

In theory, the best plan is to just not make any enemies, but even that doesn’t always work.

Eventually, you may be faced with that huge spike of spammy links that threaten to destroy your Google rankings.

You need to make sure that Google doesn’t count those links when the algorithm is deciding where to rank your pages.

It’s a tool that can be dangerous because it can actually harm your rankings if used incorrectly:

Basically, you create a text file that contains all the URLs that should be ignored, and Google will do that the next time it crawls any of those pages.

However, if you disavow a link that was actually helping one of your pages rank well, that page now has one less good link.

What this means is that you need to be careful, and I’ll show you how to do just that.

A possible shortcut: If you have an Ahrefs account with a standard plan or higher, you have access to a disavow feature.

You can turn it on beside the main search bar:

In the link reports, you’ll see an option to disavow a URL or domain by clicking a link:

At any point, you can go to your “disavow links” and export a file that could be uploaded into the disavow tool.

This will save you time in the long run because you don’t need to worry about tracking old links that you’ve disavowed, but it’s not mandatory either if your account doesn’t support it.

Disavowing manually: This is the option that most use, and it works fine.

First, you’ll need to download as many backlinks pointing to your site as possible. It’s difficult to get all the links, but if you use multiple sources, you can get a good number of them.

Start with Google Search Console (former Webmaster Tools). If you go to the backlinks section, there’s an option to download sample links and “latest” links. Do both:

Then download whatever links you can get from backlink databases such as Ahrefs, Majestic, Open Site Explorer, and Open Link Profiler.

Add them all to one giant spreadsheet. All you really need is the URL/domain name.

Here’s the scary part:

You need to determine whether each link is legitimate or not.

This involves a lot of manual tedious work for large sites.

You can use some shortcuts such as:

• looking for spammy domain extensions (e.g., “.ru”)
• looking for spammy anchor text (e.g., “viagra”)
• looking for well-known domains that are obviously good links

That’s the bulk of the work. You’ll have to visit many URLs to check them. Consider dividing this work up if you have a team.

Next, you need to strip the trailing URL data so that all you have left is the domain name.

To do that in Excel or Google sheets, use this formula in a column next to the URLs:

=left(B1,find(“/”,B1,9)-1)

Drag the corner of that cell down so that the formula is applied to all the URLs in the column:

In the example above, you’d start with column B and end up with the bare domains in column A.

Next, get rid of the “http://”, “https://”, and “www.”. You can do this with a simple “find and replace” function (replace each phrase with a blank space).

Next, highlight all the domains and remove the duplicates.

Finally, you need to add the term “domain:” in front of all the sites so that the disavow tool knows to discount links from the entire site.

While you can disavow specific URLs, it’s usually best to remove all the links from the spammy domain.

Do this by using the formula:

=”domain:”&A1

Here is the resulting table:

You should now have a list like the one in column B above.

Finally, copy and paste these into a simple text file:

You can add comments using the “#” sign, but those are just for you. The disavow tool simply relays the information about the links to the search engine’s algorithm.

Finally, go into the disavow section of your Webmaster Tools account, and choose the domain that these links affect:

After clicking that button, you can upload your disavow text file.

As long as you did everything right, you’ll get a success message like this:

It’s a lot of tedious work, but it’s not too complicated.

Within a week or two, Google should remove most of those bad links from consideration.

Conclusion

Negative SEO is a terrible business practice, but some people still use it.

I’ve given you a 4-step process that will protect you against the bulk of potential negative SEO attacks or at least limit the damage they do.

I encourage you to employ these steps as soon as possible because they aren’t very useful if you use them long after the damage has been done.

Have you ever been affected by negative SEO? Share your experience in a comment below.

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Niche Site Project Coaching Call #7 with Perrin & Colleen: Building an Outreach Ecosystem & How to Approach Sites

Man… we were so close to revealing our site to you guys this week. Alas, we can’t. And it’s all Colleen’s fault!

Kidding, kidding. Colleen’s kicking some major butt, per usual, but we really did want to have the site in a “showroom” state this week (and believe me… we’re really looking forward to showing this bad boy off a bit).

But we can’t. Not just yet.

Why? Colleen’s not quite finished with content. We’ve been shooting for around 40 articles. That’s when we’ll officially “launch.”

But, long story short, Colleen probably needs another week or so before we’re ready to push our site out of the proverbial nest. And that’s fine! We were probably overly ambitious, and real-life stuff (like jobs) can certainly get in the way.

So, we’re going to give Colleen a bit more time to finish her first round of content before we really start getting busy with outreach.

That doesn’t mean Colleen hasn’t been gearing up to guest post…

Even though most of her energy has been going to wrapping up her first 40 articles, Colleen’s still been working on prospecting some good guest post targets.

Mostly, she’s been working her social network to see who has blogs, and she’s been looking for very high quality sites she wants links on, so she can try to build some relationships.

And she’s hit some snags.

A couple days into her prospecting, Colleen messaged me and said what basically everyone says when I tell them to go find people they know who have blogs. She said, “I asked, and no one has blogs!”

I replied, “Who did you ask?” And it turned out that she’d been just… kind of… brainstorming who might have a blog and asking them directly.

And that’s cool! It’s a good start! Colleen found three friends who had blogs that way.

However, we did have to expand our strategy. Here’s what we did:

• Instead of asking people directly, Colleen posted a status on Facebook asking if anyone was an active blogger. This was pretty successful, since people usually enjoy sharing their blogs.
• We joined a few easy-to-find Facebook communities and started making friends. The strategy here is the exact same—asking friends if you can guest post; the only difference is these folks will be new friends instead of old friends.

From that, Colleen lined up about 5 guest posts.

How cool is that? All it took was a couple of Facebook messages. Normally, if you were to execute a “traditional” guest posting campaign, that would probably take hours of prospecting and hundreds of emails.

By simply asking friends, Colleen was able to knock it out in a few hours while she was writing. And, let me tell you: for a new site, five links can make an incredible difference.

Colleen’s also been making some headway searching big blogs she wants links on. She’s mostly been looking at lists of top blogs in her niche. I think we may actually need to shoot higher for these (I talk about another prospecting “hack” in our call), but she’s found a lot of good ones already.

In this call, we discuss how to actually EXECUTE guest posting.

So, we’re on a roll with our guest post prospecting, and I think it’ll be fairly easy to get at least 10 links out of our first campaign.

But how do you actually do guest posting?

If you’ve never really executed an outreach campaign, it can be pretty daunting. And because it can be daunting, the very last thing I want to do is overcomplicate it. So, on this call, we focused on two things (1) how to set up a good outreach ecosystem and (2) how to approach different kinds of sites.

What do I mean by “outreach ecosystem?”

Basically, tools.

Here’s how I define “outreach environment”:

• A place where you can track emails
• A platform that allows you to use custom templates
• A way to organize your follow-up
• A way to keep track of relationships

There are many, many outreach tools out there. The three I typically recommend are (in order of cheapest to most expensive) Yesware, BuzzStream, and Pitchbox.

I won’t go through all of them there, and I really don’t even dive too deep in our coaching call; however, I can tell you that we’ll be using a combination of Yesware and Google Apps. Here’s why:

• Yesware has a really robust free version, which we’ll use to start.
• It integrates with Gmail, which greatly reduces the leaning curve
• It does 90% of what we need from an outreach tool
• Google Apps will let Colleen email from a branded email address (i.e. colleen@hersite.com)
• Google Apps increases Gmail’s sending limits by a lot (from 500 to 2,000 daily emails).
• Google Apps will let Colleen add team members, which could be useful if she ever wants to outsource her outreach

Is this the best way to go? No. Personally, I like BuzzStream. However, both tools combined will cost Colleen $5/mo unless she wants to upgrade, and she’ll be able to do nearly everything at the efficiency we want.

And really, at the end of the day, tools are NOT the most important part of outreach. The most important part of outreach is sending the dang email.

We also talked about how to actually pitch sites.

Here, I honestly feel like Colleen may have more to teach me than I have to teach her. One of her primary skills is communicating with people over email, building consensus, and moving them to action.

That said, I have deployed my fair share of outreach campaigns, and I’ve come up with some general rules for guest posting.

Here they are:

• For small blogs, don’t pitch right away. Instead, make friends. After you’ve got a friend, then pitch.
• For big blogs, make it short, sweet, and professional.

This is probably the biggest epiphany I had when I was learning outreach: you have to approach big blogs differently than you do small blogs.

I mean, think about who you’re talking to.

The owner of a small blog probably runs it as a passion project. They’re likely not making money. They’re likely bombarded with spammers on a daily basis. They’re ready to reject you. The simple solution, then, is to break down those defenses first, and only pitch them after they like you.

(…watch our call to see how I like to do this in my first email…)

Big sites are a different story. Here, you’re likely talking to an editor—someone who doesn’t necessarily even care about the site. They just want to do their job and go home. These folks may not want to be friends. They just want to know you can make their job easier. So for them, I like to pitch right up front in a very short email.

(…I show what I like to send these folks in the first email on our call, too…)

Here’s the main lesson, though: it’s not about your email template. So many people obsess over templates. There’s this deep, undying need to know exactly what to say.

That’s not important!

I’ve tested dozen of templates, and you know what? They all work about the same. The overall approach is what really makes the biggest difference.

Overall, we’re simply setting a good strategy and gathering our tools.

That way, we can hit the ground running!

So, that’s where we’re at: the top of the proverbial roller coaster, getting ready to take the plunge.

And who knows, maybe we’ll be ready to reveal the site next time!

Watch the Coaching Call Here:

Or if you would rather listen to the audio, you can download the MP3 Here.

The post Niche Site Project Coaching Call #7 with Perrin & Colleen: Building an Outreach Ecosystem & How to Approach Sites appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

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