We all know how important it is to build links to your website. SearchMetric’s annual report put backlinks at number 4 in their list of ranking factors. We also know tat the best way to build links is by writing content, promoting it.

But what if you don’t like writing any more than you have to? We’ve put together this guide so that you can learn exactly how to build links without having to write any content at all. Dive right in!

Interviews

By getting an interview with a reporter or a blogger, you can get your link profile a nice addition by having the interviewer link to your website when they publish the interview on their site.

A good place to show off your expertise and attract attention from reporters is HARO. This services allows reporters to post requests through their website and twitter feed asking for experts or professionals for interviews in their work.

All you need to do is sign up and select what industry you’d like to receive requests from. 3 times per day (morning, afternoon, and evening) you’ll receive email with typically 20-30 requests from reporters. Not all are for interviews in the sense of an audio or video style, but it’s still a great place to find some.

Another good website to look for interviews is Reddit, just yesterday I saw someone asking for SEO experts to be interviewed. Just find a sub-reddit related to your niche and see if anyone is requesting interviews.

Mentions

Getting a mention in an interview is an excellent way to boost your backlink profile, but it is by far not the only one, and another good way is to find mentions of your website that already exist and then get the authors to insert a link into their mention.

The mention might be in a blog, a forum or a news website, and all you have to do is find them and ask for the mention to be turned into a link. Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer is an excellent tool for finding those mentions. Once discovered get in contact with the webmaster and ask them if they’d change the text into a link.

After finding and contacting all of the websites you should setup a Google alert or a Talkwalker Alert to get a notification every time someone mentions you, your website or your brand in general.

Directories

If you haven’t already signed up to all kinds of different directories, I suggest you start doing that right now! HubSpot has an amazing collection of directories on their blog, so I won’t waste my time listing them here. Instead, to find the directory listing, just click here.

Sponsoring Events & Giveaways

For a local business this is a win-win situation. Not only will you get exposure from your logo being on all the promotional material that is used to advertise the event but you should also be included in the sponsors section of the events website.

You can gain links from local online newspapers and radio stations who work with the event to promote it. Remember you don’t just have to sponsor local events, you can also sponsor various events and giveaways online.

Give Away Your Product For Free

If you sell a physical product or a digital one, you can send out the product, free of charge, to relevant bloggers and authority figures, and ask them for honest reviews of the product. Having a product is great because it acts as an incentive for the blogger to post a review.

While this doesn’t work with every blogger, most of them will see it as an opportunity to write an easy piece of content to their blog, and most of the time they link back to you. And hey, if they don’t, you can always do like we told you to do in the mentions section, and ask them to add it later on!

A few good sites to find bloggers for reviews are:

• Tomoson
• BloggersRequired

Infographics

Infographics are hot right now, Kissmetrics increased their blog readership to 100,000 visitor in just 18 months with a content strategy of producing an infographic once a week. So if you are wondering whether it works, just check out that article.

A good way to increase the chances of your infographic being shared is to add the embed code below the infographic so others can just copy and paste into their blog. It’s a true win-win situation, the sharer gets great content and you get credit for your work – and a nice juicy backlink if you’re lucky to get a share by a popular blogger or a news site.

Infographics are a costly piece of content to produce however. A well researched and designed infographic will cost approx $1000-$2000. A good place to find good infographic designers is the visually community

Donations

There are literally thousands of charities all over the world, and by making a donation to one of them you can usually get a good backlink from their website in a thank you post.

Reach out to different charities or browse their websites to find one or more that suit your purposes. Besides, you’re doing a good thing when donating, so the backlink isn’t even the best thing you get from that.

Forums and Communities

Most niches have their own niche specific forums, some even more specific forums, such as in the automotive niche you have manufacturer specific forums, or sometimes even model specific forums.

These places are full of good audiences for you to build a relationship with, and better yet, they usually allow you to have a signature that links back to your website.

So not only can you build excellent relationships with your industry, create a backlink during the process but it’s also a great source of referral traffic. As we know diversifying your traffic is a crucial element to any successful business. By posting more and more on a forum over time you will generate greater exposure for your signature link. Another way is by directly linking to your articles in your responses to help back up your answers, you can mix this with other authority sites so it doesn’t appear spammy.

It’s really easy to find forums too, just type into Google “Your Niche” + Forum. You should find at least one or 2 forums to sign up to and start posting on. And remember, don’t just sign up and drop a link then leave. Be part of the community and grow your presence over time. Happy posting!

Wikipedia

I was a bit hesitant to include Wikipedia links in this list simply because they are SO DAMN HARD to get. The link power of Wikipedia is astonishing however, so if you have the right website you should be taking everything out of it.

However, do remember that Wikipedia does have pretty strict guidelines as to what your site can be about, and affiliate sites for example are not approved to be linked to, and are usually deleted from Wikipedia. It’s always worth a shot.

Government, County and City Websites

The government operates many directories, usually in a similar form like business directories, but specific to a certain area of operation. So if you run a marketing agency in London, it doesn’t hurt to get listed in a government controlled directory. The backlinks you get from these types of websites are usually pretty juicy.

What we have found from looking at our local government site is that hosting a local event is your best route of action in order to gain a link. Most resources that are linked to in government sites are internal, other .gov sites or non profit organisations.

If you host a local event that benefits the local community. For instance if you run an art shop maybe you could host a life drawing class once a month, you’ll have much better chance of being included.

And last but not least… Comment on blogs

Posting meaningful comments in other people’s blogs is always a good way to strengthen your online presence, regardless of the link you get being do-follow or no-follow. Blog commenting is a god source of referral traffic and you’d be amazed how many people click on your name in the comments section.

The most important thing is to provide a quality response. If people like what you say they’ll be more likely to want to read more of your content.

In the past people only bothered to comment on do-follow blogs and would skip any no-follow blog. Now that wordpress automatically add no-follow links to all comments people have started to realised to power of no follow blog comments for referral traffic. The most important thing is to find relevant blogs in your niche that have the type of readers you want to attract.

What also helps improve your CTR on blog comments is being one of the first to leave a comment on a new blog post. Checking each blog individually every second of the day can be very time consuming and annoying so we’ve developed a cool way to stay ahead of the pack and be one of the first to comment on posts.

For our most relevant blogs we use Shoot The Breeze to setup an email alert when a new blog post is published.

For our next tier of blogs we want to comment on regularly we add them into feedly and then just check feedly once or twice a day. Having everything in one feed you can quickly see what new content has been posted and using this technique we are usually in the first 5 commenters of posts.

Feedly have also mentioned that they are working on an instant notification feature for new blog posts which will be great to see.

And that’s about it, not too difficult now is it? Get out there and start building those links people!