Google was asked if you have an English version of your site for years and years and then expand the site to France. So you create an FR subdomain or subfolder for the French users. Does the English version signals pass through to the French version of the site? Gary Illyes from Google said generally no.
Link building is hard. Anyone who says otherwise has either not done much of it, or they’re trying to sell you a course.
To make it even harder, there are a million supposed link building hacks and tactics on the web – and most of them are pretty bad. A quick Google search will net you a treasure trove of stale email templates and tactics like link reclamation that either trick you into believing them because they rank well in search, or make you wonder why articles like that don’t have an expiration date.
When it comes down to brass tacks, there are really only two broad strategies for increasing your link building effectiveness, both of which come from a framework using BJ Fogg’s behavior model:
Increase motivation (make them want to link to you more) or
Decrease friction (make it easier for them to link to you)
Link building is a critical part of SEO, whether your website is small or large.
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Here’s how you can use BJ Fogg’s framework to really improve your link building strategies – despite what your Google searches are telling you.
What is BJ Fogg’s behavior model?
BJ Fogg’s behavior model illustrates that three elements must converge at the exact same moment for a behavior to occur: “Motivation”, “Ability”, and a “Prompt”. When the desired behavior is not performed, one or more of these elements is missing.
Source: Behaviormodel.org
Each of these elements is comprised of subcomponents. For example, “Core Motivators” will shape the “Motivation” element, “Simplicity Factors” define the “Ability” element, and each of these will work together in the context of the “Prompt”.
“Motivation” and “Ability” share a compensatory relationship in that when one is high, the other can be low and still achieve the desired results. For example, if something is hard to do, success can still be achieved if the motivation is high enough.
When this model is applied to link building, your best chance at securing a quality link is to either increase someone’s motivation to link to you or decrease friction to make it easier to link to you.
Let’s dive in.
Method one: Increase motivation
If you’re trying to increase motivation, you need to figure out how to influence how much the blogger or publisher wants to give you a link. The main way to do that is to produce really amazing content. That’s really a pre-requisite, for any long term content program, you can’t cut corners on content quality.
Outside of that, though, there are several ways to increase the blogger’s motivation to give you a link to that amazing content:
1. Build reciprocity and play the long game
Creating strong relationships is a clear path to increasing motivation. Your strategic partners can be an “in” to new markets or audiences, and ideally, you’ll be able to offer the same benefit to them.
As marketing strategist Mark Lindquist of Mailshake notes, when forming strategic partnerships, it’s not just about building high-profile relationships – it’s about working with the right people.
“I’m not at all concerned about the social following of someone as an indication of whether or not they’re worth connecting with,” he says. “Figure out what your goals are, find the people who can help you accomplish those goals, and build relationships with them.”
Guest posting is a great way to start building these relationships, but it’s also important to go to meetups, get on calls, and generally build your network and help others out. A good rule is to offer something of value first before asking for something in return. It’s a long game, but it will ultimately result in a win-win for everyone involved.
2. Offer clear incentives
‘What’s in it for me?”
This is the ultimate question at the center of almost any transaction or conversation in marketing and business, and for good reason. Mercy and gratitude won’t get the job done. You need to push the self-interest button to spur action.
If someone is devoting time and resources to help you, they’ll want to know that it’s worth their efforts. What incentives can you offer?
If you have a large social following, use it as leverage in the deal. They can tap into your audience and essentially get free exposure if they’re willing to do the same for you.
3. Give them something truly helpful
If your content genuinely helps someone improve their own content, it’s a much easier sell than a stale pitch of “My content is slightly better than what you already link to”. Here’s what better content could look like:
New original research
At Hubspot, we did some original research with the goal of getting some links back to our forms product. We published a blog post with the findings, and it was pretty easy to pick up some links because the data was new and interesting to bloggers.
Source: ahrefs
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Working with influencers is a strategy that works for tons of companies like DataBox, BigCommerce, and Mailshake.
For example, Smart Blogger uses round-up pieces to boost social shares and connect with influencers. They reached out to bloggers asking for their best tips on how to promote a blog, and the final article became one of their most successful posts at that time with more than 4,000 shares.
New images and graphs
Infographics and images can become outdated just as easily as blog text. As new research and information become available, images and infographics should be adjusted to reflect it.
I think the infographic link building tactic is sometimes overdone, but it can still work if you do it right. It’s best when you’re summarizing new data or complex information in a simple and interesting way. A great example is Pique Tea’s guide to intermittent fasting (a complex subject):
Source: blog.piquetea.com
SEO Smarty’s case study shows how they shared an infographic at scale using MyBlogGuest to get it in front of potential publishers (they earned 10 links from this method, by the way).
Or, you could do this the old-fashioned way by posting your infographic to your own blog, sharing seed content on social media, and reaching out to potential publications that could use it.
Anything that genuinely improves their content, ask yourself – “How can I improve tons of people’s content by creating something new?”
What questions do you have while reading content that goes unanswered? Could something you’ve written help to clarify?
LawnStarter does this well with their original research and data analysis pieces. For example, their blog post on the beneficial insects for your lawn includes backlinks to reputable sources for more information without distracting from the overall content.
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Method two: Decrease friction
The other link building method is to lower the friction or the inherent effort it takes someone to give you a link. Your goal should be to make things as easy as possible for the person on the other side.
1. Make your outreach emails as clear as possible
Good email outreach means that the person on the other end of your email shouldn’t have to figure out what you’re trying to say. If they don’t understand your request, they probably won’t respond to it.
Keep it simple and professional, but don’t be afraid to infuse a little personality, either:
There’s no need for mystery or ulterior motives. Ask for what you want, and tell them why you’re asking for it.
2. Deliver your quote or link fully formatted and ready to go
Give publishers as little work to do as possible. This not only makes it easy for them to do what you want, but it also ensures the quality of the final results. Your link or quote looks just as you want it to, the anchor text is spot-on, and you can reach back out with a genuine “Thank you”.
Other sources you can tap into are HARO or even Slack groups where people are actively looking for quotes. This is a super low-friction way to get links – for you and the publisher – because the barrier to entry is low.
3. Provide free content by guest posting
Guest posting remains one of the most effective, low-friction ways to earn backlinks. If your post is good, the publisher has zero work to do other than hit “Publish”.
If you can write a good guest post, you’re giving someone content for free, which is a win-win. Many publishers have a dedicated contributor program, but even if you don’t see one on their website, they still may accept guest posts with a good pitch.
Also, don’t forget to reduce friction in your own process. Use a cold email tool like Mailshake and a good CRM like HubSpot to automate and track all of your efforts, and remove much of the guesswork on outreach and follow-up.
BJ Fogg’s behavior model has been applied to a myriad of practical use cases, but its potency for effective link building is hard to ignore. Increasing someone else’s motivation and decreasing friction might not help you earn every link you pursue, but it can help you win bigger and lose smaller the more you do it.
Alex Birkett is a Senior Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot, where he focuses on freemium user growth. He can be found on Twitter @iamalexbirkett.
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Global consumer Internet video traffic will account for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic. Pages with videos are 53 times more likely to rank on Google.
With Google releasing more information about updates, you should see it as a good practice to highlight this information in your Google Analytics account.
Every year our team analyzes site audit results of our users to find out the most common SEO errors. Light shed on the results we’ve got for last year.
If you’re looking for a way to optimize your site for technical SEO and rank better, consider deleting your pages. I know, crazy, right? Lots of points covered with screenshots.
John Mueller from Google said it is wrong to say that “Edu domains tend to have a ton of outbound links, and as such, Google ignores a big chunk of them.” He said “People who focus on .edu links usually have bigger problems to worry about, but I’ve certainly never said what you’re suggesting.”
Gary Illyes from Google posted an awesome question and answer on Twitter talking about pages that are on the edge of the Google quality threshold. He said that if your pages disappear from Google Search and then reappear when you manually submit them to Google, that means you’re on that edge.
Want to know what the most searched Google keywords are? We compiled a list of the 100 top trending searches and most Googled questions. Data was taken from our database of 20 billion keywords in March 2021 and covers the US and Global search volume for Google search terms.
Did you know influencer marketing can generate up to 11x the ROI than more traditional forms of advertising? Or that 88% of customers trust online reviews from strangers as much as they would a recommendation by a friend? With influencer worth expected to grow to more than $10B by 2020, it should come as no surprise that growing numbers of people are focused on establishing themselves as Influencers on social media sites.
While many influencer marketing advocates are looking toward Instagram, savvy marketers are also diving headfirst into Pinterest. Just this past fall, Pinterest announced its efforts to share API data with eight influencer marketing platforms, making it easier to track and value Influencer collaboration efforts. At the same time, with brands continuing to see a steady decline in referral traffic from social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest referral traffic continues to climb.
Whether you are interested in establishing your brand as an influencer on Pinterest or want to better understand the Pinterest influencers you would like to work with, we have gathered some valuable data and insights for you. Taking the time to better understand the posting habits of top pinners can also help you improve outreach strategy for upcoming influencer marketing campaigns.
Analyzing Top Pinterest Influencers
Using ranking data from Trackalytics, we gathered the 500 most followed profiles on Pinterest as a sample base of Pinterest Influencers. The pins featuring the highest volume of saves over the past year were analyzed using a machine learning algorithm to match pins with specific topical categories and sub-categories. The top 15 Pinterest accounts, as determined by the number of followers, were analyzed for both pin volume and topical relevance, using the SEMrush Social Media Tracker.
While many of our findings aligned with expectations, (i.e., a large portion of established Pinterest influencers were early adopters of the platform who established a strong follower base while competition for attention was still low) there were also a few surprises (i.e., cocktails are the third most popular sub-topic of recipes.)
Influencers Vary Wildly in How Active They Are
While it might be easy to assume Pinterest’s most established Influencers would be regular contributors to the site, our research found a wide variation in activity levels among the top 15 Pinterest accounts.
The most active Pinners, @janew (1829 pins in the last year) and @stylemepretty (1545 pins in the last year) were ranked sixth and eleventh, respectively. On the other end of the scale, users like @veanad (74 pins in the last year) and @llbean (7 pins in the last year) still cracked the top fifteen users list.
As you can see from the infographic, the numbers are all over the board. Only five users fall within the 200-450/posts per year range, demonstrating no set usage pattern that easily distinguishes top Pinterest Influencers from other users.
With this said, it is important to remember that many of the top Pinterest users established themselves early on when Pinterest used to recommend accounts to follow when new users signed up. Many early adoptees found themselves on these recommended lists and gained massive follower counts thanks to Pinterest’s internal referrals. Some, like @ohjoy, have leveraged this following into full-time businesses, inking partnership deals with Target and other retailers. Others, like @stylemepretty, may have started as individual users, but soon blossomed into full-scale publishing platforms with staff.
The takeaway here is that being a Pinterest Influencer is less about the volume of posting and more about the quality and targeting of the pins you choose to share.
Pinterest Influencers Focus Heavily on Style and Food
It is especially worth noting that video pins are seeing a significant rise in interest across all categories. Video-based pins were easily the most successful pin types within the Food and Recipes related format. As with most other areas of social media content marketing, both Pinterest influencers and marketers alike would be wise to shift more attention to creating video-based content.
Keep in mind that Pinterest also does an amazing job of tracking and predicting trends across all the topical categories of Pinterest. Their latest trend report is available via PDF and can be a great source of ideas for upcoming content collaborations or influencers pitches. Just take the time to explore the categories you wish to tackle, then pull a few ideas from Pinterest’s trends report for the categories you have chosen.
Putting It All Together
There are a few key takeaways from this data that you can immediately put to use in your efforts to both build your own Pinterest presence as well as to better connect with existing influencers.
First and foremost, stop worrying so much about the quantity of content you are pinning and shift your focus over toward the quality of content you are pinning.
If you are planning outreach efforts to Pinterest influencers, take the time to figure out whether they are a selective pinner or a high-volume pinner. High volume pinners may be easier to pitch, as it takes a lot of content to fill those posting needs. More selective pinners may require a paid partnership or a more appealing pitch in order to qualify for one of their limited content spaces.
As for content, ask yourself whether your focus is more heavily on keeping an existing audience engaged, or on reaching out to new audiences. If you are looking to keep your current audience engaged, make sure to continue sharing content that has resonated well in the past. If you are looking to reach a new audience, consider exploring related topics in the areas of home, fashion, food, and DIY. With such a high volume of activity around these topics, you’re sure to land in front of some new potential customers.
In our fifth vlog episode I was in Seattle for Mozcon and I asked Rand Fishkin (@randfish) if I can interview him for my new vlog series. He invited me to his home/office, aka ShedToro, and despite some angry bees, I think the interview went pretty well. This is part two of a two part interview, here we discuss Google being anti-competitive, ranking studies, EAT & YMYL SEO and Microsoft Bing.
In part two, we discuss some of Google’s anti-competitive behavior, if we can trust the new people at Google after folks like Matt Cutts, Amit Singhal and Brian White left Google but with Paul Haahr sticking around and bringing in Danny Sullivan to Google. We discussed the hearings in Senate and Congress and his study about how Google is taking all the clicks without letting people out of search. We even talked about Google Panda, Jason Calacanis’s Mahalo web site, Sundar Pichai and more. Finally we discussed how Microsoft Bing is doing and then I left to go back to the hotel.
It was an honor interviewing Rand. And I hope you liked it.
You can subscribe to our YouTube channel by clicking here so you don’t miss the next vlog where I interviews. I do have a nice lineup of interviews scheduled with SEOs and SEMS, many of which you don’t want to miss – and I promise to continue to make these vlogs better over time. If you want to be interviewed, please fill out this form with your details.
Danny Sullivan from Google responded to numerous questions about the unconfirmed Google February update early this morning saying “We do updates all the time.” This is the same statement he made for the November update.
Here is an interesting move by Google. Google updated its improve your local rankings help document to show an example of how keywords in your business description can help improve your local rankings. But local SEO experts say that is not how it works and keywords in the description have no impact.
Google has posted in the Search for Beginners section of the Google Webmaster YouTube channel an SEO Explained video. This video goes through the basics of SEO including on page SEO, multimedia SEO, black hat SEO and how to use Search Console and more.
Someone on Twitter shared a Google home page test with me. The new test has a few noticeable changes; the first is the blue background on the Google Search button, the blue (or white) font in the buttons and the final thing is the microphone button is outside of the search box.
Google announced that you can now see your annotations in your change history report and reporting data within Google Ads. Google said “To help you understand the impact of your campaign changes, you can now view changes annotated in your performance charts.”
This is an interesting structure, statue or something at the Google office in Dublin. It is a fox and it is sitting in one of the cafes, it appears. It just caught my eye and thought would be good for
How do you decide which strategies are going to help you grow your brand?
If you’ve got questions about outbound, then you’ve come to the right place.
What Is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing is where you (the business) initiate conversations with your customers to attract them to your brand. For example, TV commercials, cold calls, paid ads, and direct mail are all examples of outbound.
Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is when your customer initiates a conversation with you. For example, they visit your website, read an ebook, or download a white paper.
The goal for outbound marketing is to actively build authentic relationships through engagement, targeted communications, and putting your company in the right place at the right time.
There’s no denying that inbound marketing has grown in popularity in recent years (and with good reason, as it produces tremendous results.) However, outbound still takes up 90 percent of marketing budgets due to the high cost per outreach.
To improve your ROI in outbound, you need to allocate your budget to the methods that work for your brand. Below, we’ll cover some strategies to try, but first, let’s talk about its relevancy.
Is Outbound Marketing Still Relevant Today?
Every business owner loves to cut costs. When you, as a consumer, immediately delete a sales promotion email from your inbox without looking at it, you might wonder why that business would continually persist with an outbound strategy.
The likelihood is, they’ve built a huge mailing list and their promotions go to every single email address—paying no heed as to whether each customer is directly their target audience or not.
Why? They’ve invested in building a mailing list, and outbound marketing is still an extremely useful tool. It’s amazingly good at driving brand awareness (as long as your emails aren’t repetitive enough that a customer ends up hating you), maintaining brand relevance, and introducing products to new audiences. It helps you be at the forefront of your customer’s mind, for recommendations, word of mouth marketing, and lead generation.
Inbound marketing is great, and especially for smaller and low-budget businesses, but if customers don’t know your products exist in the first place, they can’t search for something they aren’t aware of.
Outbound marketing guarantees you reach people. You won’t be shouting into the void. Blogs are great for SEO and hoping Google’s Algorithm will take pity on you, but when you pay for a TV ad in a half-time break of a popular show: you know it’s going to be seen.
It can be expensive, but, when done correctly, it still provides a good ROI and is still relevant today as a complement to inbound marketing.
7 Outbound Marketing Strategies to Try
Most marketing success comes through a combination of different strategies. Whether it’s inbound or outbound, there are lots of different ways to reach your target audience, and often it will take lots of different strategies to achieve your goals.
Here are seven outbound sales strategies you can use to boost your marketing.
We’re all accustomed to receiving newsletters from websites, but we tend to forget about an important part of outbound strategy: cold email.
Cold emails are unsolicited emails you send out to prospects. You’re initiating the interaction, so it firmly fits in with the principles of outbound marketing.
“Everybody hates receiving unsolicited emails, spam is the worst.”
Well, what if your cold emails didn’t feel like unsolicited emails? What if they were highly personalized, respected your customer’s time, and actually offered value to them beyond a product that can fix “all of life’s problems?”
Outbound marketing doesn’t have to be pushy, impersonal, sales-based spam. It can have all the creativity of inbound marketing. Using your understanding of your target audience, you can craft cold emails that get responses and create leads.
Here are some things you will want to concentrate on with your cold emails:
cleaning your list: make sure you’re reaching live emails
engaging subject lines: earn the click
personalization: make people feel like they’re not the millionth person to receive this email
offering value: you want something from them, what can you offer in return?
A/B test everything: subject lines, signatures, CTA’s, interval between each email, the time you send each email, and, of course: the copy itself
Outbound Marketing Strategy Number #2: Direct Mail
First, I recommend “cutting edge technology” with emails, and now I’m telling you to send people letters through the mail?
Well, yes!
So much of our lives might have moved online, but we still exist away from the internet and we still receive mail. As it turns out, we still enjoy seeing something in the mailbox with our names on it, and this is an effective way of using outbound marketing.
This scientific study found brand recall is 70 percent higher among participants exposed to direct mail than an online ad. It may not have the fancy analytics, and you may not be able to put a GIF on it, but it’s certainly a good way to gain traction for your brand, and can still be relevant to your ethos, voice, and how you want to present yourself.
Estimates for the average ROI from direct mail vary a lot, and, like with most outbound marketing, it’s all about how good your campaign is.
With direct mail, it’s important to:
Remain targeted with your approach and segment people based on past purchases, location, demographics, etc.
Be creative and make your ad stand out amongst the crowd.
Include a way to track the success of the campaign (unique discount codes are a great way to see which customers are responding).
It might not seem like it fits with the digital age, but direct mail is still a useful outbound strategy.
Outbound Marketing Strategy Number #3: Search Ads
Paid search ads can be seen as a cross between inbound and outbound marketing. While the targeted user has likely actively searched for information related to your products, you’re still artificially placing your brand in front of them in a way more reminiscent of outbound marketing.
Search ads are great for immediate success.
With SEO, you write an article and watch as the search engines gradually start to rank it. When it does start to bring in traffic, it’s an amazing tool because you’re not paying for clicks, but it takes time and there’s no guarantee of success.
When you invest in paid search ads, you give your brand an immediate presence in the SERPs, almost guaranteeing you traffic. Of course, you will be paying for each click which means the most important thing with search ads is optimization.
Clearly set out what you’re trying to achieve with your paid ads and make sure everything is streamlined toward driving action from your customers. Small issues such as a clunky checkout page can hurt your conversion rate and make a big difference to your ROI on your search ads.
In marketing, we talk a lot about reaching your customers where they’re hanging out, and the data shows this is overwhelmingly on social media. If you’re not running social media ads, then you’re missing out.
The average organic post reaches just five percent of your followers, so you need a huge following to make a difference with organic social media. Paid ads on the other hand allow you to immediately reach a highly targeted audience.
One of the most powerful aspects of advertising on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn is targeting. These companies have an incredible amount of data on their users and you can use this to be extremely targeted, serving your ads to the people they’re going to have the most impact on.
Outbound Marketing Strategy Number #5: Trade Shows/Events
Marketing may have shifted focus from the physical world to the digital one, but that certainly doesn’t mean getting out and meeting people is a dead art. One of the best ways to get your brand in front of a targeted audience is by attending a trade show.
Maintaining brand relevance is something that takes constant commitment, and having a stand at a major trade show is one of the ways you can do this. Just think of any major trade show, and you’ll expect the biggest brands to be there. For example, what would an international farming show be without John Deere?
It may seem like these companies are so big it doesn’t matter whether they attend a trade show, but they recognize that to remain relevant you’ve got to be visible.
When planning for a tradeshow, make sure you’re setting goals and managing your budget appropriately.
Outbound Marketing Strategy Number #6: Cold Calls
Outbound doesn’t always have the best reputation and cold calls certainly fit this picture. Despite this, the inescapable reality is cold calling works for many businesses.
Sales and marketing are still about reaching new audiences and starting conversations and that’s exactly what cold calling allows you to do. Of course, there are good and bad ways of doing this, and you need to consider your approach carefully.
Again, it’s easy to look at cold calling and think it’s all about numbers. Sure, outbound relies on volume, but the most important aspect is still quality, in this case, the quality of the conversations you can have.
This is why there’s a push away from scripted sales pitches towards approaches like SPIN selling where the focus is on helping the customer to solve their problems (if you’ve read my inbound marketing articles then you know this is something I talk about all the time).
If you’re thinking about using cold calling as part of your outbound strategy then keep these important points in mind:
Invest in the right software: this will save you so much time and make you much more efficient.
Think about your brand image: don’t be pushy, work on growing relationships.
Research your prospect list: make sure you’re reaching a targeted audience.
Respect people’s privacy: take people off your contact list when requested.
Protect the vulnerable: look after your customers, especially the elderly, and put protections in place (such as a 30-day refund guarantee) to allow them to change their minds.
Outbound Marketing Strategy Number #7: TV, Radio, and Print Ads
Online marketing has transformed the way businesses advertise, but traditional advertising is far from dead.
There are lots of online places you can advertise your business and continue to grow your brand. TV and radio ads may require a bigger investment than other forms. like PPC but they still bring in big results.
50-64-year-old Americans watch an average of four hours and 59 minutes of traditional TV each day.
Over 65s watch a massive six hours and 39 minutes.
Consumption of traditional media might be changing but it’s still there—and therefore it’s still a big opportunity for marketers. Make sure you understand your target demographics and are showcasing your brand with creative messaging and you can still see an excellent return on your investment.
Outbound Marketing Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?
Outbound relies on the business initiating the interaction whereas inbound marketing relies on the customer searching for your brand.
Is social media inbound or outbound marketing?
Social media can be both inbound and outbound. Paid social media ads would be classed as outbound, whereas organic reach is inbound marketing.
Why is outbound marketing effective?
Outbound marketing is often effective because it’s immediate. You’re not waiting for people to find you, you’re putting your brand in front of people and initiating interactions.
Is outbound marketing dead?
No, it is very much alive. Many businesses still use outbound to achieve a good return on their investment.
What are examples of outbound marketing?
Examples include paid search ads, social media ads, cold email, cold calls, trade shows, and tv/radio/print ads.
Outbound Marketing Conclusion
Outbound marketing is something that’s still relevant today. It’s a great complement for your inbound marketing and an excellent way to grow your brand.
Marketing is a competitive field, and sometimes you can’t rely on people coming to you, instead, you’ve got to put your name out there and guarantee you’re getting exposure. In these cases, cold emails, search ads, social media ads, trade shows, cold calls, and traditional media ads can make a huge difference.
The most important thing to remember is that many of the same principles of inbound marketing still apply to outbound. You still need to understand your target audience, and you’ve got to be able to provide value and help solve people’s pain points.
If you can successfully do this, then outbound marketing can be an important part of your strategy.
