Wish Your Website Got More Traffic? This One Strategy Can Help

Every website thrives on traffic. For some, it means more chances to secure conversions and sales of online products. For others, it means a chance to earn more revenue from advertising and affiliate link opportunities.

Unfortunately, traffic can be hard to earn. Even if your site offers some of the best onsite content in your industry, it’s no guarantee that people will notice your brand. And you could certainly pay for traditional advertising, but the expensiveness of the medium may ultimately negate any benefits you would have gotten from the traffic.

Fortunately, there’s an approachable marketing strategy that can help you get more traffic from multiple initial origins—link building—and it’s easier to learn than you think.

The Advantages of Link Building

Link building is the process of using high-quality content to establish links pointing to your site from other domains. There are many nuances to link building, including using the right anchor text combinations, using a combination of link attraction and manual building, using the best link building strategies for your industry, and so on, but for now, let’s focus on the core concept.

These are just some of the most important advantages of link building to consider:

• Low costs and barrier to entry. First, link building has a practically nonexistent barrier to entry. As long as you have some strong pieces of content on your site and the willingness to write high-quality material for offsite publishers, you could feasibly start a link building strategy all on your own. You may not be able to access high-level publishers for some time, but your approach doesn’t have to be perfect to start earning you results. Plus, even if you work with a professional agency, link building is extremely cost-effective, earning you more in results than you’ll spend building the links.
• Traffic from multiple locations. One of the most important benefits of link building is its ability to earn you new traffic from multiple sources simultaneously. Right away, you’ll earn referral traffic from your links as readers encounter them and click through to get to your site. Over time, those links will increase your domain authority, which in turn will increase your rankings in search engines. Once you get higher rankings, you’ll earn more organic traffic from search users who are naturally encountering your site. Plus, because your brand name will be referenced more often, you might even earn direct traffic.
• Permanence. It’s possible that your links will be removed by the publisher eventually, but barring any publisher failures or terms of service violations, you can count on your links existing for a long time. The longer they exist, the more traffic and brand exposure they’ll generate for you—especially if you’re doing the work of syndicating those articles for continued new reach. This makes them an investment that pays dividends.
• Scalability. Finally, the scale of your link building strategy is easily adjustable. Anyone can get started by focusing on easily accessible publishers, or media outlets with lower editorial standards, and there’s practically no upper limit to the authority you can gain, or the number of links you can build. You can continue investing more in the quality and quantity of your links, and keep expanding your reputation indefinitely.

Getting Started

So how can you get started with such a strategy? First, you’ll need to create several linkable assets for your site—these can be blog posts, infographics, videos, or other forms of content, so long as they provide some original value for the people engaging with them. You’ll need these to ensure your offsite links are pointing back to a relevant, authoritative page.

If you’re just getting started, you probably won’t have much brand authority to work with, so you’ll need to start building links on niche publishers or lower-traffic sources. These aren’t especially valuable, but they have a low barrier to entry and can help you establish a foundation for your brand’s offsite reputation. Just make sure you’re publishing the best-quality content you can to these publishers; even though their editorial standards may be laxer, you may use these as portfolio pieces in the future.

From there, you’ll be ready to scale up. Cite the number of publications you’ve been featured in, and try to land guest author spots on bigger and more prominent publishers. It may take a while to get to the top names in the business, but you can eventually get there.

Of course, you could also choose to outsource your link building strategy. Learning how to write offsite articles and get them published with authoritative media outlets is challenging, time-consuming, and costly, but link building agencies have tons of experience in the field, and access to several types of link building specialists. Most small business owners find it less expensive and more reliable to outsource the work to a professional agency.