If you want to attract organic links, give journalists, freelance writers, and bloggers what they need: current statistics, original graphics, and thought leader insights.
So if you want sites — and especially the largest sites — to link to you, give them what they want.
Choose a Trending Topic
If you want your content to be evergreen, choose a trending topic that will be popular for years to come — not just right now.
Offer multiple different and highly interesting angles to give the writers ideas on why they will want to include you in their new content or add you to existing, ranking content they’re upgrading.
Current Statistics
There probably won’t be much volume on keyword phrases related to “your niche + statistics” but that doesn’t matter.
People searching for stats write for large publications that can get your brand seen and possibly provide you with a valuable incoming link.
Sources for statistics should be (but aren’t always) attributed and linked.
Date your content and cite your sources. If writers find statistics they would like to use but cannot easily find the source or tell whether they are current, they will leave and find another site to link to instead of yours!
Original Graphics with Permission to Republish
Take your industry statistics and create original, SEO-optimized infographics and you could land a lot of targeted incoming links.
The more current and colorful the image, the better. Dark backgrounds are typically better because most sites have light content areas.
Create shorter versions as well as long infographics as some sites prefer those.
If you only want to make one image, have sections with clearly defined horizontal boundaries so they can screen capture and use individual sections.
Be sure to make it obvious the writer is welcome to republish your graphics.
Do this by offering an embed code, or providing text at the bottom of the content giving express permission for re-use.
You can also include that type of information on a page on your site. Once writers identify a site that permits republication of their research and graphics, they will specifically search that site for material for future content.
Thought Leader Sound Bites for Quotes
Include short, insightful quotes in your content, especially from your founder and C-suite executives.
If you’d like to garner more incoming links and mentions, regularly add sound bites on current topics to your content.
When a journalist needs to meet a deadline, they can’t always reach a thought leader in time.
Put what they are likely to need where they can find it, ideally on your site (so it gets the link or mention).
Twitter can work, too, but your brand may or may not get mentioned or linked.
According to Brandwatch, journalists are the largest, most active group of verified accounts on Twitter at 24.6%.
PR Daily reported that 83% of journalists use Twitter, but most still want email pitches.
Sites that are fed into Google News often choose to tie a new story into an existing trending story within 24 hours.
Unless the topic is so hot that there will be multiple stories, they need it now. Be the brand that delivers it.
How to Attract Organic Links
Here’s an example of an infographic from NowSourcing that has all the factors I mentioned above:
- Hot topic that will be trending for years to come
- Offer interesting angles
- An infographic with clearly defined horizontal sections
- Current statistics
- Colorful headers for each section
- Quotable soundbites
This is going to be a popular topic now and for many years. As a writer who contributes on multiple sites, I could easily use all or part of this infographic in many different topics for several sites.
If I were doing a post about The History and Future of the Gig Economy, I could use just the top section of the infographic:
I often use a section of an infographic for the featured image in content and then include the full infographic at the bottom.
Or I might use just that one section and link it to the infographic as I’ve done here.
A writer could create subheadings about sections of the full infographic below and then put each section of the image with their own text to make it more interesting.
Another benefit of doing that is being able to push each image out to social media separately.
So you can promote your content more heavily without annoying your followers.
Offer Ideation (Ideas for Writers to Use)
Scroll through the infographic below. Notice that each section would make a great post title:
- Is Gig Work Really New?
- Moving Work to the Web
- There are Apps for GigWorkers
- Gig Work Today: Who Chooses Gig Work
- How Do Gig Workers Use Their Extra Income?
- What Gig Work Means for the Economy
- Economy of the Future: Gig Work
- How Gig Work is Reshaping the Law
- The Rights of Gig Workers: Contractor vs. Employee
Not much thought was required to turn their sections into new pieces of content with a ready-made image to fit in it. See how they did the work for the writer?
I could do an entire series just on that one infographic. A person could even launch an entire new site with these topics!
Ready to Go Attract Organic Links?
Hopefully, you can see how GigWorker and NowSourcing managed to hand writers everything they need to craft great content and include them in it.
Granted that Brian Wallace at NowSourcing has over a decade of experience in how to do the research and come up with the topics. So he has an advantage.
But you can do this, too. It just takes some thought and creativity.
How much would it take for you to stand out in your industry? Is your niche SEO doing all that is possible to attract links to your content?
Questions? Ideas? Ask them in the comments.
Top image credit: Pixabay + Canva
Originally published 12/18/19; republished 2/10/20 to add custom video and SlideShare by Julie Weishaar from NewHorizons123; updated 4/3/24 to add a new video.