Luscious Link Building: Get Links on High Authority Sites Within Your Niche

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it for the thousandth time — high-quality backlinks are one of the biggest ranking factors in SEO. Without these links, your site(s) will not rank. 

But they are such a pain in the ass to get. And if you want to outsource to an agency, you better have some dollar bills to back it up.

To save some cash, many try building an in-house link building team. Not a bad idea. 

To get links, I find most in-house teams are doing one of two things, or a combination of both. 

Mass guest posting

As I’ve noted the past two weeks (here), guest posting can be great, but 97% of people are doing it wrong. 

Also, almost anytime anything is done en masse, I find it to be a low-quality and short-sighted approach, e.g., publishing 10,000 AI articles. 

It almost always comes crashing down on you.

Buy links from link brokers 

Come on . . . don’t do this. If websites are in a link selling database, they won’t help.

Link brokers resell the same links, often from sites that don’t discriminate on the quality of their backlinks. 

These approaches lead to penalties and harm your site’s reputation.

Side note: Completely cool with using these strategies for parasite pages, tier-two links, and the likes. I just wouldn’t be pointing this crap to my money site. 

So, what to do instead, you ask?

The strategy I’m about to outline was shared with me back in 2018 in Bangkok at an entrepreneurship conference. 

It absolutely changed the link building game for me. Yet I still hardly see anyone doing this. 

This strategy isn’t new. People just haven’t implemented it because it isn’t nearly as scalable as “Dear Sir” emails. At least, it’s not as scalable at first. 

But if you stick with it you’ll start getting higher-quality links while spending less money. It’s a dream come true.

This strategy has helped me land some excellent contributor slots:

• DR 81 finance website

• DR 79 news website

• DR 73 hunting website 

• Multiple magazine features

• And much more

Out with the old, in with the new

The idea here is relatively simple. Instead of trying to get guest posts on websites, you want to get a contributor slot. A “column” as the big media companies call it. 

If you can secure multiple contributor slots on high-authority websites, then every link builder in the world will want to work with you. 

Link exchanges will become dramatically easier and your time spent on cold outreach will significantly decline as well.

To do this, we’re going to focus on a few key areas:

• Building a personality

• Your pitch

• Writing good content

As always, the devil is in the details, so let’s break it down. 

Step one: building a personality

First things first, you need to build a personality within your niche. 

This is paramount. 

You’re not going to be reaching out to websites on behalf of your website but rather as a freelancer/individual (more on this later). 

You can go about this in three ways. Choose your own adventure.

Write as yourself: If you’re the name and face of your brand, do this. If I were trying to get contributor slots on digital marketing websites, I would use my name.

I’ve got a solid online presence (personal website and LinkedIn) and it’s clear I’m in the ecosystem and live the life of an internet marketer.

Use an author on your website: This worked really well for us. I had two authors for my first affiliate site who lived and breathed the niche. 

Whenever we pitched big sites within the niche, they could look up our writers and see they were “for real,” just as I am in the digital marketing world.

The only negative here is you’re tying yourself to the writer. If they decide to quit, then you’re shit out of luck.

You need to either really trust them or have a contract in place that says even if they leave, your company keeps the contributor slots that you’ve secured under their name.

Build a personality: The third option is to just build a personality. Create a fake persona who fits the demographic of your niche. Create a photo for them (yay AI), bio, LinkedIn — the whole shebang.

Biggest problem with this is if one of these big websites wants to chat on the phone or via Zoom (and some will) you’ll either have to deny the calls or take them and not turn on the camera.

To be fair, this doesn't happen often. But I’d hate to see you get into a situation where TechCrunch wants you to write for them but you can’t accept the call.

– 

No matter which personality route you choose, you need to make them look legit. The biggest “hack” here is creating a personal website for yourself, your writer, or your nom de guerre.

It doesn't need to be fancy but creating one will do wonders. 

Build a website that showcases previous work examples along with some of the biggest websites they’ve written for.

You know, the classic “As Seen On” badge on the top. 

Build the website as if it were a resume. There are plenty of personal website templates that you can steal from that will work just fine.

Put some effort into this but don’t let it hang you up (it stopped me for a while). 

Hire someone on Upwork and just spin up a minimal viable website. Having something up is better than nothing.

Once you start getting some contributor slots, you can work on optimizing it.

Step two: your pitch

This, my friends, is where most people screw up. Forget everything you know about outreach and stay with me here. 

There are three main changes we’re going to make to your outreach emails. 

Do NOT mention your website: Pose as a freelance writer and just say you’re trying to build your name within the industry. Don’t mention guest posts, link building, nada. Forget all that shit.

Ask for money: This might seem like a wild idea but the biggest websites on the internet pay writers for their content. When you start offering services for free, it raises a big red flag. I always offer the first article “pro bono” but then ask for payment. 

If they say “no,” no worries. I’ll still write because I’m getting links. 

If they say “yes,” kick ass. Now I’m getting paid to build links.

Personalize your outreach email: You don’t need to go balls to the wall with this but adding in a few lines of personalization significantly increases the response rate. 

When you’re finished, 20% of your email should be personalized, 80% templated. 

Seriously, just make the first one to two sentences highly personalized and everything below can be templated.

I always find the best way to learn is by looking at examples, so here’s one of my best-performing outreach emails. 

Now, this could be improved, but it has worked wonders for me in the past. 

I use the first name in the subject line along with a play on words.

The first sentence is highly personalized based on the Editors newest article. Notice how we said “stop at Bass Pro.” This is because the website/story was about fishing. 

Bass Pro sells fishing gear. Speak their language and connect with them. 

The rest is templated after that. Again, the key is telling the editor that you’re looking to regularly contribute. 

You’re not just looking for a one-time guest post. Convince them that you’re here for a long-time, not just a good time.

Also not pictured is the signature of my email. In the signature I point the editor to the personal website that we built for the persona and include a headshot, real or fake. 

Think, what do real people in real companies have in their email signatures? Include all that you can.

If you want to dive deeper into crafting the perfect outreach email, check out my article on email outreach tips. 

Step three: write good content

Once an editor has accepted your pitch, write a damn good piece of content. Not a 500-word trash article written by ChatGPT. 

Treat the content as if it were being published on your own website. Give my article from last week a read and it’ll tell you exactly how to optimize your articles.

Now, when you first write for a big site, they won’t offer you a contributor slot out the gate. 

You need to build trust with them first, and that’s the job of your first one or two articles. 

Follow their guidelines, submit photos, and put some effort into it. 

Build trust with the editor and show them the quality you can produce.

Consider the first one to two articles as a probation period where you are being heavily watched. This is when you either make it or break it. 

That said, do not try linking to your money pages in the first one or two articles. Editors will catch this immediately and drop you. 

Once you build a relationship with them, they’ll start trusting you and won’t be so heavy on the edits. This is when you can start popping your links into the content. 

Your Next Steps

Reading articles and theory is cool, but you know what will actually move the needle for your business?

Action. Don’t just read this. 

Implement it or send it to a team member.

Here’s what to do next:

1. Build a personality within your niche to use for outreach.
   

2. Find high DR websites within your niche.
   

3. Send them outreach emails that are personalized and ask for contributor slots, not guest posts.
   

4. Once an editor says “yes,” create a piece of content worth paying for.
   

5. Stay in their good graces and start naturally including backlinks in your articles.
   

6. Reach out to other link builders and start doing three-way link exchanges. 

And that, my friends, is how I build those luscious links that everyone wants.

This was a long one today, but I’m glad we made it.

See you next week and, as always, hit me with any questions you may have.

All you have to do is hit “Reply.”

Much love ✌️