Passive link building content part two

1. Calculators

Calculators crush at passive link building, especially in finance, fitness, and education niches, but you’d be surprised where else you can find them. 

For ideas, run calculator.net through Ahrefs and look at the “Best by links” report.

You’ll find multiple calculators with thousands of referring domains.

What’s great about these is what little design they require. They don’t need to be super sexy; they just need to work.

I mean, calculator.net reminds me of Windows XP with its old-school design and layout:

Search for “mortgage calculator” and you’ll find a page from Bankrate ranking number one.

Pop this page into Ahrefs and you’ll see it’s gained 1,620 new referring domains over the past 12 months.

Of those new referring domains, 350 came from websites with DR 40+ and domain traffic of 10,000+.

That’s ~30 new referring domains per month from some of the largest websites on the internet. This is incredible.

Now, it’s going to be hard as hell to outrank Bankrate for this keyword, and you probably won’t.

But from a link building perspective, creating a calculator for this keyword and running Google Ads to it would be advantageous if you’re in the finance niche.

How much would you be willing to pay for Bankrate’s backlink profile?

As I mentioned above, while these work best in certain niches, spend an hour researching and you should come up with at least a few ideas.

For instance, I know nothing about the equestrian niche but was able to find an adult horse weight calculator. While its backlink profile isn’t as sexy as Bankrate’s, it’s still decent. 

Pro tip: ChatGPT is amazing at generating these ideas. Cross-reference calculators it suggests with Ahrefs data and you’ll be building one in no time.

If you’re serious about building a calculator for your niche, check out two more resources.

• In this video by Stacy MacNaught, she shows more calculator examples along with how to create one with ChatGPT’s help.

• These 51 SEO calculator tool examples by James Oliver are pretty sweet, and you can name your “fair price” as $0 if you want it for free.

2. Templates

Airtable has the templated link building strategy down far better than anyone else I’ve seen. 

It provides a database of free templates for hundreds of different use cases, ranging from project management to marketing and retail. 

Google shows me it has 695 pages indexed under its /templates/ subfolder.

Now, templates are akin to “how-to” guides, which I talked about last week. This subfolder generates a decent number of backlinks, but the marketing of these is far more sophisticated than just link acquisition (more on this below).

Looking in Ahrefs we can see over the past 12 months, Airtable’s /template/ subfolder generated 528 backlinks. Approximately 44 new backlinks each month. 

Just looking at DR 40+ and domain traffic 10,000+ backlinks, we see it generated 66. 

This is pretty dang good, but what’s best is the beautiful blend between marketing and link acquisition.

While these templates only generate ~5,700 visitors per month organically, its middle/bottom of the funnel content and its focus are converting visitors into free users. These free users are then upsold to a premium version later down the line. 

What’s more, these templates are so powerful that other professionals often quote them in articles and videos. 

For instance, Wix published an article on social media and branding. Guess what this article references: Airtable’s free social media calendar template.

These sorts of referrals are powerful, and it’s actually how I came across Airtable’s strategy. Two years ago, I dove deep into recruiting and management.

I wanted to set up an applicant-tracking system (ATS) but the cost didn’t make sense. Low and behold, I came across this video that taught me exactly how to create a free ATS using Airtable’s template.

And guess what happened two months later—I became a paying user because I loved the product so damn much.

3. Generators

Last but not least, we have the weirdest natural link building strategy I’m aware of: generators. Specifically, name generators.

This strategy ranges from dog name generators to business name generators and my personal favorite, rap name generators.

What’s up, this is Gangsta Ally Jay.

While I’ve never used these in my life nor do I ever plan to, I can’t deny the number of links they generate. 

Shopify’s business name generator has over 2,400 referring domains . . . 

Including over 136 coming in just in the last 30 days.

To see if this will work in your niche, start by going to Ahrefs’ keywords explorer and searching “name generator.”

Then, go to “matching terms” and find all the beautiful potential that lies ahead:

With over 51,000 keywords and a total global monthly search volume of 7,100,000, surely you can find one in your niche.

Pro tip: I keep seeing brands putting “AI” inside their name generators, and that angle will play well due to the popularity and rise of AI. Everyone wants to be cool and hip, yo.

Now, I’m going to go a little out of my depth here, but I don’t imagine building one of these would be a high-cost endeavor thanks to ChatGPT’s API. Looks like this guy created one about a year ago with minimal investment.

And within 30 seconds, I just got a brand-new rap name, Hustlin’ Horsman.

For more inspiration, check out James Oliver’s 64 name generator tools database. Lots of interesting insights within it.

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. Learn all 7 content tactics that passively earn links (previous issue here).

2. Spend 4 hours finding the highest ROI opportunities in your niche.

3. Recreate them but make them better.

4. Test.

5. Don’t be afraid to fail.

6. Iterate.