Trust Me, I'm Lying: Link Building

I got started in SEO eight years ago. 

It was my junior year at the University of Missouri and, as a fresh 21 year old, I was going out too much and spending all my money in bars with floors so sticky I’d have to peel my shoes away. Naturally.

One thing was certain: To keep the party going, I needed money. 

Enter getting hired to link build for ammo.com.

I knew nothing. Nada. 

I was terrible.

Half my outreach emails demonstrated improper grammar and the other half were too long, with unclear messaging.

“What do you want me to do, exactly?” was a reply I got consistently.

But I learned and improved.

I got pretty dang good.

I also learned that link building is difficult. 

Reminds me of being a kid, offering to shovel driveways in a snowstorm for a little bit of cash, only to be told no left and right.

To top it off, link building has only gotten harder.

• More people doing it: Imagine 10 kids in my neighborhood trying to shovel snow. Why would the neighbor choose me over Johnny?
  

• Fewer high-quality websites to reach out to: Can’t make any money shoveling driveways when this winter only saw six inches of snow.

This puts us in a bit of a crisis. 

We all know link building is important, possibly more important than ever.

But supply and demand just aren’t matching up.

So, we have to shift our focus to quality over quantity. 

It’s why Digital PR has blown up.

Site owners realize that links on BIG DR sites (50+) are what move the needle. Not links on Uncle Joe’s BBQ blog.

But how tf do we get those? It’s certainly not from blasting out 10,000+ “Dear sir” emails to a list you scraped together.

Don’t worry, we’ve all done that.

Instead, let’s be slower and more methodical in our approach.

Let us first learn how the media works — by the media manipulator himself… 

…Ryan Holiday.

He may not know this, but Ryan Holiday is the best link builder of them all.

His book Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator transformed my link building methods, and it’s how I’ve scored contributor slots (not just links, contributor slots) on DR 80+ websites.

In this book, Holiday outlines three different tiers of media. 

Tier 1

These are the big media sites. WSJ, CNN, Fox, etc. 

You’re almost never going to be able to pitch reporters over here and get a link from them. 

Tier 2

Tier 2 sites are loosely described as “blogs,” albeit they are fairly big in and of themselves. 

Ryan shares some examples of Tier 2 sites you’ve probably heard of:

Again, hardly ever going to be able to reach out to these people and get a link.

Tier 3

Tier 3 blogs are all the small sites that don’t qualify for Tier 1 and Tier 2.

These people are relatively easy to get a hold of, and it’s these sites you want to build a relationship with.

– 

Here’s how it works.

Tier 1 sites get stories from Tier 2 sites.

Tier 2 sites get stories from Tier 3 sites.

Thanks to ahrefs, we can reverse engineer where Tier 1 and 2 sites are getting their news from and thus what Tier 3 sites we should be targeting. 

Let’s say I’m a conservative news site and want to get on Drudge Report (Tier 2). 

First, I open up Drudge Report in ahrefs and look at its outgoing links.

I then sort by DR. The lower the DR site, the better; they are easier to reach.

Finally, applying a filter of 10+ in the “links from target” section tells me which sites Drudge Report has linked to 10+ times. 

These filters tell me two things:

1. The site is low DR, so I should be able to email them and get a reply.
   

2. Drudge links to the site constantly, so they continually check it for news.

If I can get mentioned on the Tier 3 site, and the article/story is good enough, then I should be able to get onto Drudge.

In the screenshot above, one site that I found particularly noteworthy is Crazydaysandnights.net. 

When I open the site, it couldn’t be more beautiful. 

Here we have an old-fashioned blogger site run by a journalist who is doing this out of passion.

This is the person I reach out to and build a relationship with.

I’m talking highly personalized and in-depth outreach here — none of that B.S.

“Oh em gee I love your blog, please add in my link that compliments it.” No.

Thank them for their work. Call out specific talking points they’ve mentioned. If they have a book, buy it, read 20 pages, and shoot them an email with a question.

The ways to personalize an outreach email are endless but the biggest thing to know is that you need this relationship. 

Go the extra mile to get it.

If you have a relationship with this site and they start sharing your work, then someone at Drudge might eventually share it.

Then you see who shared your article at Drudge and reach out to them saying thanks.

Now you have a contact at Drudge. Now you pitch your content directly to them.

Eventually you write an article good enough that WSJ picks it up. Now you reach out to that journalist at WSJ and build a relationship with them.

And the cycle continues over and over.

By the way, when you get shared on Drudge and big media outlets, you aren’t just getting links.

You’re getting thousands and thousands of pageviews each time because millions of people visit these sites.

If you’re doing things right, i.e., capturing emails and getting people to remember your site, then you aren’t just building links.

You’re building an audience and a BRAND.

That’s it this week. Let me know if you have any questions by shooting me an email — I'll try to get back to you as quickly as I can, but I’ve been under a brain fog today because I woke up last night at 3:00 a.m. for no apparent reason.

Ended up tossing and turning till about 5:21 a.m. until I finally fell back to sleep only to see the sun peek its way through the curtains an hour later.

Funny enough, I went to a coffee shop this morning to focus so I could get over this brain fog. Seems this shop is the hip spot for college kids to work and study. 

I wonder if any of the kids next to me are building links right now. 🙃