Why Link Building Strategies Fail

Why Link Building Strategies Fail
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Posted by Adria Saracino

I've executed a lot of failed link building strategies.

Some of these strategies I created. Others were handed to me. Over the years, I've discovered that the same reasons for failure kept cropping up. Thus, I thought it'd be helpful to outline the mistakes I've made and seen. Hopefully this helps you avoid the stress and headaches I've experienced along the way.

Here are the ways in which I've seen link building strategies fail and how you can make sure you don't get duped by these common pitfalls.

Link Building Strategy Content Strategy which Link Bait

Let me break it down...

The content strategy is the road map designed to create epic pieces of content. The link building strategy is how you plan on getting links. Sometimes you use content from your content strategy to get links, but sometimes you don't. Sometimes the content from your content strategy helps generate links all by itself, such as when people find it easily in search engines and start sharing it on their own sites. This process is not part of the link building strategy.

Producing a piece of link bait isn't a content strategy, either. Link bait is a piece of content that is created with the hopes of attracting a load of links. Link bait creators hope their content will go viral, and let me tell you, it is really difficult to churn out link bait after you produce a piece that goes viral. You're lucky if one goes viral, let alone multiple. Thus, link bait isn't a content strategy as it's not really sustainable.

In addition, link bait can create a bad user experience, say in the case that you are churning out infographic after infographic all hosted on your company blog. Frequent visitors to that blog might become alienated, especially in "boring" or small niches where you often need to think of tangential topics and audiences to make a successful piece of link bait.

Why should you know (and care about) the difference? Because getting link bait and content strategy confused can set your team up for failure. It often results in expectations not being met, as they will be unrealistic from the start. Plus, each of these strategies answers different questions as they are being created — such as the target market, goals, and metrics — all of which are vital to success. Miss one part and you could be missing an important piece of the big picture.

How to Win:

Create a content strategy that includes link bait (isn't all link bait) and figure out where you can leverage the content for link building. Simultaneously, create a link building strategy that drives additional links above and beyond what your content can do. For even more win, consider how you can coordinate with your social strategy to really leverage both your content and link building efforts.

The key here is collaboration and integration, which will ensure you don't miss opportunities for a win. Think you only have the resources to pursue one strategy (which I will call BS on)? I love this controversial article on content marketing being better than link building. I'm not saying I agree or disagree, I just love when authors take an aggressive stance :)

The "Strategy" Part is Left Out

Trusty old Wikipedia defines a strategy as, "A plan of action designed to achieve a vision." Unfortunately, a lot of times the planning and designing parts are left out, leaving a grandiose vision but no real road map for getting there. I see this a lot with companies who pride themselves in being agile. Sometimes they are just too agile, too shotgun and reckless, saying "let's go, go, go" and hoping to see some wins later on.

How to Win:

No brainer here: create a strategy. Know that executing one campaign after another with no connecting thread is not a strategy. Here are the top-level pieces both a winning content and link building strategy should have.

  • What - What is the purpose? What are the goals?
  • Who - This is two part, 1) Who will be accountable for the project? 2) Who is the target audience?
  • How - Again two part, 1) How will you reach this goal(s)? 2) How will you track it?
  • Why - Why is this piece of the strategy being pursued? This should be answered from both the business and user perspective.
  • When - When will this be executed? Create timelines and deadlines to execute each piece of the strategy.
  • Where - Where does this fit in? Knowing how it integrates with other efforts and where it fits into the grand scheme of things is essential.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, here are some useful resources for how to create link building and content strategies:

No Defined Goals

Part of a strategy is having a vision, but to achieve that vision you need to set goals. Typically, the best strategies have a number of goals, broken into both short term and long term. Some will argue that "ranking #1 for [insert highly competitive short tail keyword here]" is a goal, but since it is pretty lofty you need to ask yourself what short term goals can your team action in order to be number one.

How to Win:

Set up both long-term and short-term goals. Generally, the short-term goals will be stepping stones for reaching long-term goals, creating a tree of goals with actionable milestones. I found an acronym from a UK government agency that I thought was wonderful. It says that all goals are SMART:

characteristics of SMART goals

No Urgency or Tracking in Place

In my experience, in-house link building teams tend to fall victim to this more often than agencies. Just as a link building strategy should have goals, there should be some urgency in reaching them. This is where tracking comes into play. I see a lack of urgency is often correlated with not having a system in place for inspiring that urgency. To be clear, what I mean when I say "urgency" is a timeline for reaching goals - essentially deadlines.

Every link builder is going to find a way to track how many links he/she is getting. It's human nature - we're out trying to get something and we want to see if we won or not. While I still find that the market struggles with developing a completely automated and instant way of tracking incoming links, there are manual processes that can aid in tracking