It’s Not About Link Building

Posted In Blogging | 9 comments

Fraser Cain does no backlinking…

You read that right.

His blogging strategy does not involve any proactive link building efforts on his part.

Yet, he receives over 80,000 visitors from the search engines every day from his Astronomy / Space blog called UniverseToday.com. (He grew his astronomy blog from a readership of 3,000 people every day to over 80,000 in just 3 years!)

So, how does he actually manage to get so much organic traffic without any link building?

It’s simple:

 

Quality Content

 

By writing top-tier quality content he is able to draw over 1 million visitors every single month from organic traffic spread across nearly just as many keywords (search strings).

Then he focuses on proper on-page optimization and create content that people are actually looking for.

Not only does he spend time with content curation where he posts the latest astronomy news, he also writes articles that specifically addresses topics that people are curious about (or want to know). In other words, an example would be Wikipedia style articles… high value content people will talk about (and link to).

This is different from blogging where you’re simply offering your opinion or version of the news, or perhaps writing about what YOU think is important. Then go out and syndicate and build links for the content yourself.

Instead, he tries to identify and understand what people are typing into the search engines with the mindset, in Fraser’s words:

“What would be the thing that would just make me so glad that I had discovered it if I type it into the search engines?”

 Anyway, if you’re interested in hearing more about Fraser, then have a look at this interview (and no, that’s not me conducting the interview… in case you were wondering):

Note: I should mention that when first starting out you’ll need to syndicate your own content, since you have no readership.

But as your site grows, get links and get ranking in the search engines (which should equal traffic), you will find that you won’t need to do this in order to start getting traffic and rankings for all kinds of articles (and keywords).

Why?

Because people will naturally spread the information.

I find this type of strategy to work quite well with even with macro type sites (sites that contain 30 – 100 pages). Once you start getting traffic and your site gets authority in Google’s eyes, your new articles will almost automatically start getting traffic (provided you have done your on-page SEO properly).

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Leave A Reply (9 comments So Far)

  • http://arindamchakraborty.com/ Arindam

    BTW, any recommendation on RSS directory submission tool/service?? Free ones are appreciated; I don’t mind manual submission! :)

    Thanks!

    • http://affiliatemarketingdiary.com/ StevenR

      Hi there,

      I use either Pingler.com or RSSbot (http://sher.us/rssbot).

      Pingler is free, and RSSbot is not (it’s a desktop software – I’ve been using it for years).

      All the best,
      Steven

  • http://arindamchakraborty.com Arindam Chakraborty

    Can you pls explain this part:

    ‘when first starting out you’ll need to syndicate your own content”

    Do u mean RSS directory submission?

    Also, you said that Fraser does not do backlinking, and yet in your small note (which seems to relate much more with my experience that people don’t read a site unless they know about it through search engines, and to publicize your site in SEs, you WILL need to build backlinks; of course these days social media is big too but I have never been a huge social networking expert anyway, lol) you said ‘But as your site grows, get links’.

    Just a little confused lol, but I get the gist of your article and agree with it: quality content counts (but I believe that quality backlinking is equally important, and by that, I don’t mean spamming tons of sites with profile spam; I mean: for example, commenting on a quality blog such as yours, or posting on a quality forum to contribute to it in some way)! :)

    And pls add a subscription function here lol. It would be highly convenient to follow others’ comments! :D

    • Steven

      To me, syndication means putting your content into other channels using Social Media channels (and RSS submissions).

      I probably didn’t explain it clearly…

      My note refers to the fact that once your site has matured in the search engines (and you have 20 – 100 pages of quality content) you won’t need to worry about overt linking, because your site has started to get links organically (based on the quality of your content and readership).

      In other words, when you start to write the type of posts that Fraser is talking about, you will rank and keep getting traffic for months (if not years) from that one page. Because the content is relevant and valuable to people, they will automatically talk and link to said content without you having to go out and ask them to…

      For instance, my old affiliate marketing blog, Affiliate Marketing Diary (which is severely neglected these days), has about 120 posts and gets about 6000 unique visitors per month right now (it’s gone down a ton in traffic because I don’t post to it anymore). I have never done much link building at all for this site (with the exception of adding it to a link network at one time and some initial social media marketing and rss submissions).

      Yet I still keep getting about 6000 unique visitors… month in, month out.

      Why?

      Because I have the type of content Fraser is talking about in the video.

      I saw people were asking about specific topics (by paying attention to social signals, keyword research etc.), created the content and these posts have been driving traffic to my site for a LONG time.

      I never did any link building for this content, yet I have many first page rankings in Google for those pages… but it would not have happened if I had not put in some effort into quality content that mattered to people (and this handful or so pages get a large percentage of traffic on my site).

      Anyway, I’m not saying “Don’t build links”.

      Link building is very important, particularly in the beginning… the point is simply that links to your site will happen organically once you have great content on the site and people start talking about it.

      Hope this helps,
      Steven

      • http://frasercain.com Fraser Cain

        Thanks for the post

      • http://frasercain.com Fraser Cain

        Thanks for the post Steven. I’ll say it for you… “Don’t build links”. You want to build relationships and help people. You want to connect and organize your community and work on projects with other people. And you want to link to anything that you think is going to improve the quality of your readers’ lives. You want to spend all of your time crafting amazing content and building real relationships, and none of your time actually trying to get links.

        If you do all that right, the links just happen on their own, without any effort in a manner that Google deeply approves of.

        Regarding the tool, it’s essentially a fancy database that lets you collect tens of thousands of keywords in one place. I use it to keep my writing efforts organized, so I know which keywords I’ve worked on, and which ones still need to be improved. I can see which keywords don’t have enough internal links pointed at them, etc. Definitely not necessary, just a huge timesaver.

        • http://affiliatemarketingdiary.com/ StevenR

          Thanks Fraser for dropping by and spelling it out for me. :)

  • Steven

    I don’t know anything about his tool… I don’t use it.

    The reason I decided to post this interview was simply to re-iterate the fact that good quality content that people are searching for is crucial to a thriving site… not just opinion pieces or curated news (or automated blog posts or cruddy articles).

    Using keywords to build keyword optimized content (which everybody who has been around site building has been doing that for years) is not necessarily the same thing that Fraser is talking about.

    What I took away from this interview was to simply use keyword research tools and do proper background work to find out how and why someone is searching for the keyword you are planning to use.

    The mindset is different in the latter.

    All the best,
    Steven

    PS – I used to use SBI years ago as well. I really liked their “brainstorming” tool. These days I only use Google External Keyword Tool and do my own background research on the keywords I plan to use…

  • http://vendingbusinessopportunities.org/ Dave

    I guess I don’t quite understand. To me, this is not a new concept. It is what niche/keyword research is all about when starting a new site. And then keeping up with keyword research and article writing and page building around those keywords, which have varying degrees of popularity.

    And this is what Site Build It (SBI) has been centered around for years. And they have the niche and keyword search tools built into their yearly hosting subscription. And Market Samurai, Traffic Travis, and several other keyword searching tools do a lot of the same thing. So again, I guess I don’t get it. What makes this tool so unique and new??

Steven
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