No, no, I’m not crazy by any means. The simple fact is that I enjoy my days too much to spend them trapped within the confines of an office. Oh, did I mention, I work from home too. Indeed, my days begin at three in the morning each and every weekday, sometimes earlier depending on the complexity of my breakfasts (can’t be cooking on the clock). Most people who see “3:00” blinking red on their alarm clocks would rip the cord right out of the wall, but once you get used to it, it becomes a way of life.

So, where were we? Oh right, an early-morning, zombie-like haze! For anyone who has ever endeavored into the mind-numbing task of link-building, they know that it is time-consuming, tedious, and full of boredom that can put you to sleep faster than rain drops on a tin roof. This matter is only amplified when you couple it with the early morning hours. Therefore, the first thing I do when I wake up is prepare a rather large, protein-packed breakfast to give me any sustainable energy. I couple this breakfast with some form of caffeine, usually a Coke Zero, but if I were a coffee drinker, this is when I would be chugging it down.

After my stomach is content, I sit down in my computer-chair and begin my skimming through my agenda of things I have to get done for the day, which is usually longer than I’d care to get into. A typical day of link-building usually consists of multiple spreadsheets, Notepad documents, Internet Pages, and email programs which can typically be a nuisance to meticulously find and open. Therefore, I create a “macro.” I’m no tech-junkie, but if I had to define a macro, I would define it as a program that opens up all of your necessary files with the click of the mouse.

To create a macro of your own:

1) Simply open Notepad on your computer.
2) At the top of the document, type: @echo off
3) Hit enter and type: start “” “[location of file]”
4) An example of a macro that opens up a Google webpage and a Yahoo webpage is:
@echo off
start “” “http://www.google.com/”

start “” “http://www.yahoo.com/”

5) All you have to do now is save the file to your desktop as “filename.bat.” The .bat extension is essential to the correct functioning of the macro.

** If you don’t know the location of one of your files, simply right click the file and go to properties. From there you should see a heading titled “Location.” The area to the right of that is the location.

You can always tell if you had a good link-building session the day before because your email inbox will be overflowing with interested webmasters. Sifting through my inbox to scout out any webmasters interested in working with me is how I usually begin my session. This can range anywhere from half an hour to two hours or more depending on the volume of emails you are receiving. This is where organizing and prioritizing comes into play. Personally, I have various different folders set up within my email program where I can separate emails into categories, usually based on priority. Furthermore, if I find that I cannot work with a certain webmaster for whatever reason, but see an opportunity, say, next month, I will kindly reply and tell him or her to hold off until the next month and then put that email into a separate, appropriately labeled folder.

What most people have the most trouble with when working from home is the countless distractions, including myself from time to time. Most will tell you to set up a distraction-free office in a quiet corner of your house. However, I find it much more satisfying to give into a distraction or two, but never for more than five minutes. Trust me, after an hour or two of responding to emails in the wee hours of the morning, you will have to find some sort of vice to help lighten the weight of your eyes. For me, I have one of those doorway pull-up bars installed right in my home office. Whenever I feel like I can’t keep my eyes open, I simply walk over and do ten pull-ups. Not only does that get you out of your chair and moving, but it also gets your blood circulating and you ironically feel more energized. Not to mention, it only takes about thirty seconds to a minute and you’re back on track. Other forgiving distractions that take no more than five minutes include checking the mail, watering your plants, feeding your animals; anything that gets you moving and takes no more than five minutes. My rule is five minutes every two hours, or two minutes every hour.

Once you’re back in your chair, it is time to send out some “discovery” emails. These are the emails that draw in interested webmasters. Naturally, writing a personal email to each and every webmaster is unrealistic when you should aim for emailing thirty to fifty webmasters a day. My best friend when it comes to link-building is the “template email.” Several link-builders will disagree when I say that they are the best option, but that is because they simply fail at sounding like a normal person when they write them; most end up sounding like robotic spammers who not only want to solicit some poorly-defined service, but also want to take over the world after doing so. The trick to writing a good template email is to write it so that the webmaster feels as though he or she is being engaged personally. This is the time when I ditch the professional, MBA-style way of talking and take up a tone as if I were talking to my best friend. Simply create a file in Notepad with various different template emails and you have successfully increased the number of emails you can churn out in a day. Not only that, but you can also modify them as needed to be more personal, or more specific, or to greet a webmaster in a holiday-specific way; anything that engages the webmaster on a more personal level.

As mentioned previously, I aim for about thirty to fifty good emails a day. Over time, those emails add up and so do the sites. It is very possible that you have, in fact, emailed the webmaster of a specific site three times in the past month without even realizing it. How do you fix this? With the help of a Spreadsheet, of course. Enter the URL for each site that you email into the spreadsheet, and if you feel as though you might have emailed a particular webmaster once before, simply hold the “ctrl” key and press “F.” This brings up a search box where you can enter keywords from the URL. Hit “Enter” and if you have entered a particular string of keywords once before, it will take you to that entry.

For me, emails are of the utmost importance. Some link-builders will only check their emails in intervals. Me, however, I check them the instant they come in. My rule of thumb is, “The quicker I respond, the quick I get a response.” With webmasters coming from so many different time zones, it could be two days or more before you hear a response. Therefore, I think regularly checking your unread emails is one of the most important aspects of link-building.

After a successful eight-hour day of link-building, I have sent and received emails to and from countless webmasters, written a few guest posts, done thirty to forty pull-ups, and hopefully found success in one way or another. I think we can all agree that link-building is tedious, making minutes feel like hours, wasting away the day as if it were not already short enough. Combine that with the endless distractions of working from home, and you have a lethal combination for not getting any work done. However, a good link-building session can be had relatively easily, and the earlier you get it done, the more time you have to enjoy your day. Hey! Its 11:00 a.m. now, so I’m heading out for some fishing. Feel free to join me….oh wait….you’ve still got work to do!

EDU links are looked at as the holy grail of link building. While I think they’re a little overrated, they are great for building a site’s authority. The only issue is they can require quite a bit of effort and resources to acquire.

Here’s a method that doesn’t take much at all.

Step 1. Create a Student Discount

This is usually the only step that requires anything from the dev side of things. Just create a student discount for your product. If you have multiple products, be logical and choose what’s most relevant, not the one you want. However you can create a discount works: discount code, tracking cookie, separate checkout page, whatever.

The discount can not be temporary and in some cases the discount can not be one time only. It has to be a discount that will work every time.

Step 2. Find Student Discount Programs

Lots of colleges have various forms of discount programs. You just need to find them! Here’s a variety of searches you can do to sniff them out:

• site:.edu intitle:”student discount program”
• site:.edu intitle:”student discount card”
• Site:.edu intitle:”employee discount
• Site:.edu intitle:”employee discount program

If it’s extremely relevant you can also find specific niche discounts. For example there’s usually a discount program for student housing.

Step 3. Contact

Nearly every discount program will have a specific person to contact. It’s not always easy to find, but do some digging and look for it. Don’t resort to emailing someone else unless you have to.

Some of them may require to fill out an application. There’s usually a set of basic guidelines that your discount needs to offer as well; however, if you followed the instructions on the first step, you shouldn’t run into any issues.

During your initial email I recommend using a soft opening and not running right in with why they should add your product to their program. Ex:

Emily,

I’m trying to get in contact with the person in charge of Random University’s Student Discount Program. If you could point me in the right direction, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance!

All the Best,
-Peter

After you get a response, then you can go in with your full pitch. This makes the contact committed to the conversation and keeps them from simply ignoring your email. After that, it’s just the fine details!

Step 4. Improving Your Acceptance Rate

Ok, so far you know all the basics. However, you can vastly improve your acceptance rate by creating dedicated landing pages for each college. The easiest way to do this is to make a template that would be easy to personalize for each individual college. This way you can simply change out their school colors and name on each page.

By doing this, you can also create a page before you make your pitch. If they see you already have a page up, it’ll be hard for them to turn you down!

Conclusion

There are lots of opportunities like this not just on EDU sites, but anything with a discount program: clubs, fundraisers, charities, etc. Do some random keyword searches with “discount” in them. You’re bound to run into a few ideas!

Out of everything I’ve ever done in SEO, link building is by far the most tedious and the most conducive to burnout. I never get tired of code issues or examining traffic sources, but building links by hand? Wow, it can kill you.

I recently conducted an in-house survey of my 20+ link builders just to see what suggestions they had for avoiding burnout and keeping their jobs interesting, and I must say that the majority of the responses were not what I expected. I figured that I would see responses like “take a break” or “watch the video of that dog Salsa dancing” but by and large, they all said the same thing: the key to avoiding burnout is to get a different perspective, whether that is by talking one-on-one to another link builder at the office, testing out a new link building tool, or having brainstorming sessions. Basically, their key to success lies in not giving up, but immersing themselves even further in what they’re doing in order to keep it interesting. Therefore, I think that there’s a lot to learn from how they go about this, and with that in mind, here are 5 ways that we all avoid burnout.

1. Discuss what you’re doing with someone else. Link building can be a lonely effort. I bounce all of my ideas off poor Paul Madden because he’s not my boss, he doesn’t work for me, he lives far enough away that if he tells me I am wrong I can’t reach out and smack him, but he understands what I do for a living and the problems I face as a business owner. If you don’t have someone to talk to who is doing what you’re doing, find someone. While you’re finding people to talk to, find someone who doesn’t do exactly what you’re doing but does something similar (maybe your supervisor, or your client) and get a different perspective.

2. Try a new tool. Trust me, there’s a new one every 5 minutes. Try old ones that you haven’t used in 3 years too. People update them (sometimes.)

3. Search for what you know. If you’re interested in art, for example, and you’re link building for a client who sells metal machine parts, dig through some steampunk sites. If your background is in finance and you’re working for a site that tries to educate people about the risks of certain behaviors, write a guest post about how insurance rates for an employer could rise due to covering people with obesity-related health problems. If you can’t find a way to relate two things, find a way that you can differentiate them and write about that or search for terms related to that.

4. Combine unrelated keywords. This sounds counterintuitive, but combining disparate search terms can bring up some sites not brought up by related terms. A search for “finance metal clothing baby” when intended to help build links for a site related to finance brings up a site selling punk rock baby clothes (which gives me an idea about a post dedicated to punk singers who made no money in music and became stockbrokers who bred) and a wiki entry on broken needles in children’s clothing and the dangers that poses, which would be a great idea for an infographic about statistics surrounding needle injuries reported each year in the world, broken down by country. Yes, I am reaching here but sometimes reaching like this is the key.

5. Use social media to learn, not just to interact or promote. See the example above? Throw that set of keywords into a twitter search or Icerocket, and see what you get. Sometimes just reading posts that show up for a search will give you totally new ideas about what to search for or write about.

Lastly, there are definitely some tools and articles that I return to time and time again, so here’s my list…make your own, and every few months return to it, just to see what’s changed and whether you can get something new from something old.

Solo SEO’s Link Search Tool: I never get tired of this one, as it makes things so easy. If you’re brain dead for a few minutes, this one will save your sanity.

Moz’s The Professional’s Guide To Link Building: sometimes I get caught up in the big picture and reading an article that breaks things down into tiny little easy-to-digest components is exactly what I need.

Wordtracker’s 62 Steps To The Definitive Link Campaign because it’s, um, 62 steps! Not 5, 10, or 100. It’s 62.

Debra Mastaler’s blog The Link Spiel: Yes I am a massive ass kisser when it comes to Debra but her ability to see links in ANY situation is very inspiring. If you aren’t regularly reading anything she puts out, you’re way behind.

I’d love to hear any suggestions about ways you have of keeping link building from making you slam your head into your desk for 45 minutes straight by the way!

Everyone knows that writing superb content is the best way to approach guest posting. However, if you’re doing a large scale link building campaign, it’s not realistic to push out masterpieces several times a week. You’re going to have a mix of subpar guest posts on subpar blogs that only exist for the sake of getting a link.

Here’s a tactic you can use to leverage more out of those posts.

The point of great content

Great content gets noticed. It gets a lot of eyeballs and a lot of links pointing back to it. However, writing an amazing guest post on a blog that doesn’t have an active community, can fall flat on it’s face. That’s why I suggest keeping your best content for those top sites. If you’re writing a guest post for a site with a large community that is well recognized, you’ll get much more leverage out of it.

Why get posts on mediocre blogs?

If two sites both have links from the top 10 influential blogs of their niche, but one also has links from several mediocre blogs, which do you think will rank better? When you publish high quality content on a site other than your own, that site is going to get the majority of the links, not yours. That’s why it’s important to promote on other blogs as well. So even though you won’t get the same amplification posting on a small community blog, you’ll still get that juicy link. Plus, this also helps build a diverse back link profile.

Getting the most out of that guest post

Obviously, a link from a high authority site carries more weight than a link from a lower authority site. This isn’t something you can imitate, however posts on higher authority sites get more back links naturally than others. This is something you can mimc, or at least to some degree.

Easy Links You Can Target

• Social Bookmarks: This is probably the easiest place to start. After you get a guest post up, point some social bookmarks at your post. If you don’t have the time, it’s easy to find services that will do the submissions for you at a minimal price.

• Tumblr: Use a creative or funny image in your post and link it back to your post. Something that is bound to get a few reblogs. Unlike most social platforms, it’s pretty easy to get reposts on Tumblr without a following by taking advantage of the hashtags feature. You should also put a link in the comments section of the post, so that when it gets reblogged, it’s also reblogging your link. Neil Patel wrote a great piece on leveraging Tumblr properly that’s worth a read.

• Pinterest: Build up several boards on Pinterest for different themes of images. As you add images to these boards you’ll build up a following of people to those niche boards. Now you can use the same image you used on Tumblr, and post it on Pinterest (linking back to your post, not your Tumblr). If you have a small following on these boards, it’s easy to get a few repins.

Conclusion

These tactics, among others, should be used for higher quality guest posts as well. The reason I chose these specifically though, is because they don’t require much time to attain and they focus more on a link than the content.

Even though these links aren’t superb quality, they are showing that the post is active; giving it more weight.

Three years ago, if you had told me to link build without a sole focus on competitive keywords as anchor text, I would have written you off as destined for the asylum. Keyword research takes too much time and effort to miss an opportunity for exact keyword links, right?

Enter Panda. Google’s Panda came down like a battle axe and smote low-quality content farms, leaving them scrambling to recover. Who knew such an adorable constituent of Animalia Chordata would become the mascot of an especially brutal SEM blitzkrieg?

In March, Google published a list of search quality highlights, one of which reads:

Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.

Several SEOs have waxed philosophical about the meaning of this cryptic paragraph, listed in Google’s March 2012 Changes. The change is hidden in a list of 49 other updates, some of which seem comically trivial (the tennis scores update – Codename “Double Fault” is going to change everything!), driving the search world mad with implications.

One thing is for sure – Google wants to get away from its dependence on anchor text. Whether Google is taking action now or later is negligible; it’s not as if Google will provide the SEO world with more descriptive warning, if any, than the paragraph above. With this in mind, it would behoove any search marketer to focus more on the quality of content in which your link floats, like a cute little buoy in relevant waters.

This will be a jagged little pill to swallow for companies in competitive marketplaces and passive income entrepreneurs. Campaign managers will cling to their too-precious anchor text without realizing how abusive their relationship with their links has become.

Y’all – it’s getting out of hand. And it’s only going to get uglier.

I’m a proponent for sustainable SEO – it makes me unpopular at conferences and in circles of SEOs who guffaw about their newest one-trick-ponies (exact match domains, anyone?) and getting the most out of them while it’s still possible. This sort of attitude is, quite simply, reckless.

A search engine specialist is nothing without his or her ability to adapt, and thus, preventative measures should be taken where consequence is foreseeable and inevitable.

I challenge you to take one week – just one week! – out of your link building endeavors to kill your darlings and take your anchor text blinders off: diversify your anchor text, improve the relevance and usefulness of the content in which your link resides, and submit fully to the flow of the content and external linking formats of link hosts. Pay more attention to directory linking, for the sake of a balanced diet.

Even if you don’t see any improved ranking or ROI, you will have done yourself a gigantic favor in link emergency preparedness for future algorithm updates.

Hi everyone!

First off, let me apologize for being a lying cow and saying that we’d never have a blog. Secondly, let me say that honestly, yes, we’re totally jumping on the blog bandwagon because everyone else is doing it. Thirdly, I finally realized that my link builders get down and dirty with links for hours a day, every day, and that they’re truly in a position to talk about how to build links. Some of our employees have been with us since the first few months of the company, and they’ve continued to do what many (including myself) consider to be the most tedious part of online marketing, day in and day out. I commend them for it and I hope that you’ll learn from them.

We’ll also be publishing guest posts, starting with one from Peter Attia, my former right-hand man at Link Fish. If you’re interested in submitting a guest post, we’d love to hear from you!

Another thing that I’d like to encourage is feedback in terms of what types of posts you’d like to see. I personally like to read posts that are actionable, with something to take away that helps me do something better or faster. I doubt you’ll see any big rants here, as we’re honestly too busy to focus on writing 10 paragraphs of how irritating something is, but hey, never say never.

Our first post will be by Rae Alton, the head of content at Link Fish. Rae has a truly amazing brain and I’m quite thrilled to be able to give her more of a voice for the industry. I think you’ll find her as funny and brilliant as I do, and if you’re coming to Search Exchange, go see her speak for god’s sake!

To conclude, I’d like to thank everyone who has given me feedback on my articles over the years, and I hope you’ll do the same with what we publish here.