What are some of the cheap methods of getting dofollow backlinks to help improve brand authority? How do you improve the visibility of your brand on the internet without spending loads of cash?
By doing search engine optimization. You must be telling yourself, right?
However, search engine optimization is a complex process. Google keeps updating its scripts making its robots more intelligent than ever.
With every update, many sites come tinkering from the top position because the new scripts do not favor them.
This challenge has created a niche of SEO experts who charge an arm and a leg for their services. Some of them are so costly that you would give up on your dream before you even start.
Do not worry. There is a proven method that will guarantee you higher rankings on the search engine result pages.
Ever wondered how sites like Amazon manage to rank on top for almost every keyword with a commercial intent?
It is their brand authority. Google respects brand authority.
So, how do you improve the authority of your website?
Many technical things are involved in the process of determining a website’s brand authority. I will not go into that because it is of little consequence in this post.
I will not talk about how it happens because nobody really understands how Google ranks pages.
However, there are agreeable factors that are believed to contribute to that process. These are the things I will share with you shortly.
Implementing them has been shown to have a significant boost in brand authority.
There are paid methods and free options. I will not go into paid options for two reasons:
- Google hates sites that pay to get more brand recognition
- Why pay for it if you can get it for free?
Having said that, let’s now start looking at the FREE methods of improving your brand visibility. The strategy involves creation of top notch content, building high quality backlinks, and then promoting it over and over again.
a) Create the highest quality posts that cover the subject matter comprehensively
Following the recent updates at Google, the search engines now give priority to quality over trickery.
In the past, people would fool the robots by regurgitating shitty content stuffed with relevant keywords. Since the robots relied on keyword density to determine relevance, articles with properly optimized keywords ranked at the top no matter how shitty their content were.
Not anymore. The robots are cleverer now. They know how to check for context and depth of the content.
If you are writing about a particular subject, strive to answer all questions that could be asked on that subject. Divide your content into sub topics and make use of illustrations, tables, and bullet points to make the article more user friendly.
Content that is more user friendly will reduce bounce rate, which also contributes to ranking.
If your content answers all the questions a user has on that subject, your click through rates will increase. You will also notice the ripple effects in dwell time on site and better response to call to actions (CTAs).
Another way to increase dwell time on the page is by including interactive media. You can embed presentations from Slideshare that people have to click to slide through, adding polls and surveys, and embedding audio-visual media.
Be careful what type of media you add. It should enhance the content, otherwise no one will bother to come back to your page.
On the same note, avoid adding too much advertisements to your page. People hate ads and they’d rather avoid them altogether if they can.
The best trick to make your ads effective is to sandwich in such a way that it appears to be part of the content. Relevant adverts work best and have a high likelihood of getting a click.
b) Get backlinks from high authority publications
A backlink is a vote of confidence on the internet. The more you have them, the more credible the search engines deems your website.
Getting backlinks is perhaps the most challenging part in the blogging journey. Many a blogger have resorted to black hat techniques to improve their link profile.
Things normally work out until one day the big search engine catches up with you. Then all the hard work you have done over the years sublimes in a moment.
It is such a sad situation to be in. I just do not have a large enough heart to bear the pain associated with such a loss. I do not encourage anyone to use black hat techniques of getting backlinks.
If you are meeting black hat for the first time, it is like selling a prohibited drug. Everyone knows it is happening and can even point out the participants but you have to wait until the law catches up with them.
Sometimes, the wheels of justice crush them very fast. Other times, they seem to elude the law enforces all the time.
15 Cheap Methods of Getting Dofollow Backlinks to Your Blog
1. Give interviews
Quite straight forward. If you have an expertise in a particular field or a compelling story that can help other people, giving an interview to other publications and media outlets is a sure way to earn yourself a backlink.
You can also appear on podcasts offering solutions or sharing your story with the world. Usually, the interviewer will put up your bio and a link back to your site for those who would like to know more about you.
2. Offer testimonials
Do you have a product or a service that really thrilled you? You can contact the owner and offer to give them a testimonial for your experience.
Product/service providers love testimonials from unbiased reviewers of their service because it boosts their credibility. Much more if the reviewer has a website that confirms to the readers that they are real.
3. Get listed on resource websites
Do you have a service or local business that you want people to know about? See if you can get listed on the “Top X sites that blah blah…” for increased visibility.
Usually, these resource sites will look around for websites that offer certain products or services to add to their list. It could help if you can take the proactive approach and reach out to them with your proposal.
Demonstrate the value your website will add to theirs. Don’t just look at taking away from them.
4. Ask other bloggers/publishers to review your product/service
If you have an awesome product or service, please reach out to other publishers and ask them if they can try it out (usually for free) and give you their honest review of it.
5. Broken link building
This is one overlooked method that works like charm. Some web pages lose their indexing with time and pages that link to them end up pointing to an error page.
This problem can drastically reduce a website’s credibility since people will fault it for recommending expired/non-existent resources.
To get brocken links in a particular niche, first install the “check my links” chrome plugin. Once you have the plugin in place, use Google search to look up the following queries”
- keyword inurl:links
- your keyword + links
- keyword + resources
This will yield result pages with broken links. Sift through them to find the most appropriate resource for you to use.
Once you have identified the resource, create a comprehensive article on that subject (if you don’t already have one).
Go ahead and let the web admin of the site with the broken link know that they have a broken link (mention the exact link) and suggest to them an alternative resource to link to.
In most cases, though not always, they will link to your resource. You shall have saved them a great deal of time they would have spent on identifying and fixing a problem with their site.
Your reward is the backlink. Free and easy, except for the time you will invest in creating the resources.
6. Get backlinks through infographics
This is quite easy and straight forward. Given the huge pool of resources that exist on the internet, there’s a high likelihood that someone has written something about what you want to cover.
What you can do is to collect these resources and produce an amazing illustrative infographic. Cite all the resources you’ve used to create the infographic and publish it on your site. Make sure you add some text before and after the infographic for SEO purposes.
Once that is done, head over to a backlink profiling tool like Ahrefs, Moz, SmallSEOtools, The Hoth, etc and plug in the url of the competing post. You will see all the sites that link back to that post.
Pitch the admins of these sites suggesting to them to add your infographic to their site. Make sure you have an embed code ready that they will simply plug into their site and the infographic appears on their end without additional work.
By the way, I offer infographic creation service. Contact me if you want one for a backlinking campaign.
7. Get backlinks from naked brand mentions
In some instances, other brands will mention your brand without a live backlink. Use tools like Mention.net or Buzzsumo to find websites that mentioned your brand without linking to it.
Reach out to the web admin and request for a backlink. In most instances, they will not hesitate to give you that link. If they loved your work enough to mention you, they should not have a problem linking back to your site.
8. Donate to a charity or sponsor an event
We all know how this goes. You will earn your place in the list of sponsors. Worth trying, not just for the backlinks but also for the worthy course the charity is advancing.
9. Offer a scholarship for .edu backlinks
Students are always looking for scholarships. You can create a scholarship on your site and approach local academic institutions to list your scholarship under their scholarships.
You will spend money using this method but you will earn the revered .edu and or .gov links.
Another method of getting .edu backlinks is by offering university students incentives to write articles in their university blogs and link back to your site.
By checking the university resource page, you can find an opportunity to get listed as a resource. Universities usually provide additional links to exceptional websites that offer detailed information on a given subject.
10. Submit a guest post
This is perhaps one of the oldest methods of getting backlinks that is still very effective. Identify a publication that accepts guest posts and reach out to them with your guest post idea.
If they like your idea, they will let you move forward with writing the article, which you will forward to them for publication. You will usually get a backlink to your site in your author byline.
You can find a comprehensive list of blogs and magazines that accept guest posts here. If you don’t know how to find the editor’s email address for cold pitching, please use this guide.
11. Enlist on HARO
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is a service that sends alerts to subscribers when a journalist needs help with a particular subject. HARO will send curated email digests from reporters who need help.
When you receive the alert, respond to the journalist with helpful resources. They will credit you and give a backlink to your website.
12. Submit your site to top blog and social media aggregators
One sure way of getting a trickling effect of backlinking is by linking to blog and social media aggregators. Find the aggregator you like, register for an account, and submit your site. As simple as it can get. No additional work.
13. Get brand mentions in expert roundups
Go to Google and search for keyword+roundup for the the current week. Reach out to the publisher of the expert roundup publication and introduce them to your pillar content on a given subject.
If they are happy with it, they will include you in their next expert roundup.
14. Get dofollow backlinks from comments.
Most blogs offer commenting service but not all of them will give you a free dofollow backlink. It is the dofollow backlink that will improve your brand visibility on the web because Google understands that they are voting for you.
The best way to find blogs that offer dofollow comment backlinks is to check those that have enabled Comment Luv.
Some of the blogs with enabled Comment Luv service include Carol Tice’s Make a Living Writing (https://www.makealivingwriting.com/), Sherman Smith’s blog (http://www.shermansmithblog.com/), Ryan Biddulph’s Blogging From A Paradise (https://www.bloggingfromparadise.com/), etc.
You can find a larger list of blogs with Comment Luv here.
15. Post on forums for backlinks
This method is quite saturated these days. However, if you can find controlled forums, you could benefit from a link from there. Academic forums work best for this method.
c) Promoting the content over and over again
Now that you have used these cheap methods of getting dofollow backlinks to your site, it i time to start a promotional campaign. You can rely on free, paid, or an amalgamation of both paid and free methods to promote your content.
Free methods involves listing your website on top blog and social media aggregators to promote the content. You can also use social media platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, etc. to promote the content to your followers.
Paid methods can take many forms. For instance, paying a popular blogger to mention your content and/or send it out to their list is just one way. You can also rent a list of niche subscribers and broadcast your campaign.
Search engines and social media platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. all offer paid content promotions. You can split test them and optimize on the one that brings the best results.
Over to you now
Use these strategies to create dofollow backlinks to your blogs and niche sites. If there is a technique you need help with, do not hesitate to engage me in the comments.
Which if these cheap methods of getting dofollow backlinks have you used to create backlinks? Which one worked best for you?
Let’s discuss in the comments.
P.S. I offer infographics creation service. Do not hesitate to contact me when you want to try backlinking through infographics.
Thanks for sharing this useful blog’s list. This makes us easier to find the blog we need.
You are welcome.