Online entrepreneurs are so obsessed with getting high Domain Authority (DA) scores and one component of increasing DA is gaining high-quality backlinks.
In this refreshing episode, Bibi Raven will walk us through effective and ethical Link Building strategies.
Bibi the Link Builder is the kooky founder of Bibibuzz – where her wild party of link slingers build juicy backlinks for her worldwide clientele. She’s infamously known for action-packed link building advice, creative outreach training, and expired dad jokes.
Jaryd had a fun chat with Bibi about where do most people go wrong when they set out to acquire backlinks? What should website owners consider first before even building or acquiring backlinks?
They also discussed the quality versus quantity equation on backlinks. What do quality and non-quality links look like?
Lastly, Bibi shared the simplest yet most effective outreach strategy for link building.
Tune in to this episode and find out how you can improve your site’s DA score!
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Episode Highlights
02:24 Where do people go wrong when acquiring backlinks?
05:15 Quality vs Quantity equation of backlinks
08:50 What is an Eyeball Test?
10:41 Which one should you go for – More links or Relevant links?
14:37 Why do “Spammy” links exist?
23:46 How to determine the target pages for your link building efforts?
31:48 Outreach strategy for link building
36:41 Bibi’s amazing advice to those starting in their link building journey
39:42 Where can you find Bibi?
Courses & Training
Courses & Training
Key Takeaways
➥ Quality backlinks always beat a large quantity of backlinks.
➥ The best pages you should build links for are your main domain first, and then your top of silo or hub pages.
➥ Internal linking is key to help you spread out link juice throughout your website.
➥ Backlink outreach strategy is an effective way to get links, but very time consuming.
About The Guest
Bibi the Link Builder is the kooky founder of Bibibuzz – where her wild party of link slingers build juicy backlinks for her worldwide clientele. She’s infamously known for action-packed link building advice, creative outreach training, and expired dad jokes.
Connect with Bibi Raven
Transcription:
Jaryd Krause (0:00)
You don't need to buy backlinks to boost your SEO profile or you don't need to buy backlinks to get backlinks. Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause host of the buying online businesses Podcast. Today I'm speaking with Bibi, the link builder who is the Kooky founder of Bibibuzz where her wild party of Link sling is build juicy backlinks.
For her worldwide clientele. She is infamously known for action packed link building advice, creative outreach, training and expired dad jokes. Now, in this podcast episode, Bibi and I had a lot of fun. We talked about the equation of quantity versus quality backlinks and the backlink building and more so about is that should you go for one? Or should you go for the other? Or would it could be the would it be good for you to do a blend? And what feels right for you, instead of just going by what most people suggest? what feels right for you as your business and as your business owner? And what sort of links do you want to build?
Think about that from an ethical standpoint, and what is the best way to go the best strategy for you could be blended, it could be mostly quantity, it could be maybe a bunch of non-relevant links or non-contextual links. We also talk about why most sites get spam my backlinks which we want to actually cover further and we will actually know more about so if somebody knows more about that. Let us know we also talk about how to know which pages to build links to from the pages you may already have or how to create content using H refs, you know Content Finder, how to create content that will easily get you links for the content that you create. We also talk about how to do outreach that sets you up to win links and most often not need to pay for those backlinks and so much more in between all of that this is such a valuable episode. If you own an online business, chances are you're going to want to do some link building at some stage don't need to pay for it.
This is the podcast episode for you. Before we dive in a special note that this podcast episode is not the only way that I can help you for free. We help a lot of people save millions of dollars and make millions of dollars through buying online businesses. One of the tools we use is our due diligence framework, you can get that for free at buying online businesses.com for tax free resources. Check it out. Now let's dive in to the podcast. Bibi, welcome to the show.
Bibi Raven (2:26) Hi, thanks for having me. I'm waving from Amsterdam.
Jaryd Krause (2:30) And I'm on the other side over here in Australia. Now I wanted to just dive straight in. I wanted to ask so many people wanting to build backlinks to build their blogs? Where do most people go wrong? When they set out to acquire backlinks? What do I say the top sort of few things they get wrong?
Bibi Raven (2:48) A couple of things. So I think one of the base things is to not spend some time and research the audience of the people that you want to get links from and the needs of those people. So a lot of times people focus on their own customers, right, but you want links from specific site owners? And then you have to think about what are them? What are they trying to do with their site, you know, how are they engaging with their audience? How are they selling to their audience? And how can my piece of content or my linkable assets help with that.
And the other thing is that you that often people don't look at the audience themselves, the audience of those link prospects, and because you could be slightly different than your customer audience. So I think that's, that's definitely one thing. The second thing is to be obsessed with scaling. Yes, scaling is important because you want to systemize stuff, you want to work efficiently. But at some point, you're so focused on scaling, that you lose sight of your conversion rates. And at some point, your conversion rates are going to be so low, that scaling is no longer the cheapest way to do stuff, right because you have to email more and more and more, which means that you get flagged for spam and you have to have all these intense systems to get new email addresses you know, make sure your email deliverability is on point if you notice that you get lost in the scaling and you lose sight of your why then go back and try to fix you’re at least that way. And a third thing was I don't know if their thing I think that was pretty good already.
Jaryd Krause (4:27) So the second one being when you start acquiring so many links and you want to scale it sometimes you realize that there's a see saw that you don't need more links, you need to fix your conversion rate, because you already got a lot more traffic coming from those links and the conversion rates low. So focus on the conversion rate before you move back and its sort of that.
Bibi Raven (4:49) No. What did it mean conversion? Sorry, I didn't mean conversion rates of your product sales, I mean conversion rate of winning the links. That's what I mean. tell people, when I went to obsess with scaling the atomic pointer, sending out hundreds 1000s of emails per month to get a 0.001 conversion rate of links, that's what I meant, sorry, not about the sales.
Jaryd Krause (5:15) It will let's talk about that. Let's talk about the quality versus quantity equation, say somebody's going to come to you. And they say they got a blog, and they've got like a D 35, or something like that, in that particular niche, they want to do some backlink building so they can increase their see that EA T and they're going to get some brand ambassadors on with the actually write good content, and they got a digital footprint in the niche. What's your take on the on the quality, like a few quality links versus quantity links? What's your take on that equation there?
Bibi Raven (5:46) All right, so I've never done a real test where I thought, like let's get 1000 Shit links, what people consider shit links, and then gets three really high quality links. I've never done a test with that, right. So I don't know, if it ends up being the same, right? Maybe from bad links, you just need more, I don't know, although that could have some problems in its self as well. But I would always look at your competition. And then, you know, some people are overwhelmed by looking at the links, the backlink profiles of the competition. But if you whittle it down, if you remove all the bad links, they're only competing with like 10 links, 10 really relevant natural place links, you can't look at quality without researching them as well for quality. If I see all the competitors ranking with 1000, bad links, then it's my choice, you know, either I want to go 4000 bad links, or I try to be different and go for five or 10.
Jaryd Krause (6:46) That's an interesting take. So say you do find some book, some competitor with 1003, or four competitors with 1000, bad links. And they have a more of a more of authority, their sites have more authority than you. Where would you where would you go from there? Would you say okay, clearly what they've done for success is getting a lot of crappy links? Or would you? Would you just go I've know that through my experience with being building links and quality links, high traffic high dr? All that from, you know, in other niches for other sites? I'm going to take that approach, how do you know what approach to juggle and what's your most common go to them?
Bibi Raven (7:27) Well, let's go back a little bit to a couple of things you said. So one is you said high authority sites, what do you mean with high authority? And the other thing was high dr. So why high dr. Right, so what do you mean with high authority?
Jaryd Krause (7:38) What I mean is they got like a, their domain authority is say, you know, 70, or something like that. And you want to want to get you’re that site's authority up to that type of authority or higher, Dr. C, 6570, something like that.
Bibi Raven (7:54) I'm not a metrics Link Builder. I don't even talk about metrics. So Da, Dr. It's something for me to weed out through a giant list of prospects or whatever, right? It's something to give me a little bit of an indication, but it's really, really low on my list of establishing how strong the competition is. Okay, and what is high on your list ranking for important keywords, their traffic flow, how much traffic tools are estimating that they're getting? Right? Yeah, that kind of stuff. And definitely also an eyeball test, as well to see, is this a site that I think is going to survive the next year, right? Or? Or are they look so spam my, or whatever? So I don't I don't really care about high authority in terms of Da RDR.
Jaryd Krause (8:42) A lot What is the page that you're getting link from? And to what page? Are we linking to? And what's the what's the, what's the relevancy? What's the connection there putting yourself in the viewer’s shoes or seats of their site that you're linking from? And what would their experience be going from that page to say the page that you're trying to gain the link to? What would there and how would that benefit them in terms of value? Is that what you mean by eyeballing?
Bibi Raven (9:27) No, I think because we were talking about authority over sites. So what I meant with the eyeball test is like, we like to say, does it look like a neglected garden that nobody cares about? Right? Or does it look like some something that somebody really invested in, in this building on and doesn't mean like, it's ugly, or, or beautiful? Because it doesn't say anything, right?
It's just like design or whatever. But yeah, that's what I mean was eyeball test, because you were talking about the highest authority of competitors and then figuring out how you want to build links So if we if we let go of the authority thing, because it means something different for everybody, then if you look at competitors, it's your choice, if you want to go that route, the same route they're doing, or if you want to follow your own common sense, or, or whatever, I would basically do a combination of both. Because I want to pin myself down to one link building strategy, I would start with one link building strategy, see how that works. Right? And then build upon that.
So if your competitors have a lot of bad or spam my links then it's your choice, whether you want to do that or not, I think both things can work.
Jaryd Krause (10:41) Okay, I'm going to ask that question. Again, what's your take on a lot of links, versus very relevant links, and a few and a few of them.
Bibi Raven (10:49) So I think you have to make a choice what aligns with you best, you’re let's say you see a lot of bad links doing clearly doing a job. Right, right. So you don't you have a choice? Am I going to go the same path or not?
Either is fine with me. But it's a choice. So if you go for the for the links that seemingly look bad, it has to fit your personality, because there is some risk involved? Right. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad or good choice. It just depends on how you want to live. Basically, I saw this in an interview with a podcast from authority hacker. Yeah. And they were also talking about the ethics and morality of link building. And I think it was Marco Gayle, and they said, it really has to do with your own personality, as well. Know how you want to live your life.
I don't feel good about building links from really spam my sites. Yeah. Because it doesn't fit my personality. I like people, you know. So that's why I go for other types of links. And so, but I don't sorry, go on. I think people are sometimes too, in one camp about these things, or they're I'm more pragmatic, I guess.
Jaryd Krause (12:08) Well it's like as human beings, we would like things to be forever, like, we've got one marketing strategy. And we're like, let's just set it and forget it.
That's what we kind of like. So we don't have to use our brain and come back to it again. And we also don't realize we can have a hybrid approach that can actually work really well together, for example, having one platform type of marketing working really well. And it may actually complement a different type of marketing. And that could be the same with backlinks as well.
You know, depending on how you search engines determine the valuable backlink profile at any one given time, what might be relevant how they value a backlink profile in 2022, maybe totally different in 2032. And that blend of very relevant links with a few links that are just sort of spam my not so relevant links may actually be a good approach and hedging your bet. Would you agree?
Bibi Raven (13:04) I think you have a really good point. So I wouldn't be very careful still. Right. So but a blended approach, where you just try a couple of things out one after the other, see what the effect is, it's a really good way to find out what works for you, but also a good way to spread the risk in a way, just like you say, right, if I have some bigger brands, clients, and one of the things that shocked me is that their in house teams, for instance, they tell them don't link out, you know, you cannot link out even not no follow or whatever you can't link out because it's that has there was bad that was penalized by Google a lot, a lot. And it's true, I think you've got to be careful about making such a black and white rule.
Because what happens, you're going to get all the links, you're going to get 75 links from your vendors every month, or whatever or more, and you're not going to link out well, how does how does that look?
Jaryd Krause (13:56) And how does it look in the eyes as the algorithm changes in 10 years’ time, and you have to go back and use the algorithm and the search engines are all every evolving, and all the time it was good to link out? You know, versus maybe a different story in a different time.
Bibi Raven (14:15) Well, then people scaled it. And it's threw up a big pattern. Right? So that's, so that's exactly what you said before with the with the blandness approach.
I think that's really, really good. Because everything that you overuse a scale up at some point, it's going to be a pattern and it's going to be copied by other people and dentists, dead marketers ruin everything.
Jaryd Krause (14:37) We do is that marketers do? So I'm curious now that we talk about a blended a blended approach, if you took a site, and I'm just thinking about what your take on this, maybe if you took a site that had a lot of not so quality links, a lot of spam my links, and decided to go the route of, we're going to just we're just going to remove a lot of those and we're just going to go for it.
sites that have big juicy links with lots of traffic. And we'll call them high authority sites. And we're going to use that metric just so for ease of people listening, not making it technical.
And you've got, say, maybe 50 really good quality links, but no, no other links, like, everything's so high quality, and you've got no sort of filler links, sort of semi irrelevant, non-relevant, or spam my links, you've got to have none of that in between, would you have the perception that Google would go, this doesn't look very natural, like it's too perfect? Um, do you think that would be a thing to cause?
Bibi Raven (15:36) I don't know, it could be. But at the same time, if you're having all these really strong links, you're going to pick up all these other spam my links as well, anyway, without having to do.
Jaryd Krause (15:45) It Because.
Bibi Raven (15:48) you're going to naturally have all the block spots in the world. So just, you know, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. Because those links should be really relevant. I think, you know, at the same time, I don't know. Because if you I've never done a test with it. So I don't know how it is to get 550 Allay Forbes links that have no relevance to you what happens then?
Jaryd Krause (16:12) it's, I don't know. It's funny how I want to come back to the Forbes links. Let's come back to that. But I just want to put up just highlight something for people listening.
A lot of people that are buying website businesses, we do SEO due to due diligence on the link profile the backlinks, and one of my students asked me, maybe a month or so ago is every single site have spam me? backlinks? It's just a common thing. You just have to expect it like, it just happens.
So do you want explain you want explain why that why that happens?
Bibi Raven (16:45) so we used to vote, every link prospects, we, we look at them, right? And we used to also look very closely to their backlink profile. We still do that.
But you see so many spam my links that you can't judge a site on it, they're going to pick it up anyway. So I'm not I'm not very an expert. I'm not an expert in spam my links. But what happens? I think, I really don't know. I know that Black hat people, they have some automated, it's where they link to other sites around a specific topic.
Because all these blog spots things are very content contextual. Right. So let's say you're a baker shot, and you're going to get all these Baker BlogSpot things. I actually don't know how to works, I think they do it to somehow become relevant in a niche. What do you know?
Jaryd Krause (17:38) I don't actually. And I have, you know, maybe there is negative SEO, where people may purchase non quality, spam my toxic links to go to a competitor's domain. I feel that's maybe it's crazy to think that somebody would do that.
But in other business aspects, I've seen people do those types of things. It's a very fear based mentality, which is I don't believe you should build anything based on fear. But I believe there's people out there that that are in that area. And so that could be a reason. But it's not going to be like every single site has non quality links.
So just don't know exactly where they were and why they will come from so somebody's listening does No, maybe we'll get you on the podcast and explain that. But I now want to bring it back to.
Bibi Raven (18:30) It's because I want I want H refs to put a thing, like a standard seeing in their backlink profile where you could just exclude all those now you have to do all these word filters to get them out.
Jaryd Krause (18:45) It's a weird, I don't know how what happens. But if somebody does know, let us know, the greater good explanation on it. But coming back to the Forbes links, Forbes is like, not particularly in any one niche.
They've got so much content around so many things. And I just don't believe that Forbes links are always the best links to go for. Versus and this is, this is what I feel versus say, if you've got a site that's in the dog niche, getting a link from another site, or another page, it's in the dog niche, which is talking about a point that you mentioned in your article, and you gain that link from them that supports your article and lifts your live shows up.
I feel like that that link may be from a decent authority site with its pushing a lot of good link juice and traffic to that page. A lot of times that could be better, right. So you I would love to hear what you have to say about that.
Bibi Raven (19:48) Sorry. It does depend on the context of the link. So Forbes ranks for they have their own Many affiliates cluster within their domain called Forbes or Pfizer. And they rank for some stuff where you think like what? Brag for set RA for saggy boobs? Hello? Yeah, so yeah, and then and but then when you look at the page, you can see that it gets a lot of traffic.
So and it's a ranking for relevance keywords, so I wouldn't have a problem getting a link from that page, if it's relevant to, to my niche. I personally prefer a link from a real expert. So like you say, like the dog expert or something, but I think I think there would be both good. If the link on Forbes comes from a page that's relevant, that's relevant and gets traffic or, or its formula, a really good guest post, you know, that, you know, a lot of people are going to see, so I don't, but I do think that people see a Forbes link as a holy grail.
And that's something I need to let go because I get I get leads in, you know, for, for my service. And then they're like, I want Forbes links. And I was like, why? You know, well, explain to me why it sucks that people just obsess with this link from this specific domain. And then ignore all the small sites that are doing a great job. Right?
Jaryd Krause (21:16) So let's talk about that then. So you get a lead that says, hey, I want 20 links from Forbes, I want five links from Forbes and this is my budget. And you say, Hang on, yeah.
What's your advice to them? And say that site that's in sports bras, you know, women's sports bras or something like that? And they're wanting they're wanting links from Forbes? What's your advice to them in terms of link building?
Bibi Raven (21:41) Go find another thing? That's my, because I'm not that link builder. Right. And I don't know, people. I don't know how to fix it. I just don't want to do that. But I mean, I want to get links from for it. But I'm not that type of link builder.
So finding somebody else that can that's a better fit for you. I'm not there to convince people of anything. So I usually just send them away in a very charming way, I hope. But the second, if they if they wanted to know why, if they want to have some education on it. Yeah, I would say that it's going to look weird if you just focus on a site just because it's that site or that person. And you ignore all the amazing experts out there where you can get how do you say contextual links, you're not really relevant links. And you can even develop that relationship further. Right.
So you, you become an expert as well, because it's just like normal, how you deal with people, if you want to, if you want to achieve a certain goal, look at the people that you hang out with, you know, so? it's, I don't I'm not a I'm not an Einstein about this. I'm just really common sense. Yeah. If a client doesn't get that, if a lead doesn't get it, and then we were not speaking the same.
Jaryd Krause (22:55) So when you say, I'm not that type of link builder, and I could have a preconceived idea of what type of link builder you are. And that could be that you would like to get contextual links, and help them build relationships through link building, rather than just you know, metrics and vanity, you know, is that the type of link building that you are Link Builder, you are? Or would you add to that? to change that, like.
Bibi Raven (23:26) No, that's the kind of person I am because I don't want to be Trixie full of tricks and things. And I'm not, I can't I can't play chess, I can't sync two steps ahead, you know, so just think, what's the most logical thing to do I have a site around dog food. So I want to have links from dog nutrition experts or families or whatever, you know.
Jaryd Krause (23:46) And then once you know that you want those types of contextual links. What does your outreach look like? Do you go and just try and find 10 of the best, most contextual pieces of content? Sorry, let's, go one step. Let's go one, I've got another question that comes before this one, or put it in logical order.
A client comes to you and say, Yeah, I've got a dog I got I got a dog food business, or a pet care business. Some business owners and website owners don't know, they know, they need links, and they go, Hey, I just need to get links to this. They don't know which page to get it to, or why.
Why maybe a regular page or main category page or the homepage might be better. I have a little bit of an understanding of I'd like to hear from you what type of pages you know what, and which, where should we be sending these links to before we go away and look for them? Like what how do you choose tell people and help people choose what they get?
Bibi Raven (24:44) Targets pages? So to start with things, right. So when, when, when, when a lead comes in? I have a full list of I think it's 24 questions and then we go through what are what are your What are your link building efforts so far? Who is your target audience? What are topics?
They want to know more about? What are topics they should know more about? What are surfaces you think deserve more attention? What do you want to focus on for the next two months, your keywords, all these, all these things help determine the target pages? But usually clients have already determined their target pages.
So I, sometimes I do is for them. What I usually look for then is that I do some keyword research, I see which keywords are relevant to the products or their audience and where opportunities where they can grow. So kind of like low hanging fruits. So for instance, you look at page one, they're not in the top three, right, but they're in four or five, what can we do to bump that up?
And then I look at that topic or that that products on your site? What's, what's around it, right? So do you have an informational cluster around is or a linkable asset, or something like that. And ideally, I always try to determine one or two commercial pages to focus on for the next two to three months’ informational patient pages around that, because I do like to go for unpaid links, mostly.
So I want to see what's what would make sense to link out to, for somebody without getting money for.
Jaryd Krause (26:15) So you mean like link exchange?
Bibi Raven (26:17) No, like a guest post? Or oral link insertion? So what are what being the things that I also do is content creation, for linkable assets? Can I tell you a little bit about that, if you want to know, your audience wants to make it you know all about that, but you know, your audience?
So I think content is so so important, you know, I mean, of course, you can get tons of links without having contents. But at some point, you got to do it, because it's just going to, you got to start billing ads, because it's going to help you along the way to just vacuum up all those things.
Jaryd Krause (26:54) So for right now, all the keywords.
Bibi Raven (27:00) Yes, it's all the keywords position one guaranteed. But one of the things that we do is very simple stats pieces. So usually the client writes those. And when you look at your audience, there are some trending topics, or there are things that that sites always publish around for, for that specific audience.
And if you look at journalists, apologists, they need to do their homework, right. So when they write about a topic, they need to have data. And I found that, yes, you can do your own data. But it does take a lot of time. Or maybe I'm just really bad at it. But what you can also do is make a compilation of all the stats that are around floating on the internet.
So just make an article. But it's a bit kind of a dry piece that goes through all the stats, and you put all the stats, the most important facts on top of on the on the top of the article. And then if you have a pretty strong domain, you can just maybe build a couple of links to it, but just let it sit there. And then journalists are going to do their research.
And when they use the stats from that piece, they'll just link to it. Because they don't have time, they have to do 10. So they're not going to see what the original sources are just going to use your piece. So we did a piece like that for clients around veganism, it picks up 250 links, right. So that's, that's great, but it's over the year. So we have to update it every year. And the other thing is foundational pieces.
So that's around if you if you have something that's relevant. And I'll just name an example. So we have a client, that part of their audience are honeymooners, people are getting married. Of course, an engagement ring is really important in that and then I found out that a lot of the gemstones are using engagement rings, or other jewelry. There weren't really good foundational pieces on So Wikipedia pieces, right? But the fun thing about creating a foundational piece that's on Wikipedia, is that you can make it pretty juicy.
So you can also talk about the benefits of gemstones, the meaning the oranges, all those things that are too controversial to include in Wikipedia. And when somebody's getting married, or they want to give somebody a piece of jewelry, it's not an it's more it's also about origin and, and all that stuff. But it's more about the meaning because it's a milestone, right? So was with this client, we did all these foundational pieces around every gemstone that's on the planet. And then you might think like, oh, that's not really relevant. You know, we're not selling gemstones, all that. However, one of the pieces got picked up by US magazine, because they're writing about the engagement ring of Jennifer Lopez.
And they were doing a piece because it was US magazine also has Forbes affiliates, clusters, Forbes like affiliates. So they were like how can you buy the same ring Jennifer Lopez on Amazon and they were talking about a specific gemstone and it's at its benefits. And then they quoted the clients about The benefits of Last year, I think it was about how to get legs.
Jaryd Krause (30:04) Choose which pages and on your site to build links to.
Bibi Raven (30:10) So if you don't have target pages.
Jaryd Krause (30:14) No, no. It was just an example of somebody that doesn't know what page they should be building. no, I just need something. So site. But I think that's a great example of having a main page, a target page. And you can have different, the cool thing about that is you build a lot of links to that. And you have different gemstones with different data points and information about it.
Yeah, also have supporting pieces of content for it. So you can have a whole content cluster based off that, that main target page. And you can have internal links from that main target page to other pieces of content, where maybe US magazine links to that target page for the initial information about one of the gemstones, but then they can go to that page and click on to another link on your own site where they get a full article around that gemstone, which just adds so much value to that link.
And they use it to your site, which means the link so much more valuable, right?
Bibi Raven (31:15) So that's also a really important thing, before everybody starts jumping on clusters, and you know, all that stuff, really start doing your internal linking from the beginning, because I noticed with so many sites, now they've done a full content run, like last year or something.
So they added like 507 pieces, and then they're we got to do internal linking back and fix it. And just, you know, they give it to an intern and internet runs away. It's never seen.
Jaryd Krause (31:45) So once somebody has once you know, alright, cool, we got some target pages, let's build some links to this your outreach strategy, you don't have to pay for links? What so what does it look like?
Are you looking at sending hundreds of emails, 1000s of emails? Or are you on the boat where you go? Let's find the most contextual relevant piece of content on the web for those target keywords. And let's build a relationship with them, rather than just going cold outreach to a million people, or is it somewhere in between? Is there a blend?
Bibi Raven (32:18) There's a blend. So um, by the way, I do have clients that are cool with baling. So let's say 20% of our links come from page opportunities. So I'm definitely not against that. But it's just personally I don't like it. I like to turn people into getting stuff.
But what about the outreach, we do call cold outreach for every client, I think we do like 30 a day and with some with some process, with some projects, it takes, I don't know, 400 emails to get enough links. And with other ones, it just keeps on going. It takes 1000s. But it's never like in 100 words or anything like that. Absolutely not.
I think what's different is difference is that when people look at scaling and quality, so quality would be bespoke email, right? So very unique email for it's meant for one specific person, the template is something you use for multiple people use the same thing. It has a little bit of personalization, like the first name or stuff like that. But that's it. But I like to go in the middle where yes, I'm doing templates. But I'm making sure that the copy of the template is very targeted for that audience.
Jaryd Krause (33:33) So not personalized. So there's a difference between targeted and personalized. Right. So you mean talk.
Bibi Raven (33:39) The most personalized was not be spoke, yes. Personalized, and targeted, but it's not spoke. So. Okay, let me give you an example. I've given this example before, but it's for computer brands. And then there's they're focused on printers, right. So on for graphic designers. What a graphic designer. I don't know. But so we looked into what are the most annoying things that graphic designers have to deal with. And it's where the clients want changes one day before the deadline or something and I wanted to buy next say 12pm often did was.
Jaryd Krause (34:17) Design I know he's.
Bibi Raven (34:21) Exactly. So that's it. So can I get a link to it? But anyway, so in, in a subject line, you said, we said I love your I love your style, or I love your design, but you know, so they open the email? And then it's but can you make the font a little bit funnier? And I want to have these colors.
Oh, can you make it look more like Apple by Wednesday? 12pm. Thank you, you know, so. So a designer, the opposite email is just like, super annoyed, but he's also laughing because it's exactly one of the biggest annoyances and then you go into the hole email where I understand how it is I want to educate help you educate your audience, which are your potential clients, right? And this is how so.
So that's what I mean with targeted, you don't just do a generic email, you make a target as for specific audience or you could also make it targeted around the current trend. So I also did emails themed with squid game, or Lord of the Rings or stuff like that.
Jaryd Krause (35:29) I want to just highlight something for the audience that may not have the may not have heard what I heard. What I heard is, you, you did outreach, it's personalized. It's not bespoke, it's personalized, but target targeting to that person.
But what I heard was you helping and adding value to that person by asking if they would like to link to a valuable resource that they don't have to create for themselves that they can send their traffic to? From their site? Right?
Bibi Raven (36:04) Yeah, exactly. And that's how you should refer versus engineer some of your content, and your linkable assets, like, okay, so, part of my audience are graphic designers, or we're focusing on them right now, because they have the highest OCR or whatever.
So what are their problems? And how can we help them solve their problems and not with your products? Right? But yeah, just on social, if somebody says, All Kido is so bad, and then you, you don't have the time to convince them. So you you link to a case study, then you say, but it's not bad. Scientists.
Jaryd Krause (36:38) I love it. There's somebody that is on a mad quest, and we're going to finish up the podcast. But I just want to ask one more question. For somebody that's on a mad quest to just get a lot of great links.
They want to do it in a way that they're not doing massive outreach to get a lot of spam my links, they want to do it in a way that feels right for them ethically, what advice would you give them? If they're just about to start embarking on that on this link building journey for their site?
Bibi Raven (37:08) So first off this, this is not to do with always necessarily, but look at your existing network. So a lot of people have business partners, suppliers, fans or whatever, and, and tap into them. Because so many people leave those links on the table.
And I think it's, it's really the other part is research, what people link to a lot anyway, right? And what the what the problem is of the prospects and their audience. So I like to use h refs content Explorer. And I always like to use words that are not specific to a topic, but specific to some kind of needs. So if you look in content Explorer, and you type in how many, or how do I get or something like that. And then you start filtering it on domains, and referring domains.
So you say you want to see every topic out there? No, you want to see every kind of BS out there? That's false, the question how many that gets 500 links, and not to the homepage, and maybe there they are a low Dr. In this case, I will use the R. That way, you can find smaller sites that are getting a lot of links purely based on the value of their content. And then you can, of course, make something similar.
Or you can have if it's not relevant to your niche, you can apply to your own niche. And that works really well. Another thing you can do with a condom Explorer is just put in an empty search. Also, so no words at all, and then start filtering. so I would definitely reverse engineer everything.
Jaryd Krause (38:50) And that's such a great strategy to create content for natural backlinks that people are just going to link to because they need to share that.
Bibi Raven (39:01) You can build links to it doesn't say you have to just sit back and just wait for links calm because it often doesn't have, you can build links to it, where you can maybe run some ads for it if it's like a really low, low CPC keyword. So for instance, if you would do a trend, let's say Baba, right? So you do Baba statistics 2023, you will run an ad for that.
And this helps you go to position zero with a piece like that. And then you could get some links, maybe because your journalists are lazy, they're not going to go.
Jaryd Krause (39:40) A lot of a lot of it. db. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can we send people to check out more about what you were doing? Because it's awesome.
Bibi Raven (39:46) Thank you. So you can go to BB boss.com And there's nothing on there. Just go to the link building services page and there you can go.
Jaryd Krause (39:59) To answer's no services page there is there is some content on that. That's valuable for you to go through. So I'll link to that in the show note, guys. Thank you for thank you so much for coming on BB. It's great to have you.
Bibi Raven (40:11) Thank you so much. And well build some things.
Jaryd Krause (40:15) Everyone's actually everybody that is listening. Thank you for listening. If you know somebody that owns a website business, do them a massive favor and share this podcast episode with them. Yes, it helps us reach more people Jaryd and Bibi and we get to help more people with what we're doing, but it's helping them with free content and link to this podcast ever.
For her worldwide clientele. She is infamously known for action packed link building advice, creative outreach, training and expired dad jokes. Now, in this podcast episode, Bibi and I had a lot of fun. We talked about the equation of quantity versus quality backlinks and the backlink building and more so about is that should you go for one? Or should you go for the other? Or would it could be the would it be good for you to do a blend? And what feels right for you, instead of just going by what most people suggest? what feels right for you as your business and as your business owner? And what sort of links do you want to build?
Think about that from an ethical standpoint, and what is the best way to go the best strategy for you could be blended, it could be mostly quantity, it could be maybe a bunch of non-relevant links or non-contextual links. We also talk about why most sites get spam my backlinks which we want to actually cover further and we will actually know more about so if somebody knows more about that. Let us know we also talk about how to know which pages to build links to from the pages you may already have or how to create content using H refs, you know Content Finder, how to create content that will easily get you links for the content that you create. We also talk about how to do outreach that sets you up to win links and most often not need to pay for those backlinks and so much more in between all of that this is such a valuable episode. If you own an online business, chances are you're going to want to do some link building at some stage don't need to pay for it.
This is the podcast episode for you. Before we dive in a special note that this podcast episode is not the only way that I can help you for free. We help a lot of people save millions of dollars and make millions of dollars through buying online businesses. One of the tools we use is our due diligence framework, you can get that for free at buying online businesses.com for tax free resources. Check it out. Now let's dive in to the podcast. Bibi, welcome to the show.
Bibi Raven (2:26) Hi, thanks for having me. I'm waving from Amsterdam.
Jaryd Krause (2:30) And I'm on the other side over here in Australia. Now I wanted to just dive straight in. I wanted to ask so many people wanting to build backlinks to build their blogs? Where do most people go wrong? When they set out to acquire backlinks? What do I say the top sort of few things they get wrong?
Bibi Raven (2:48) A couple of things. So I think one of the base things is to not spend some time and research the audience of the people that you want to get links from and the needs of those people. So a lot of times people focus on their own customers, right, but you want links from specific site owners? And then you have to think about what are them? What are they trying to do with their site, you know, how are they engaging with their audience? How are they selling to their audience? And how can my piece of content or my linkable assets help with that.
And the other thing is that you that often people don't look at the audience themselves, the audience of those link prospects, and because you could be slightly different than your customer audience. So I think that's, that's definitely one thing. The second thing is to be obsessed with scaling. Yes, scaling is important because you want to systemize stuff, you want to work efficiently. But at some point, you're so focused on scaling, that you lose sight of your conversion rates. And at some point, your conversion rates are going to be so low, that scaling is no longer the cheapest way to do stuff, right because you have to email more and more and more, which means that you get flagged for spam and you have to have all these intense systems to get new email addresses you know, make sure your email deliverability is on point if you notice that you get lost in the scaling and you lose sight of your why then go back and try to fix you’re at least that way. And a third thing was I don't know if their thing I think that was pretty good already.
Jaryd Krause (4:27) So the second one being when you start acquiring so many links and you want to scale it sometimes you realize that there's a see saw that you don't need more links, you need to fix your conversion rate, because you already got a lot more traffic coming from those links and the conversion rates low. So focus on the conversion rate before you move back and its sort of that.
Bibi Raven (4:49) No. What did it mean conversion? Sorry, I didn't mean conversion rates of your product sales, I mean conversion rate of winning the links. That's what I mean. tell people, when I went to obsess with scaling the atomic pointer, sending out hundreds 1000s of emails per month to get a 0.001 conversion rate of links, that's what I meant, sorry, not about the sales.
Jaryd Krause (5:15) It will let's talk about that. Let's talk about the quality versus quantity equation, say somebody's going to come to you. And they say they got a blog, and they've got like a D 35, or something like that, in that particular niche, they want to do some backlink building so they can increase their see that EA T and they're going to get some brand ambassadors on with the actually write good content, and they got a digital footprint in the niche. What's your take on the on the quality, like a few quality links versus quantity links? What's your take on that equation there?
Bibi Raven (5:46) All right, so I've never done a real test where I thought, like let's get 1000 Shit links, what people consider shit links, and then gets three really high quality links. I've never done a test with that, right. So I don't know, if it ends up being the same, right? Maybe from bad links, you just need more, I don't know, although that could have some problems in its self as well. But I would always look at your competition. And then, you know, some people are overwhelmed by looking at the links, the backlink profiles of the competition. But if you whittle it down, if you remove all the bad links, they're only competing with like 10 links, 10 really relevant natural place links, you can't look at quality without researching them as well for quality. If I see all the competitors ranking with 1000, bad links, then it's my choice, you know, either I want to go 4000 bad links, or I try to be different and go for five or 10.
Jaryd Krause (6:46) That's an interesting take. So say you do find some book, some competitor with 1003, or four competitors with 1000, bad links. And they have a more of a more of authority, their sites have more authority than you. Where would you where would you go from there? Would you say okay, clearly what they've done for success is getting a lot of crappy links? Or would you? Would you just go I've know that through my experience with being building links and quality links, high traffic high dr? All that from, you know, in other niches for other sites? I'm going to take that approach, how do you know what approach to juggle and what's your most common go to them?
Bibi Raven (7:27) Well, let's go back a little bit to a couple of things you said. So one is you said high authority sites, what do you mean with high authority? And the other thing was high dr. So why high dr. Right, so what do you mean with high authority?
Jaryd Krause (7:38) What I mean is they got like a, their domain authority is say, you know, 70, or something like that. And you want to want to get you’re that site's authority up to that type of authority or higher, Dr. C, 6570, something like that.
Bibi Raven (7:54) I'm not a metrics Link Builder. I don't even talk about metrics. So Da, Dr. It's something for me to weed out through a giant list of prospects or whatever, right? It's something to give me a little bit of an indication, but it's really, really low on my list of establishing how strong the competition is. Okay, and what is high on your list ranking for important keywords, their traffic flow, how much traffic tools are estimating that they're getting? Right? Yeah, that kind of stuff. And definitely also an eyeball test, as well to see, is this a site that I think is going to survive the next year, right? Or? Or are they look so spam my, or whatever? So I don't I don't really care about high authority in terms of Da RDR.
Jaryd Krause (8:42) A lot What is the page that you're getting link from? And to what page? Are we linking to? And what's the what's the, what's the relevancy? What's the connection there putting yourself in the viewer’s shoes or seats of their site that you're linking from? And what would their experience be going from that page to say the page that you're trying to gain the link to? What would there and how would that benefit them in terms of value? Is that what you mean by eyeballing?
Bibi Raven (9:27) No, I think because we were talking about authority over sites. So what I meant with the eyeball test is like, we like to say, does it look like a neglected garden that nobody cares about? Right? Or does it look like some something that somebody really invested in, in this building on and doesn't mean like, it's ugly, or, or beautiful? Because it doesn't say anything, right?
It's just like design or whatever. But yeah, that's what I mean was eyeball test, because you were talking about the highest authority of competitors and then figuring out how you want to build links So if we if we let go of the authority thing, because it means something different for everybody, then if you look at competitors, it's your choice, if you want to go that route, the same route they're doing, or if you want to follow your own common sense, or, or whatever, I would basically do a combination of both. Because I want to pin myself down to one link building strategy, I would start with one link building strategy, see how that works. Right? And then build upon that.
So if your competitors have a lot of bad or spam my links then it's your choice, whether you want to do that or not, I think both things can work.
Jaryd Krause (10:41) Okay, I'm going to ask that question. Again, what's your take on a lot of links, versus very relevant links, and a few and a few of them.
Bibi Raven (10:49) So I think you have to make a choice what aligns with you best, you’re let's say you see a lot of bad links doing clearly doing a job. Right, right. So you don't you have a choice? Am I going to go the same path or not?
Either is fine with me. But it's a choice. So if you go for the for the links that seemingly look bad, it has to fit your personality, because there is some risk involved? Right. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad or good choice. It just depends on how you want to live. Basically, I saw this in an interview with a podcast from authority hacker. Yeah. And they were also talking about the ethics and morality of link building. And I think it was Marco Gayle, and they said, it really has to do with your own personality, as well. Know how you want to live your life.
I don't feel good about building links from really spam my sites. Yeah. Because it doesn't fit my personality. I like people, you know. So that's why I go for other types of links. And so, but I don't sorry, go on. I think people are sometimes too, in one camp about these things, or they're I'm more pragmatic, I guess.
Jaryd Krause (12:08) Well it's like as human beings, we would like things to be forever, like, we've got one marketing strategy. And we're like, let's just set it and forget it.
That's what we kind of like. So we don't have to use our brain and come back to it again. And we also don't realize we can have a hybrid approach that can actually work really well together, for example, having one platform type of marketing working really well. And it may actually complement a different type of marketing. And that could be the same with backlinks as well.
You know, depending on how you search engines determine the valuable backlink profile at any one given time, what might be relevant how they value a backlink profile in 2022, maybe totally different in 2032. And that blend of very relevant links with a few links that are just sort of spam my not so relevant links may actually be a good approach and hedging your bet. Would you agree?
Bibi Raven (13:04) I think you have a really good point. So I wouldn't be very careful still. Right. So but a blended approach, where you just try a couple of things out one after the other, see what the effect is, it's a really good way to find out what works for you, but also a good way to spread the risk in a way, just like you say, right, if I have some bigger brands, clients, and one of the things that shocked me is that their in house teams, for instance, they tell them don't link out, you know, you cannot link out even not no follow or whatever you can't link out because it's that has there was bad that was penalized by Google a lot, a lot. And it's true, I think you've got to be careful about making such a black and white rule.
Because what happens, you're going to get all the links, you're going to get 75 links from your vendors every month, or whatever or more, and you're not going to link out well, how does how does that look?
Jaryd Krause (13:56) And how does it look in the eyes as the algorithm changes in 10 years’ time, and you have to go back and use the algorithm and the search engines are all every evolving, and all the time it was good to link out? You know, versus maybe a different story in a different time.
Bibi Raven (14:15) Well, then people scaled it. And it's threw up a big pattern. Right? So that's, so that's exactly what you said before with the with the blandness approach.
I think that's really, really good. Because everything that you overuse a scale up at some point, it's going to be a pattern and it's going to be copied by other people and dentists, dead marketers ruin everything.
Jaryd Krause (14:37) We do is that marketers do? So I'm curious now that we talk about a blended a blended approach, if you took a site, and I'm just thinking about what your take on this, maybe if you took a site that had a lot of not so quality links, a lot of spam my links, and decided to go the route of, we're going to just we're just going to remove a lot of those and we're just going to go for it.
sites that have big juicy links with lots of traffic. And we'll call them high authority sites. And we're going to use that metric just so for ease of people listening, not making it technical.
And you've got, say, maybe 50 really good quality links, but no, no other links, like, everything's so high quality, and you've got no sort of filler links, sort of semi irrelevant, non-relevant, or spam my links, you've got to have none of that in between, would you have the perception that Google would go, this doesn't look very natural, like it's too perfect? Um, do you think that would be a thing to cause?
Bibi Raven (15:36) I don't know, it could be. But at the same time, if you're having all these really strong links, you're going to pick up all these other spam my links as well, anyway, without having to do.
Jaryd Krause (15:45) It Because.
Bibi Raven (15:48) you're going to naturally have all the block spots in the world. So just, you know, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. Because those links should be really relevant. I think, you know, at the same time, I don't know. Because if you I've never done a test with it. So I don't know how it is to get 550 Allay Forbes links that have no relevance to you what happens then?
Jaryd Krause (16:12) it's, I don't know. It's funny how I want to come back to the Forbes links. Let's come back to that. But I just want to put up just highlight something for people listening.
A lot of people that are buying website businesses, we do SEO due to due diligence on the link profile the backlinks, and one of my students asked me, maybe a month or so ago is every single site have spam me? backlinks? It's just a common thing. You just have to expect it like, it just happens.
So do you want explain you want explain why that why that happens?
Bibi Raven (16:45) so we used to vote, every link prospects, we, we look at them, right? And we used to also look very closely to their backlink profile. We still do that.
But you see so many spam my links that you can't judge a site on it, they're going to pick it up anyway. So I'm not I'm not very an expert. I'm not an expert in spam my links. But what happens? I think, I really don't know. I know that Black hat people, they have some automated, it's where they link to other sites around a specific topic.
Because all these blog spots things are very content contextual. Right. So let's say you're a baker shot, and you're going to get all these Baker BlogSpot things. I actually don't know how to works, I think they do it to somehow become relevant in a niche. What do you know?
Jaryd Krause (17:38) I don't actually. And I have, you know, maybe there is negative SEO, where people may purchase non quality, spam my toxic links to go to a competitor's domain. I feel that's maybe it's crazy to think that somebody would do that.
But in other business aspects, I've seen people do those types of things. It's a very fear based mentality, which is I don't believe you should build anything based on fear. But I believe there's people out there that that are in that area. And so that could be a reason. But it's not going to be like every single site has non quality links.
So just don't know exactly where they were and why they will come from so somebody's listening does No, maybe we'll get you on the podcast and explain that. But I now want to bring it back to.
Bibi Raven (18:30) It's because I want I want H refs to put a thing, like a standard seeing in their backlink profile where you could just exclude all those now you have to do all these word filters to get them out.
Jaryd Krause (18:45) It's a weird, I don't know how what happens. But if somebody does know, let us know, the greater good explanation on it. But coming back to the Forbes links, Forbes is like, not particularly in any one niche.
They've got so much content around so many things. And I just don't believe that Forbes links are always the best links to go for. Versus and this is, this is what I feel versus say, if you've got a site that's in the dog niche, getting a link from another site, or another page, it's in the dog niche, which is talking about a point that you mentioned in your article, and you gain that link from them that supports your article and lifts your live shows up.
I feel like that that link may be from a decent authority site with its pushing a lot of good link juice and traffic to that page. A lot of times that could be better, right. So you I would love to hear what you have to say about that.
Bibi Raven (19:48) Sorry. It does depend on the context of the link. So Forbes ranks for they have their own Many affiliates cluster within their domain called Forbes or Pfizer. And they rank for some stuff where you think like what? Brag for set RA for saggy boobs? Hello? Yeah, so yeah, and then and but then when you look at the page, you can see that it gets a lot of traffic.
So and it's a ranking for relevance keywords, so I wouldn't have a problem getting a link from that page, if it's relevant to, to my niche. I personally prefer a link from a real expert. So like you say, like the dog expert or something, but I think I think there would be both good. If the link on Forbes comes from a page that's relevant, that's relevant and gets traffic or, or its formula, a really good guest post, you know, that, you know, a lot of people are going to see, so I don't, but I do think that people see a Forbes link as a holy grail.
And that's something I need to let go because I get I get leads in, you know, for, for my service. And then they're like, I want Forbes links. And I was like, why? You know, well, explain to me why it sucks that people just obsess with this link from this specific domain. And then ignore all the small sites that are doing a great job. Right?
Jaryd Krause (21:16) So let's talk about that then. So you get a lead that says, hey, I want 20 links from Forbes, I want five links from Forbes and this is my budget. And you say, Hang on, yeah.
What's your advice to them? And say that site that's in sports bras, you know, women's sports bras or something like that? And they're wanting they're wanting links from Forbes? What's your advice to them in terms of link building?
Bibi Raven (21:41) Go find another thing? That's my, because I'm not that link builder. Right. And I don't know, people. I don't know how to fix it. I just don't want to do that. But I mean, I want to get links from for it. But I'm not that type of link builder.
So finding somebody else that can that's a better fit for you. I'm not there to convince people of anything. So I usually just send them away in a very charming way, I hope. But the second, if they if they wanted to know why, if they want to have some education on it. Yeah, I would say that it's going to look weird if you just focus on a site just because it's that site or that person. And you ignore all the amazing experts out there where you can get how do you say contextual links, you're not really relevant links. And you can even develop that relationship further. Right.
So you, you become an expert as well, because it's just like normal, how you deal with people, if you want to, if you want to achieve a certain goal, look at the people that you hang out with, you know, so? it's, I don't I'm not a I'm not an Einstein about this. I'm just really common sense. Yeah. If a client doesn't get that, if a lead doesn't get it, and then we were not speaking the same.
Jaryd Krause (22:55) So when you say, I'm not that type of link builder, and I could have a preconceived idea of what type of link builder you are. And that could be that you would like to get contextual links, and help them build relationships through link building, rather than just you know, metrics and vanity, you know, is that the type of link building that you are Link Builder, you are? Or would you add to that? to change that, like.
Bibi Raven (23:26) No, that's the kind of person I am because I don't want to be Trixie full of tricks and things. And I'm not, I can't I can't play chess, I can't sync two steps ahead, you know, so just think, what's the most logical thing to do I have a site around dog food. So I want to have links from dog nutrition experts or families or whatever, you know.
Jaryd Krause (23:46) And then once you know that you want those types of contextual links. What does your outreach look like? Do you go and just try and find 10 of the best, most contextual pieces of content? Sorry, let's, go one step. Let's go one, I've got another question that comes before this one, or put it in logical order.
A client comes to you and say, Yeah, I've got a dog I got I got a dog food business, or a pet care business. Some business owners and website owners don't know, they know, they need links, and they go, Hey, I just need to get links to this. They don't know which page to get it to, or why.
Why maybe a regular page or main category page or the homepage might be better. I have a little bit of an understanding of I'd like to hear from you what type of pages you know what, and which, where should we be sending these links to before we go away and look for them? Like what how do you choose tell people and help people choose what they get?
Bibi Raven (24:44) Targets pages? So to start with things, right. So when, when, when, when a lead comes in? I have a full list of I think it's 24 questions and then we go through what are what are your What are your link building efforts so far? Who is your target audience? What are topics?
They want to know more about? What are topics they should know more about? What are surfaces you think deserve more attention? What do you want to focus on for the next two months, your keywords, all these, all these things help determine the target pages? But usually clients have already determined their target pages.
So I, sometimes I do is for them. What I usually look for then is that I do some keyword research, I see which keywords are relevant to the products or their audience and where opportunities where they can grow. So kind of like low hanging fruits. So for instance, you look at page one, they're not in the top three, right, but they're in four or five, what can we do to bump that up?
And then I look at that topic or that that products on your site? What's, what's around it, right? So do you have an informational cluster around is or a linkable asset, or something like that. And ideally, I always try to determine one or two commercial pages to focus on for the next two to three months’ informational patient pages around that, because I do like to go for unpaid links, mostly.
So I want to see what's what would make sense to link out to, for somebody without getting money for.
Jaryd Krause (26:15) So you mean like link exchange?
Bibi Raven (26:17) No, like a guest post? Or oral link insertion? So what are what being the things that I also do is content creation, for linkable assets? Can I tell you a little bit about that, if you want to know, your audience wants to make it you know all about that, but you know, your audience?
So I think content is so so important, you know, I mean, of course, you can get tons of links without having contents. But at some point, you got to do it, because it's just going to, you got to start billing ads, because it's going to help you along the way to just vacuum up all those things.
Jaryd Krause (26:54) So for right now, all the keywords.
Bibi Raven (27:00) Yes, it's all the keywords position one guaranteed. But one of the things that we do is very simple stats pieces. So usually the client writes those. And when you look at your audience, there are some trending topics, or there are things that that sites always publish around for, for that specific audience.
And if you look at journalists, apologists, they need to do their homework, right. So when they write about a topic, they need to have data. And I found that, yes, you can do your own data. But it does take a lot of time. Or maybe I'm just really bad at it. But what you can also do is make a compilation of all the stats that are around floating on the internet.
So just make an article. But it's a bit kind of a dry piece that goes through all the stats, and you put all the stats, the most important facts on top of on the on the top of the article. And then if you have a pretty strong domain, you can just maybe build a couple of links to it, but just let it sit there. And then journalists are going to do their research.
And when they use the stats from that piece, they'll just link to it. Because they don't have time, they have to do 10. So they're not going to see what the original sources are just going to use your piece. So we did a piece like that for clients around veganism, it picks up 250 links, right. So that's, that's great, but it's over the year. So we have to update it every year. And the other thing is foundational pieces.
So that's around if you if you have something that's relevant. And I'll just name an example. So we have a client, that part of their audience are honeymooners, people are getting married. Of course, an engagement ring is really important in that and then I found out that a lot of the gemstones are using engagement rings, or other jewelry. There weren't really good foundational pieces on So Wikipedia pieces, right? But the fun thing about creating a foundational piece that's on Wikipedia, is that you can make it pretty juicy.
So you can also talk about the benefits of gemstones, the meaning the oranges, all those things that are too controversial to include in Wikipedia. And when somebody's getting married, or they want to give somebody a piece of jewelry, it's not an it's more it's also about origin and, and all that stuff. But it's more about the meaning because it's a milestone, right? So was with this client, we did all these foundational pieces around every gemstone that's on the planet. And then you might think like, oh, that's not really relevant. You know, we're not selling gemstones, all that. However, one of the pieces got picked up by US magazine, because they're writing about the engagement ring of Jennifer Lopez.
And they were doing a piece because it was US magazine also has Forbes affiliates, clusters, Forbes like affiliates. So they were like how can you buy the same ring Jennifer Lopez on Amazon and they were talking about a specific gemstone and it's at its benefits. And then they quoted the clients about The benefits of Last year, I think it was about how to get legs.
Jaryd Krause (30:04) Choose which pages and on your site to build links to.
Bibi Raven (30:10) So if you don't have target pages.
Jaryd Krause (30:14) No, no. It was just an example of somebody that doesn't know what page they should be building. no, I just need something. So site. But I think that's a great example of having a main page, a target page. And you can have different, the cool thing about that is you build a lot of links to that. And you have different gemstones with different data points and information about it.
Yeah, also have supporting pieces of content for it. So you can have a whole content cluster based off that, that main target page. And you can have internal links from that main target page to other pieces of content, where maybe US magazine links to that target page for the initial information about one of the gemstones, but then they can go to that page and click on to another link on your own site where they get a full article around that gemstone, which just adds so much value to that link.
And they use it to your site, which means the link so much more valuable, right?
Bibi Raven (31:15) So that's also a really important thing, before everybody starts jumping on clusters, and you know, all that stuff, really start doing your internal linking from the beginning, because I noticed with so many sites, now they've done a full content run, like last year or something.
So they added like 507 pieces, and then they're we got to do internal linking back and fix it. And just, you know, they give it to an intern and internet runs away. It's never seen.
Jaryd Krause (31:45) So once somebody has once you know, alright, cool, we got some target pages, let's build some links to this your outreach strategy, you don't have to pay for links? What so what does it look like?
Are you looking at sending hundreds of emails, 1000s of emails? Or are you on the boat where you go? Let's find the most contextual relevant piece of content on the web for those target keywords. And let's build a relationship with them, rather than just going cold outreach to a million people, or is it somewhere in between? Is there a blend?
Bibi Raven (32:18) There's a blend. So um, by the way, I do have clients that are cool with baling. So let's say 20% of our links come from page opportunities. So I'm definitely not against that. But it's just personally I don't like it. I like to turn people into getting stuff.
But what about the outreach, we do call cold outreach for every client, I think we do like 30 a day and with some with some process, with some projects, it takes, I don't know, 400 emails to get enough links. And with other ones, it just keeps on going. It takes 1000s. But it's never like in 100 words or anything like that. Absolutely not.
I think what's different is difference is that when people look at scaling and quality, so quality would be bespoke email, right? So very unique email for it's meant for one specific person, the template is something you use for multiple people use the same thing. It has a little bit of personalization, like the first name or stuff like that. But that's it. But I like to go in the middle where yes, I'm doing templates. But I'm making sure that the copy of the template is very targeted for that audience.
Jaryd Krause (33:33) So not personalized. So there's a difference between targeted and personalized. Right. So you mean talk.
Bibi Raven (33:39) The most personalized was not be spoke, yes. Personalized, and targeted, but it's not spoke. So. Okay, let me give you an example. I've given this example before, but it's for computer brands. And then there's they're focused on printers, right. So on for graphic designers. What a graphic designer. I don't know. But so we looked into what are the most annoying things that graphic designers have to deal with. And it's where the clients want changes one day before the deadline or something and I wanted to buy next say 12pm often did was.
Jaryd Krause (34:17) Design I know he's.
Bibi Raven (34:21) Exactly. So that's it. So can I get a link to it? But anyway, so in, in a subject line, you said, we said I love your I love your style, or I love your design, but you know, so they open the email? And then it's but can you make the font a little bit funnier? And I want to have these colors.
Oh, can you make it look more like Apple by Wednesday? 12pm. Thank you, you know, so. So a designer, the opposite email is just like, super annoyed, but he's also laughing because it's exactly one of the biggest annoyances and then you go into the hole email where I understand how it is I want to educate help you educate your audience, which are your potential clients, right? And this is how so.
So that's what I mean with targeted, you don't just do a generic email, you make a target as for specific audience or you could also make it targeted around the current trend. So I also did emails themed with squid game, or Lord of the Rings or stuff like that.
Jaryd Krause (35:29) I want to just highlight something for the audience that may not have the may not have heard what I heard. What I heard is, you, you did outreach, it's personalized. It's not bespoke, it's personalized, but target targeting to that person.
But what I heard was you helping and adding value to that person by asking if they would like to link to a valuable resource that they don't have to create for themselves that they can send their traffic to? From their site? Right?
Bibi Raven (36:04) Yeah, exactly. And that's how you should refer versus engineer some of your content, and your linkable assets, like, okay, so, part of my audience are graphic designers, or we're focusing on them right now, because they have the highest OCR or whatever.
So what are their problems? And how can we help them solve their problems and not with your products? Right? But yeah, just on social, if somebody says, All Kido is so bad, and then you, you don't have the time to convince them. So you you link to a case study, then you say, but it's not bad. Scientists.
Jaryd Krause (36:38) I love it. There's somebody that is on a mad quest, and we're going to finish up the podcast. But I just want to ask one more question. For somebody that's on a mad quest to just get a lot of great links.
They want to do it in a way that they're not doing massive outreach to get a lot of spam my links, they want to do it in a way that feels right for them ethically, what advice would you give them? If they're just about to start embarking on that on this link building journey for their site?
Bibi Raven (37:08) So first off this, this is not to do with always necessarily, but look at your existing network. So a lot of people have business partners, suppliers, fans or whatever, and, and tap into them. Because so many people leave those links on the table.
And I think it's, it's really the other part is research, what people link to a lot anyway, right? And what the what the problem is of the prospects and their audience. So I like to use h refs content Explorer. And I always like to use words that are not specific to a topic, but specific to some kind of needs. So if you look in content Explorer, and you type in how many, or how do I get or something like that. And then you start filtering it on domains, and referring domains.
So you say you want to see every topic out there? No, you want to see every kind of BS out there? That's false, the question how many that gets 500 links, and not to the homepage, and maybe there they are a low Dr. In this case, I will use the R. That way, you can find smaller sites that are getting a lot of links purely based on the value of their content. And then you can, of course, make something similar.
Or you can have if it's not relevant to your niche, you can apply to your own niche. And that works really well. Another thing you can do with a condom Explorer is just put in an empty search. Also, so no words at all, and then start filtering. so I would definitely reverse engineer everything.
Jaryd Krause (38:50) And that's such a great strategy to create content for natural backlinks that people are just going to link to because they need to share that.
Bibi Raven (39:01) You can build links to it doesn't say you have to just sit back and just wait for links calm because it often doesn't have, you can build links to it, where you can maybe run some ads for it if it's like a really low, low CPC keyword. So for instance, if you would do a trend, let's say Baba, right? So you do Baba statistics 2023, you will run an ad for that.
And this helps you go to position zero with a piece like that. And then you could get some links, maybe because your journalists are lazy, they're not going to go.
Jaryd Krause (39:40) A lot of a lot of it. db. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can we send people to check out more about what you were doing? Because it's awesome.
Bibi Raven (39:46) Thank you. So you can go to BB boss.com And there's nothing on there. Just go to the link building services page and there you can go.
Jaryd Krause (39:59) To answer's no services page there is there is some content on that. That's valuable for you to go through. So I'll link to that in the show note, guys. Thank you for thank you so much for coming on BB. It's great to have you.
Bibi Raven (40:11) Thank you so much. And well build some things.
Jaryd Krause (40:15) Everyone's actually everybody that is listening. Thank you for listening. If you know somebody that owns a website business, do them a massive favor and share this podcast episode with them. Yes, it helps us reach more people Jaryd and Bibi and we get to help more people with what we're doing, but it's helping them with free content and link to this podcast ever.
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Host:
Jaryd Krause is a serial entrepreneur who helps people buy online businesses so they can spend more time doing what they love with who they love. He’s helped people buy and scale sites all the way up to 8 figures – from eCommerce to content websites. He spends his time surfing and traveling, and his biggest goals are around making a real tangible impact on people’s lives.
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