5 Alternatives to Guest Posting for Building Quality Links

Link building is probably the hardest part of SEO, as, unlike other on-page SEO techniques, this is out of your control. Fortunately, there’s guest posting for building links manually.

You write guest posts for other high authority blogs and they benefit because they get fresh content and you benefit because you get a backlink to your website.

But the biggest issue with guest posting is the amount of time and money it takes. You need to not only do the outreach but constantly write guest posts. If you do this by yourself it can take up a lot of time and if you hire someone, it can cost a lot of money.

Fortunately, guest posting isn’t the only way to build backlinks. There are several other alternatives that work. Here are some of the best…

Link outreach

You will be surprised at the number of sites that will directly link to you without you writing a guest post. If you publish a high-quality blog post on your site and reach out to relevant blogs and ask them to link to you, you will be surprised at the number of people who will.

Good bloggers are constantly looking for sites to link to as linking out is good for SEO. So, if you make it easy for them by sharing links to good content like yours, they will gladly do it.

A popular technique that link-building experts use to get links from blog posts is called broken link building. This is where you crawl the sites you want links from and find broken links.

You then reach out to these sites and inform them about the broken link and also inform them that this link is bad for their SEO and you suggest a link on your website that they can replace it with.

Many bloggers will quickly swap that link with yours as it will boost their own rankings.

Create infographics

More than 50% of us are visual learners. We prefer looking at charts and educative illustrations than reading lines and lines of text. It is because visuals can be fun and a picture can express a thousand words.

This is one of the reasons why infographics are one of the most popular forms of content. They are more likely to go viral, and when they do, everybody wants to publish them on their blog. When they do this they will link back to the site that created it. You will get these links with minimal outreach.

This is why you should create an infographic or two every month. Find out what your audience wants to read and then create aesthetic infographics based on this. You can come up with new infographic ideas from scratch or simply repurpose content.

After that, you can publish it on your website and do a little outreach. Once a top publication publishes your infographic, it will boost your social proof and more will follow. You will suddenly see an influx of links.

The only problem with this is that some sites will link to you with nofollow links. So, you might wonder, do nofollow links help SEO?

The short answer is yes, especially when you get them from high authority sites. But you can always reach out to sites that give you a nofollow link and ask if they can turn them into dofollow.

ABC link exchanges

The word backlinks actually originated from direct link exchanges. This is where someone linked to you and you linked back to them in exchange. It was fine to do these forms of link exchanges in the past, but now things are very different.

Google has put a lot of rules to ensure people don’t build easy links like these. As soon as you do a direct link exchange the quality of the link will go down and if you constantly do this form of exchange Google could penalize your site.

This is why you should do an alternative form of link exchange called an ABC link exchange. This is where you link to a website from another website and in exchange, they link back to your website.

This is both Google friendly and will help you get some links quickly as it is a win-win for you and the person linking to you. So, if you have another website you can give links from, you will have a strong benefit over your competitors. If you don’t already have this site, you can acquire one.

Publish an original study

When it comes to organic link building nothing beats an original study. When you publish an original study that no one has seen before, bloggers will begin linking to you as they like to provide references in their articles. This can quickly boost your SEO rankings.

So, find out what type of content bloggers like to link to and then run a study that will unearth fresh data in the same niche.

You can then present this data with charts and a little bit of text that explains the study and the charts and organically generate links. Of course, you will need to do some outreach at the beginning, to give it a kickstart. But once the top sites start publishing the study others will too.

If you are a tech company, you will probably already have this data in your dashboard. But if you aren’t you can conduct a study through a market research survey or you can team with a tech company that has the data. This data can also improve your own marketing strategy.

Run ads

Ads won’t build links directly, but they can do so indirectly. This is because bloggers will discover your content and link to you.

For example, if you create an original study and then amplify the contents of the study to target bloggers who would be interested in covering it, they will naturally write about your study on their blogs.

Running ads can seem complicated, but they are actually pretty easy, especially when it comes to GDN ads as there are so many things such as responsive search ads that you can automate with Google itself. You can also purchase ad scripts or use an automation tool if you want to automate extra tasks.

Now use these alternate techniques to build links

If you have the time and money you can go ahead with guest posting, but if you don’t these are some good alternatives you should try out. You can also use them to supplement guest posting and build extra links. Some techniques such as creating original studies can take up a lot of time, but it is worth it.

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