My friend Dee Barizo gave me a great suggestion the other day. See, I have this problem. I have a 3 year old website that is stagnating, despite some truly great, cream of the crop content in it’s niche (I don’t say this lightly: I’ve hired an expert who’s creating a killer resource).
So I went to Dee because he’s got an amazing eye for how to effectively build links that actually affect search engine results. What was his suggestion to my problem? Well, he said that in many niches, it doesn’t work to do traditional link baiting. Not because the content doesn’t match, but because people in that niche rarely link out. In other words, within each niche there tends to be a link culture.
Get to know the link culture within your niche!
Dee pointed out that in this particular niche that I’m looking at, the search engine results are dominated by the old and crusty sites. You know, the ones that were built in the 1990s and are still running on html rather than some modern CMS. The problem is that these old and crusty sites tend to have a few things in common:
1) They do not have blogs, and thus are not actively in the business of linking
2) They either do not have link pages or they haven’t updated their link pages in years (or maybe even decades)
The Solution
If your niche is dominated by old and crusty sites, your best bet is to email them asking whether they take guest articles. Then, take some of your best content, rework it a bit, and send it off with a few links back to your site.
Take note: many of the old & crusty sites are run by actual experts, so you’ll need to make sure that you are offering them something that is truly valuable.
3 thoughts on “The Old & Crusty Method To Building Links”
Good information. Link building effects search engine ranking. So to get backlink from old sites we have to do more effort. Let me try this tips for my site.
I will aware as I am expecting something valuable from experts.
That really depends on the type of industry we are looking at. For example, a niche in fine dining does not necessarily mean that they own a blog or provide articles on their site. However, it does work well if the niche has old sites that provide articles.
Rif Chia
Thanks for the positive feedback.
One thing I’m starting to realize is the importance of market research. Whether it’s link building, marketing, or content strategies, it’s very useful to understand the people and sites in your industry.
Like you said, each industry has it’s own culture. Researching that culture can definitely help you plan out quality long-term strategies for your blog.
Dee Barizo (aka pholpher)
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