BUILD LINKS THAT

BOOST RANKINGS
White hat link building strategies for
acquiring POWERFUL backlinks
BUILD AUTHORITY. DRIVE TONS OF SEARCH & REFERRAL TRAFFIC

RankXL
 Part 0

A Quick Hello Before

You Dig In

BUILD LINKS THAT BOOST RANKINGS

Hey!

Chris from RankXL here. Thanks for checking out my guide!

Before you dive into my book, I just wanted to let you know that this guide has ZERO
affiliate links. Along the way, you’ll find links to some tools that I like to use, but none
of the recommendations are affiliate links, or for my own benefit.

Everything mentioned in this guide is done 100% for pure value and education.

If you’re new to white-hat SEO, you’re going to learn a lot of cool things :)

Anyways, just wanted to quickly say hello, and let you know that everything in here is
designed to help you with your SEO training.

Cheers!

I hope you like it.

-Chris

2
 Part 1

Introduction

BUILD LINKS THAT BOOST RANKINGS

SEO is dead.

Link building is dead.

How many times have you heard that? Ever since Google’s Penguin and Panda
updates rolled out a few years back and demolished most of the sites doing SEO at
the time, people have been claiming the death of SEO.

But is SEO really dead? Does link building not work anymore?

No... Not at all. SEO is stronger than ever (for those who do it right), and link building
still is, and will continue to be, the single biggest ranking factor.

So, NO. SEO isn’t dead. The link building methods that people were using to “game
the system” are dead.

The strategies being discussed all over SEO forums... are dead.

• Blasting your site with article directory links, wiki page links, web 2.0 links,
comment links, etc...

• Ordering link packages that give you thousands of links by next week...

• Throwing up websites with 5 pages with nothing but fluff, and stuffed with affiliate
links...

If you’re new to SEO, you might be surprised to hear that that kind of stuff actually
worked in the past.

You could throw up a 5 page site, order a few thousand links created by software that
spam the web, and be ranking on the first page in a week or two.

THAT is what is dead.

SEO doesn’t work like that anymore. It’s not so easy to game the system.

And as a result, Google’s search engine results have gotten a lot better as well.

4
What does this mean for internet marketers and niche
site builders?
You might have read what I just said and consider it a bad thing.

But the thing is, it’s a better time than ever before to get into SEO.

The search engines reward strong websites, and weed out everyone else looking for
shortcuts.

My main income source comes from building and growing websites. And my main
traffic source is organic search traffic from Google.

That means... yes... I do SEO. And I’m pretty good at it, I like to think.

In the last year, I grew a site to over 1 million visitors per month using the exact link
building strategies that you’ll learn in this guide.

And if there’s one thing I can tell for sure, is that SEO is now a more sustainable
source of traffic than ever before.

In the past, people were scared of Google. They were afraid of being wiped out, like
so many sites were in the Panda and Penguin updates.

That’s because spam worked, and people took advantage of that. The search engine
results sucked. They were full of thin affiliate sites.

Seriously, you would search for something like how to potty train your child, and get
results full of sites created by internet marketers pushing a poorly written potty
training ebook from Clickbank.

= low quality results providing no value.

These sites are spam. They build links with spam. Their sites provide no value. They
hold no authority or trust in the search engines.

They were simply ranking by gaming Google.

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And they were wiped out.

People became scared of Google’s search algorithm updates. And they had every
reason to be. Their businesses were wiped out in a matter of days.

But what if you could be on the other side of the table?

You know... the ones building quality links, sending the right signals, and NOT
“gaming” the system with shortcuts?

In this guide, I’m going to show you how to build links that get rewarded with Google
updates.

Google updates are meant for one thing: To increase the quality of their search
results.

I’ll show you how to build links so that your sites are one of the ones that receive
major traffic boosts as spam sites are obliterated.

Link building the right way

Today, the game has changed... in a good way.

High authority sites are now given more weight than ever before in the search
engines.

In the past, to rank a page, you would usually have to link build to that page
specifically.

Today, the authority and trust that a domain holds is given a ton of weight.

6
For my own sites, once I’ve built up a certain number of links, new pages I publish
jump straight to page 1-2, and then slowly climb to the top 5 positions in about a
week or so.

That’s the power that authority sites hold in the search engines today.

And things are only going to get stronger in this direction in the future.

So what do we need to do? Create a high-authority site!

And the main way to do that is by building POWERFUL backlinks.

If you picked up this guide, you’re miles ahead of the majority of SEO’s out there.

Not many people know how to link build properly.

A lot of people call themselves SEO experts, but don’t have the skills to really rank a
site for competitive keywords and increase traffic.

Link building is the most valuable skill in SEO

It’s the biggest ranking factor. If you know how to link build effectively, you have an
amazingly valuable skill set that’s hard to find in the industry.

Put simply, if you know how to build links you will always have a way to create
income for yourself. Whether it’s by creating your own sites, growing a blog, sending
leads to a business site, or even getting a job at an agency.

Link building is what makes web pages rank. It’s what drives traffic.

And, it’s the difference between building a niche site that makes a few dollars per day
and one that makes hundreds per day.

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What you’ll learn in Build Links That Boost Rankings
In this guide, I’m going to explain to you HOW to build powerful backlinks.

I’ll teach you strategies where a single link can have a major impact on your site’s
rankings.

And then, I’ll teach you some creative link building strategies you can use to go out
and build your own links.

In the final chapter, I’ll guide you step-by-step through my go-to link building strategy
that I use to grow all of my niche sites.

This strategy alone is responsible for hundreds of links to my site, including some
very powerful EDU links on actual college websites.

The best part about this strategy is that the supply is unlimited. You can go out and
build links for years to a single niche using the strategies in this guide.

Sound awesome?

Let’s get started!

8
 Part 2

How to build links that

drive traffic & increase
rankings

BUILD LINKS THAT BOOST RANKINGS

In the SEO community, there are some people who are deemed as great link builders.

But have you ever wondered... “What the heck is a great link builder? What are they
doing differently? What kinds of links are they building, and how are they doing it?”

Here’s a little secret: Link builders are hustlers. They get **** done.

Link building is more about hustle than it is about some “secret tactic” that only they
know about.

Of course, you do need to know strategy, but what I mean is... it takes work to
acquire the links that really affect a site’s rankings.

And knowing how to implement the strategies you’re about to learn, and mastering
them, is worth a lot of money.

For yourself, and to anybody else who needs help with building traffic and authority
online.

It’s difficult to find people who know how to do this well.

How “great link builders” build links

Link building is all about networking.

Now... networking isn’t the same thing that you might think it is when it comes to
SEO.

It doesn’t mean you go out to networking events, or have coffees with a bunch of
CEO’s and business execs.

In SEO, networking means communication.

The ONLY WAY to obtain links on most high authority pages is to communicate with
the webmaster who owns it.

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Essentially, you need to ask for it.

And there’s a very specific way that we link builders approach this, and it’s called
outreach.

The power of outreach

In the past few years, I’ve built links to my niche sites on HUGE websites, including a
handful of EDU sites.

I don’t mean the spammy EDU links that you could go out and buy for a few dollars
on Fiverr.

I mean... links on their official faculty’s resource page.

These links are.... POWERFUL. They’re extremely powerful.

A single link CAN change your entire site’s traffic. Because Google gives so much
weight to authority, by building a link that passes on a ton of authority to your site,
your rankings for pages on your entire domain will increase drastically.

How did I build these links?

It was all through outreach - using the methods you’re about to learn in just a minute.

Essentially, I asked for them. It’s that simple.

Now, obviously, I have a very specific way of outreaching that increases my chances
of obtaining a link quite significantly.

Without outreach, I never would have gotten these links. There’s just no way.

Outreach is the single most powerful link building strategy.

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And there’s no denying that.

You can build an unlimited amount of links.

You don’t need to “manage” the sites they’re on.

You don’t need to pay for it. They’re free.

And you don’t need to hide anything from Google. You’re doing nothing shady. In
fact, these are the links that you want Google to know about because you’ll be
heavily rewarded.

How to do outreach for backlinks

In its simplest description, outreach might sound simple: Email the webmaster
asking for a link.

But there’s a wrong way and a right way of doing it.

Doing outreach the right way is about 4x more effective than doing it the wrong way.
Meaning, do the same task, but build 4 more links for every 1 link you build doing it
the wrong way.

Let’s learn how to do it the right way first, and then I’ll go over the wrong way and
other things you should avoid doing.

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Let’s say that you’re in the golfing niche. You have a niche site about golf tips, and
have just written an article about how to improve your putting game.

Now you need to build links to it so you can start ranking for your keywords.

There are many... many... different ways you can do outreach.

In this tutorial, I’m going to go over one of my favorites. I use this strategy to build
links for all of my niche sites because it’s just so easy and works extremely well.

Let’s dive straight into step 1... I’m going to try to explain this as simple as possible
so it’s easy to understand.

STEP 1: Locate your competitors

The first thing that we’re going to do is locate our competitors.

I don’t mean every competing website in our niche. I mean pages who are already
ranking for our keyword.

Who’s currently ranking on the first page?

And we can do this with a simple Google search.

Just go into Google and enter in your keyword.

In our example, it’s “how to improve your putting game.”

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Which gives us the following results...

We’re just going to focus on the first page for

now. Usually, I like to go even as far as page 5.

Let’s move onto the next step.

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STEP 2: Find their backlinks
The next step is to analyze the backlink profile of each site.

What we want to figure out is what pages are linking to their page that’s ranking.

To do this, we can use any backlink checker: Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, Majestic,
or SEO Spyglass.

I’m going to use Open Site Explorer since it’s my tool of choice, but they will all get
the job done.

TIP: If you don’t have a paid account to any of those tools, I recommend using Open
Site Explorer since it gives you the most results for free accounts.

So first, let’s take the #1 ranking

page in the search results. That’s
this page from golf.com.

Open Site Explorer shows us that

this page has links from 3 pages.

One of them is a re-direct, and the

other is nofollow, so let’s skip
straight to the last one in the list,
which is this page.

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If you visit the page, you’ll notice that it’s a simple article about how to improve your
putting.

Here’s a screenshot of the page below.

It looks like it’s also a personal blog of a man named Robin, rather than a huge
publication.

That makes it easier for us to get the link since huge publications tend to have more
editorial steps before something can be edited/published.

Now that we found the link, it’s time to move onto step 3.

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STEP 3: Contact the webmaster
Now that we’ve found our prospect, now comes the most important step: acquiring
the link.

The very first thing is to find their contact email.

That’s easy. Every website has either a contact page or a

contact email listed on their site.

In this case, there was a contact page easy to find.

Here’s where we’ll reach out to him.

THE WRONG WAY TO REACH OUT

This is where people always go wrong. They just go straight in for the kill.

This is how they’ll usually write their outreach email...

Hello,

I am emailing you to ask if you would link to my webpage:

www,yourwebsite,com/improve-putting.

It is also about improving your putting game, and I think it is the perfect fit for
your page: bogeylounge.tv/top-recommendations-on-how-to-improve-your-
putting/.

Please contact me if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Chris

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Do you notice what’s wrong with that outreach email?

For one, remember that we’re writing a cold email here.

The webmaster doesn’t know who we are. And an email like that is pretty much
considered as spam.

We don’t give any impressions at all that we even took a look at his website or know
who he is.

If you received an email like that would you respond to it? Would it make you want to
go in and add a link to the sender’s website?

NO. NEVER.

Most people who hear about the power of outreach link building and decide to give it
a try, will make this mistake.

Inevitably, they get horrible results and brush off outreach as a “difficult” strategy or
one that only the big agencies are capable of doing.

They’re wrong.

SO HERE’S THE RIGHT WAY TO REACH OUT

For outreach to work successfully, we need to provide value or personal

communication.

In this case, we’re going to send two emails so that we can get personal with the
webmaster instead of just spamming him with a “request” email off the bat.

The first email is the introduction. The second is the ask.

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Here’s the first email:

Hey Robin,

My name’s Chris, and I run the website over at mywebsite,com.

I just stumbled upon your site, and I’ve been enjoying your articles. Great stuff!

It’s nice to meet another golf addict :)

Anyways, I’m just finishing wrapping up on a huge blog post about how to
improve your putting game. I saw that you had a guide about it yourself, and
was wondering if you would be interested in taking a look.

Would really appreciate some pro feedback on it.

Let me know if you’d to see it, and I’ll send you over the link right away!

P.S. What’s your handicap? I’m a 15 *embarrassed*.

Thanks,

Chris

The beauty about this method is that we’re not really asking anything of them. We’re
just asking for them to take a look.

In reality, it’s a HUGE first step towards acquiring our link. But to Robin, he doesn’t
know that.

The whole email is friendly in nature and is in no way asking for any favors. We’re just
saying hi, and introducing ourselves, and asking him, since we share similar interests,
if he would like to be one of the first to see the guide.

Secondly, we ask him a question at the end.

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This is in order to help get a response. Again, there is no reason for him to ignore us
unless he’s just not into replying to emails from his website.

But in order for him to respond, he’s got to say yes to taking a look at our guide. He
can’t respond and ignore that.

These small psychological “moves” that we make are VERY EFFECTIVE.

When he replies, we’ll respond with our second email:

Awesome!

Here’s the link: www,ourwebsite,com/putting-game.

BTW, if you can share this with on your site, I’d really appreciate it :)

Thanks,

Chris

Now notice that we didn’t actually ask for anything. We just hinted that if he shared it,
we would be pleased.

That’s the way that I found that’s most effective.

But you can go either way at this point.

Often times, I’ll just go straight in and ask for a link.

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Like this:

Sweet!

Here’s the link: www.,ourwebsite,com/putting-game.

BTW, I think it would make a great resource for your already awesome guide:
bogeylounge.tv/top-recommendations-on-how-to-improve-your-putting/.

If you could share it with your readers, it would make my day :)

Thanks,

Chris

I like to mix it around and see which one is working better in my niche.

That’s really all there is to outreach.

It’s beautifully simple, while being absolutely powerful.

It’s all about communication. And while there’s clearly a wrong way of doing it, there
isn’t ONE SPECIFIC right way of doing it.

You can be versatile. It’s all about communicating with your prospect, and acting
accordingly.

If you can master this skill, you have a very powerful weapon in your arsenal.

For my own niche sites, I have built a ton of super strong links, including links from
EDU domains. These aren’t the spammy EDU domains you can purchase on Fiverr
either.

These are links on actual college websites in their faculty’s resource page.

This stuff works!

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There is no other way I would have gotten links on those pages except by using
outreach.

It’s powerful stuff. Learn it, master it, and go out and start ranking for the competitive
keywords you thought were impossible to compete for.

Now, outreach might be new to you. Or you may have lightly tried it before, but didn’t
really consider it a serious strategy.

Let me tell you that outreach is THE WAY that the top SEO agencies around the world
build links to their high-paying clients’ sites.

In the next chapter, I want to show you some cool examples of outreach to further
illustrate that SEO ninjas are all about creativity.

Let’s move on.

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 Part 3

Real-world examples of
successful outreach link
building

BUILD LINKS THAT BOOST RANKINGS

In this chapter, I want to show you some real-world examples of some creative link
building strategies.

It’s all through outreach.

But like I said before, outreach is so versatile, and creativity helps drastically. These
link building strategies you’re about learn are so creative, I’m sure you’ve never seen
them before.

But you’re about to see just what outreach really entails of, and the effects of building
links in this way.

By the end of this chapter, you’re going to have a solid understanding of how
outreach works, as well as learn a ton of new strategies on how you can start building
links to your own sites by copying them step-by-step.

One of the ways that I love to improve my link building strategies is by learning HOW
other SEO’s acquire strong links - the links that are tough to get.

I like to always say: the harder it is to get a link, the more powerful it is.

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1. Above and beyond for a .GOV link
I want to start things off with an example of probably one of the best link acquisition
stories I’ve ever experienced personally.

Back when I worked at an SEO agency, we had a sister company who did PR and
marketing for sports companies. We worked together on projects since SEO is a large
part of PR and marketing.

The director of that sister company just landed a huge client that seemed to be all he
ever talked about when he visited our office.

My job was to find link opportunities for the site and present them to the team.

One of the things that I noticed was a gold mine of an opportunity on a USA.gov page
linking out to external sites (non-government related sites) because the government
didn’t have their own resources for that information. DOFOLLOW LINKS!

USA.gov has a domain authority of 96, with over a million total links pointed at their
domain.

And the page the links were on had a page authority of 79.

Getting a link on this page would be the strongest link I’ve ever built. But it was
impossible.

There was no way a typical outreach email would work for government officials, who
are so protective of their website, and very meticulous about who they link out to.

So I presented it to the team anyways, and here’s what ended up happening.

I was given the task of finding one of the sports-related links on the page, and
drastically improving it. I created a huge resource on our client’s site that seriously
blew away the page that they were linking to at the time.

More sources, more information, more up to date.

25
The next step wasn’t outreach to let them know about our page. For a link on a site
like this, we needed to get a strong “in” with the webmasters.

So the PR director did his thing and worked hard to develop connections with the
people responsible for the website. Through his networking, he discovered that there
was a conference that brought in marketing directors to speak about the future of the
web.

He pitched him his presentation idea, and was later invited to speak at their
conference! It was a paid gig, but he didn’t get paid much and it really wasn’t for the
money.

After the presentation, he had earned all the trust he needed to confidently pitch our
client’s page.

He reached out to them, mentioning our new resource, and in about a month, that
client got a link from USA.gov.

This single link skyrocketed rankings and traffic on our client’s site.

This is the perfect example of how link building works today.

It’s all about quality. It takes a little more work to build them, but each one can really
make a huge impact in your site’s traffic and earnings.

A site with 5 links can outrank and get more traffic than a site with hundreds of links.

At the highest level of SEO, this is how agencies build links for giant clients.

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2. Simple interviews that turned our clients into a market
leader
A link building strategy with one of the highest rates of success is interviewing
professionals.

It works in any niche, and best of all.... it can be easily added onto existing sites.

One of our clients was in the editing and book publishing market. Not a huge
company by any means, and really needed a lot of work to boost traffic and rankings
in Google.

There are a lot of different ways that we could have built links to his site, but the
one we ended up choosing was interviewing professionals.

Most writers have personal websites where they blog and promote their books. And a
lot of them have big social media followings. So this was the perfect niche to target.

We created a new section on his company website, where instead of a blog, we

dedicated it specifically for interviews.

Then, all we did was reach out to writers and asked if we could interview them. It
worked amazingly well.

Writers love promoting themselves, so we were essentially giving them free

advertising.

After each interview, we would email them when it went live on our site. In the email,
we included a link to the page, as well as one-click share links so that to share it with
their audience, all they needed to do was click that link and confirm it.

At first, we didn’t have any traffic of our own. But as the interviews piled up, we got a
ton of traffic just based off of the writers’ audiences.

27
Every single writer we targeted, we made sure they had a big social following, and a
personal website.

And every single interview that was published, the writer that we interviewed would
tweet, share, and link to our page so that their audiences could check it out.

This will happen in almost every niche.

People love showing off by nature, and being interviewed is a huge compliment. If

they have an audience or a website, they’ll likely share it with others. This single
section of the website we created increased traffic over 1000%.

Remember that this was a business website. It wasn’t a blog.

The only thing on the site before were pages that explained their company and
services they offered.

They were getting about 4000 visitors per month through Google.

We grew the interview section of the site alone to over 50,000 uniques per month.
And it established their company as one of the leaders in the space. People started to
know them by name, because of the interviews we were doing!

Right around when I left the agency, we had built roughly 80 links to the site, with
over 5000 social shares.

Naturally, this boosted their domain authority and rankings, and they’re now the
leader at the top for their major “service” related keywords.

This is a clear example of how link building works today.

To rank a page on your site, you don’t always need to build links to that page
specifically. Links that point to your domain now affect the other pages across your
entire domain more than ever before.

28
With proper internal links, we can drastically boost rankings, and drive a ton of long-
tail traffic for all our pages.

All the links we built were to the interviews pages.

We maybe built less than 5 links to the services pages themselves, only doing on-site
SEO changes.

But the links we built to the interviews pages boosted this client’s rankings to
the top spot for all their main service related keywords.

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3. Creating audio versions of mega guides
This is probably one of the link building campaigns that I’m most proud of in my SEO
career.

It was a brilliant idea with excellent execution. And best of all, it was scalable.

The client loved what we were doing, and the results from this campaign were
amazing.

Seriously, their rankings chart in SerpBook (the tool we used to track rankings) was
one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Nothing but #1’s.

Almost every strong link that was pointed to their site was on blogs.

It’s actually quite ingenious, and was more of a “let’s experiment and see if it works”
kind of thing.

The client was in the media production market. They made explainer videos for
businesses, much like the ones you see in Kickstarter.

What the team and I came up with, was to create free audio versions of giant ultimate
guides that were ALREADY published on the web.

At first, the idea was to create free videos, but due to how much longer it takes to
create a video, and how much faster it is to create audio, we decided to do audio.

This was a brilliant idea, because not only did it allow us to get links on huge blogs,
we were getting links on their giant ultimate guide articles, which were usually the
ones with the most backlinks pointed at them and had the most traffic and social
shares.

Best of all, we could target just about any niche and it didn’t just have to be related to
media production, which gave us almost an unlimited supply of prospects to choose
from.

30
Here’s how it worked...

We would simply target one niche at a time, starting in big markets such as finance
and education.

Then, we would search Google using key search operators. Here’s an example.

That means, we’re looking for articles about personal finance tips with the words
“ultimate guide” in the title of the post.

31
We would quickly run each site through a backlink checker (in our case Open Site
Explorer) just to make sure that the site had a ton of links and would pass on a lot of
link juice.

Then, we would record the entire blog post in audio format, and reach out to the
blogger.

Here’s an example of an outreach email we would send out after we produced the
audio version.

Hey Mark,

Just wanted to reach out and say awesome work with the blog. My name’s Chris
and I’m the video director at Company X (URL of our website)

The team and I absolutely loved your guide on personal finance (URL of ultimate
guide).

We decided to create you an audio version of the entire guide :) I think it would
be a great addition to your already awesome guide so people can listen to it on
the go.

Anyways, I’ve attached it to this email. Hope you like it!

Feel free to use it however you please :)

Cheers,

Chris

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Usually, we’d get an excited response along the lines of:

OMG this is awesome! Thanks a ton for doing this.

I’ve added it into the blog post, and gave you guys some love as well :)

It was like magic. It was that easy.

We didn’t need to ask for any link or share or anything. Because we did the whole
thing for free, people just felt obliged to pay us back with at least credit next to their
audio download link.

I would estimate that maybe 80% of the people we did this for ended up giving us a
link back to our site with a byline credit on their page.

Keep in mind, these ultimate guides are one of the biggest, and most popular pages
on these bloggers’ websites. They had a ton of links pointed at them, and a ton of
social shares as well.

Scaling

This strategy was working extremely well.

But due to time constraints, we only did this for about 30 ultimate guides ourselves
before deciding it would be smarter to outsource the work.

Each audio production cost about $100-$200, and it allowed us to target more blogs
at a time, and really ramp up our link acquisition rate.

It was awesome.

This is by far one of the most successful link campaigns I’ve ever been a part of.

33
4. Adding a quote for an easy link
This strategy will usually only work once you’re an authority either professionally or
due to a strong online presence.

For instance, you either already work in the field professionally, or you have an
authority site that’s large and credible in your niche.

This is not something I did for clients when I was working at my old SEO agency job.
This is something I like to do for my own niche sites.

Using this strategy, I’m able to get some very strong links, including one that I was
able to get from Inc. Magazine.

And it’s super easy to do.

Here’s how it works:

First, just enter in keywords that you target into Google.

What you’re looking for are long-form articles about your topic.

Let’s say that we’re in the career niche.

To start, I’m just going to start entering in some simple keywords into Google:

34
That gives us a bunch of results from authority sites -->

What I’ll do next is simply reach out to all of them with the following
email template.

Here’s a perfect prospect #2 in that list that we can use as an example:

http://career-advice.monster.com/job-interview/interview-preparation/
boost-your-interview-iq/article.aspx.

Hello,

I just saw your article on interview tips (URL of post).

I must say it’s very well written. I’m a professional in the careers
space and I wrote at (URL of your site) and I have a lot of
experience in this myself.

I would love to add in a quote to your article that further explained

the process of X (X should be a subtopic that they touch on in the
article), if you would allow it.

I think it would help readers understand the process a little better. I

know first hand that most people get it confused with Y, and I have
the perfect little tip that will help them out a ton.

Let me know any time you’d like, and I’ll send it over to your asap.

Thanks a lot, and keep up the good work!

Cheers,

Chris

35
To get a link on Monster would be absolutely amazing. Probably one of the best links
we can build for a career niche site.

It’s an editorial link from a powerhouse website that’s totally related to our own site.

This strategy works very well, because a lot of people are interested in letting others
help them improve their articles for free.

Plus, like most high DA sites, the article itself is pretty thin. Not much info, and merely
ranking due to their domain authority.

Note the way I wrote my outreach email.

I’m just offering help here. I’m not asking for anything in return. And I gave them my
URL as proof that I’m an authority in the niche (and so they have it for reference later).

In most cases, you’ll usually receive a response that sounds like this:

Hey Chris,

Thanks for getting in touch with us. That article really could use some
improvement.

I’d be happy to review your quote for the article.

Thanks,

NAME

36
And after sending it over, you’ll receive a second response that sounds like:

That’s fantastic, Chris. I’ve added your quote into the article.

And that’s the end of it. Quoting someone usually implies that there’s a link along with
it already.

And it’s always the case when using this strategy.

We didn’t need to ask for a link or any credit for using our quote.

These people are webmasters and writer/publishers (obviously since they published
the article on the website).

They know how to properly quote someone. You don’t need to mention it.

Writing the quote

This is actually the easy part. What you’re doing is just going into a sub-section of the
article and giving your thoughts on it.

Something unique that hasn’t been mentioned already in the article.

For example, here’s a sub-section from the Monster.com article.

We can simply add in something like:

“Your communication skills and personality are just as important as your credentials.
Employers want to hire people they feel will get along with others. Appearing cocky

37
can be a major turnoff, and most employers will never hire people who they see as
threats to their work culture no matter how impressive their resume.”

That’s really all it takes. It only took about 2 minutes to come up with that.

And it really is great advice :)

38
5. The Second Barrel Guest Post
This is another link building strategy that I absolutely love doing, and I continue to use
this for almost every niche site I build.

I call it The Second Barrel Guest Post.

Why? Because we’re not actively looking for guest posting opportunities, and only
using it after we get rejected.

The best part it, it works amazingly well, and can be used alongside any of your other
link building campaigns.

Like I mentioned before, outreach is all about communication, and there are so many
different ways you can do outreach.

Guest posting is one of the most effective ways to get a link from a large blog, and it
can drive a ton of traffic as well.

Don’t listen to anyone who says guest posting doesn’t work as an SEO strategy. It
still works extremely well. I can say this firsthand based on experience.

Guest posting on its own - contacting webmasters and asking if you can write on
their site - is a great strategy that’s pretty simple and easy to pull off.

If you’re looking for ways to build links, definitely look into guest posting.

But if you’re ever doing other forms of outreach, you should use The Second Barrel
Guest Post strategy.

And here’s what it looks like.

39
Like I mentioned, this strategy works alongside any of your other outreach link
building strategies.

So let’s say that we were just doing the most basic form of outreach: Finding resource
pages and asking for them to include a link to our site as well.

What’s a resource page? It’s any webpage that contains a list of links/resources to
external sites.

A ton of sites have them.

Resource pages are perfect for outreach link building simply because of how easy it
is for the webmaster to add a link to your site.

All they have to do is add another link to the list - they don’t have to change up their
article or create a new article entirely just to link to you.

To find resource pages, we use these search operators in Google combined with
our keyword.

intitle:”useful links” inurl:”useful links”

intitle:”useful resources” inurl:”useful resources”
intitle:”useful sites” inurl:”useful sites”
intitle:”useful websites” inurl:”useful websites”
intitle:”recommended links” inurl:”recommended links”
intitle:”recommended resources” inurl:”recommended resources”
intitle:”recommended sites” inurl:”recommended sites”
intitle:”recommended websites” inurl:”recommended websites”
intitle:”suggested links” inurl:”suggested links”
intitle:”suggested resources” inurl:”suggested resources”
intitle:”suggested sites” inurl:”suggested sites”
intitle:”suggested websites” inurl:”suggested websites”
intitle:”more links” inurl:”more links”
intitle:”more resources” inurl:”more resources”
intitle:”more sites” inurl:”more sites”
intitle:”more websites” inurl:”more websites”
intitle:”favorite links” inurl:”favorite links”
intitle:”favorite resources” inurl:”favorite resources”
intitle:”favorite sites” inurl:”favorite sites”
intitle:”favorite websites” inurl:”favorite websites”
intitle:”related links” inurl:”related links”
intitle:”related resources” inurl:”related resources”
intitle:”related sites” inurl:”related sites”
intitle:”related websites” inurl:”related websites” 40
Here’s an example.

Let’s take the first one in that list, and use it to fine a resource page in the careers
niche.

We’ll use the same keyword as in our previous example, “interview tips”.

This is what our search query would look like:

That
tells
Google to look for pages about interview tips with “Useful Links” in the article’s title.

A page with useful links usually means that they’re going to be linking out to external
sites that are “useful” for other people to visit.

Here’s one from the search results that we can take a look at:

41
Let’s take a look inside -->

This is a perfect resource page example.

Now all we need to do is ask for a link to your own site to be

included inside this list.

This is why resource pages are so easy to get links from. The
webmaster simply has to add another link, and that’s it. Done.

For our site, we’re going to try and get a link under the category
of “Job Search Tips”.

All we need to do is find the contact info on the site, and reach
out.

And here’s what the outreach email might look like:

Hey Tim,

Was visiting your site, and stumbled upon this page (URL).

What a great list of resources for people on the job hunt! I’m going to be
recommending this to my friends and family who are currently seeking
employment.

I have another page you might want to consider adding to your “Job Search
Tips” section: (URL of your own page).

I think it’s got some great modern advice, especially for younger college grads.

Anyways, just wanted to say hello and thanks for the awesome resource!

Cheers,

Chris

42
Notice I didn’t even mention it’s my website. You don’t need to, unless you really want
to.

A simple mention of the page is enough. I’ve had quite a high success rate with this
method.

Resource pages are everywhere. There’s almost an infinite number of them in any
niche you enter. That’s why resource pages are a link builder’s secret weapon.

Now back to our strategy in discussion: The Second Barrel Guest Post.

Let’s say that we were working on this link building campaign, reaching out to sites
asking for links in their resource page.

Some will say yes, some will say no, some will just ignore you.

For the ones who reply yes and add your link, awesome! That’s all you need to do.

But what if someone says no? ...

For the longest time, when someone said no I would just give up and move onto the
next link prospect.

But then I realized, we just formed the first step in communication with this
webmaster. And they replied, which is a good thing.

So what if we can fire a second barrel while we still have them in conversation?

43
So this is what I started doing - I sent one more email.

Hey Tim,

No worries. Totally understand.

I noticed you have a pretty cool blog. I would love to have the opportunity to
write for you.

I actually had a few topics I would love to write about:

1. Blog post idea #1

2. Blog post idea #2

3. Blog post idea #3

What do you think?

Thanks,

Chris

By the way, I just come up with the blog post ideas right there on the spot.

Whichever topics I think will be a good fit for his site.

Now obviously, for this method to work, the site needs to have a blog or a list of
articles. If it’s something like a government site, it’s not going to work.

But using this strategy, I’ve been able to get about 30% of people who say no to me
in the first place to say yes to a guest post.

It’s a win-win situation. They’re getting a quality article for free, and you’re getting a
link + exposure to their audience.

44
I can’t believe that I wasn’t doing this sooner, and I can’t believe that I have never
heard about this strategy before from other SEO blogs.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably only one of the handful of people who know
about this strategy.

When you start link building, I strongly recommend you use this alongside whichever
outreach strategy you’re doing.

This is really what being a link building ninja is all about :)

You’re being creative, and versatile, and maximizing on every opportunity.

45
46
 Part 4

Tools for outreach

link building

BUILD LINKS THAT BOOST RANKINGS

With outreach link building, you don’t need many tools. Essentially, all you really need
is an email account set up under your domain name.

For example, like the one I have set up for myself at RankXL: [email protected]

Now, that’s the most basic tool that you need, but there are a few others as well to
help speed up the entire process.

I’ll go through each one here, explain what they’re used for, and let you know if you
really really need it.

NOTE: None of these links are affiliate links. I want to make it clear that this isn’t
some promotional section where I’m trying to earn commissions.

These are the tools that I use and recommend for building powerful links with
outreach.

Tool #1: Connect your email account with GMAIL

This is an important step so let’s not skip this.

The first thing that we need to do is connect our email that we set up under our
domain name to our GMAIL account.

Why do we do this?

For convenience. So that we don’t have to log into our hosting or domain provider’s
website every time we want to access our email.

I have my [email protected] email connected with my GMAIL account.

48
By connecting it with my gmail, I’m able to send and receive emails from my
@rankxl.com domain directly from my GMAIL.

As a result, I can use all the wonderful features of GMAIL.

Setting it up is fairly straight-forward.

To connect it with your GMAIL, just follow this guide (https://support.google.com/

mail/answer/21289?hl=en).

To connect it with your HOTMAIL, just follow this guide (http://www.ruskinridge.com/

clients/knowledgebase/79/How-to-use-your-domain-email-account-with-
Hotmail.html).

And of course, if you run into any problems, just contact your website hosting
company as they may have slightly different instructions.

Tool #2: A backlink profile checker

The second thing that you’ll need is a backlink analysis tool. There are 3 major ones
you can choose from.

You’re probably familiar with them already: Open Site Explorer, Majestic, and Ahrefs.

Which one is best?

All of these will give you different results.

The one that most SEO’s love to use is Ahrefs. I personally prefer Open Site Explorer
since it’s the tool that I’ve been using the longest and am most comfortable with.

49
Backlink analysis software aren’t cheap. Any of these tools are going to cost about a
hundred bucks per month.

But if you’re serious about SEO, they’re a must to have in your toolbox. They’re more
than worth the money.

If you don’t feel ready to invest that much money right now, then they do have free
versions available. Your results will be limited, and you won’t get to make very many
searches, but you’ll still be able to use them and get some good results.

What do we need this for?

A backlink checker is used for so many things in SEO.

1. We can run our competitor’s sites into these tools and see who’s linking to them.
This is the strategy that we went over in part 1. We can then get these same links
to our own site.

2. We can run the websites of link prospects into these tools to see which ones are
strong and which ones are weak. This will tell us which ones we should be trying to
get links from. Without a backlink checker, we’re building links in the dark.

3. We need it to research niches. We can’t just enter any niche without analyzing the
competition. How competitive a niche is is directly related to how strong the link
profiles of our competitors are.

4. We need it to analyze the link profiles of our own sites. These tools will also tell you
the dates the links were found, and will also show if they’ve been deleted.
Analyzing your own profile is important, as you need to know how your site’s SEO
is coming along, as well as monitor links that you haven’t built yourself (i.e.
negative SEO).

50
Tool #3: Buzzstream or Ninja Outreach (Optional)
These two tools pretty much do the same thing, except that Buzzstream has a lot
more features. Ninja Outreach is a newer player in the market.

These tools were built specifically for outreach. Think of them as outreach
dashboards. They help you find contact info of websites, as well as keep track of your
communication with prospects.

You can set up your email to be able to send and receive emails directly from within
these tools.

Are these necessary?

It’s up to you, really. For me, I don’t use them. I’ve tried them, and I really wanted to
like them. But I didn’t.

I’m just more comfortable doing things myself and keeping tabs of every little thing
through a dashboard just slowed me down.

One of the things I do like about these tools is that you’re able to create and save
email templates.

This is super helpful since you don’t have to write a new email every time you start a
new outreach campaign.

You can just load up existing templates, and change around things like the name,
email, and URL.

But even that, I prefer to do it my own way, which I’ll go over in the next tool.

51
Tool #4: Canned Responses
Like I said, the Buzzstream and Ninja Outreach tools are optional. You could try them
out and see if you like them, but if you’re like me... you’re going to find it more
comfortable doing things manually.

And Canned Responses is one of my all-time favorite tools.

The best part? It’s free and you can install it in just minutes to your GMAIL.

What is Canned Responses?

Canned Responses is a little tool in GMAIL that allows you to save email templates.

It makes it so easy because you’re able to just pre-load up your existing templates
when you’re doing outreach rather than write a brand new email every time.

It saves you so much time, and allows you to send emails at scale.

How to set it up

First, go to your GMAIL account and go into your settings.

You can find the settings by clicking the gear icon in the top
right-hand side of the screen.

52
Next, click on the tab that says, “Labs”

If you scroll down to the bottom, you’ll see the Canned Responses option.

All you need to do is enable it.

53
After that, you’re done and you can start saving and loading up your templates.

To save a template, just compose a new email like you normally would.

And fill it in with your email template:

Then, click the down-arrow in the bottom right-hand corner and click on “New
canned response”

Once saved, you’ll be able to load it every time from the menu, and all you’ll need to
do is change up the variables like the name and URL’s.

54
Tool #5: SEMrush
SEMrush is a fantastic tool that allows you to spy on your competitors.

It’s mainly used for paid traffic from Adwords to see which keywords your
competitors are bidding on so that you can copy them.

Through SEMrush, you’re able to see a some really valuable data about websites.

First is the organic traffic that the site receives - i.e. how much traffic are they
getting from Google?

By knowing this, you’re able to gauge the size of the niche. When you’re doing niche
research, you can take the top sites in that niche and enter them into SEMrush.

If you can see their organic search volume, it gives you a good idea of what you can
expect to receive to your own site if you were to grow as large as them.

This number isn’t very accurate though and should just be used to get a general
estimate.

55
Second, is the top keywords that they’re ranking for.

By knowing this, you’re able to see which keywords are driving the most traffic to
their site, letting you know where the big SEO opportunities are in the niche.

It gives you a good idea of which keywords you should target for your own site.

Like all the features in SEMrush, you’re able to click on View full report to see the
entire list.

56
Third, is the top competitors in the niche.

This allows you to see which sites are the major players in your niche, as well as give
you even more sites to research through SEMrush.

BACKLINKS

SEMrush also gives you the full backlink profiles of each site. So if you’re hesitant to
spend money on so many different tools, you can essentially not pay for a backlink
checker and just pay for SEMrush which will cost you around $70/month.

You should note, however that SEMrush doesn’t specialize in backlink crawling and
grading. They index fewer links compared to the other tools, but seem to be
improving.

Open Site Explorer, Majestic, and Ahrefs is much better at providing this data.

57
Conclusion
These are the most basic tools required for effective outreach link building.

You don’t need to get all of them.

For me, I use a backlink checker (Open Site Explorer), SEMrush, and GMAIL
(connected with my domain email).

That’s it :)

That’s the killer combo there.

Can you do everything for free?

Yeah, you can. You’ll just be a little limited in what you can do. You can use the free
versions of backlink checkers and SEMrush.

They won’t show you the full results lists and will limit the number of searches you
can make, but you can still get the job done at a basic level.

The lesson there is: Don’t get too worried about getting all the subscriptions if it’s a
little big of an investment at the moment.

You can still get by with the free versions, and then decide to invest in them one at a
time once your site starts to make some money.

58
 Part 5

The easiest (and most

effective) link building
campaign you can start
today

BUILD LINKS THAT BOOST RANKINGS

Now that we’ve learned how to do outreach, and learned a bunch of new strategies
on how to go about using it get links to our site, I’m going to share one of my most
favorite ways to link build.

It’s my go-to strategy for link building because:

1. It works in any niche.

2. It’s incredibly simply to do, and doesn’t require much work.

3. It’s very effective, and you can build powerful links using this strategy alone.

4. There’s a huge supply of link prospects so you’ll never run dry.

Using this strategy, I was able to get links on very high PA pages, including a few
EDU links - and I mean actual links from college websites in their faculty’s resource
page.

And I’m going to go through this step-by-step, and then I’ll give you the EXACT email
outreach template that I use.

You can literally just copy my template, change up the wording just a little bit, and
then use it to start building powerful links to your own site.

Let’s get started!

60
When to use it

This strategy works with resource pages.

We learned how to find resource pages using search operators (#5. The Second
Barrel Guest Post in Part 3 of this guide).

Here they are again:

intitle:”useful links” inurl:”useful links”

intitle:”useful resources” inurl:”useful resources”
intitle:”useful sites” inurl:”useful sites”
intitle:”useful websites” inurl:”useful websites”
intitle:”recommended links” inurl:”recommended links”
intitle:”recommended resources” inurl:”recommended resources”
intitle:”recommended sites” inurl:”recommended sites”
intitle:”recommended websites” inurl:”recommended websites”
intitle:”suggested links” inurl:”suggested links”
intitle:”suggested resources” inurl:”suggested resources”
intitle:”suggested sites” inurl:”suggested sites”
intitle:”suggested websites” inurl:”suggested websites”
intitle:”more links” inurl:”more links”
intitle:”more resources” inurl:”more resources”
intitle:”more sites” inurl:”more sites”
intitle:”more websites” inurl:”more websites”
intitle:”favorite links” inurl:”favorite links”
intitle:”favorite resources” inurl:”favorite resources”
intitle:”favorite sites” inurl:”favorite sites”
intitle:”favorite websites” inurl:”favorite websites”
intitle:”related links” inurl:”related links”
intitle:”related resources” inurl:”related resources”
intitle:”related sites” inurl:”related sites”
intitle:”related websites” inurl:”related websites”

Remember how to use these search operators.

Place your keyword into Google and then copy and paste any of these phrases after
your keyword.

What you’ll end up with is search results full of nothing but resource pages - pages
with lists of links.

61
Like I said, resource pages are super easy to get links on, and the impact of acquiring
a link from a strong resource page can really boost your rankings.

When I’ve found a resource page that turns out to be a good prospect, I’ll just send
them an email that looks like this:

TITLE: A big thank you!

Hello,

I stumbled upon your page (URL of resource page), and I just wanted to thank
you for putting this together.

I’ve been looking all over the web for (topic that resource page helps with) and
your page provided me with all the resources I needed :)

Thanks a ton!

I also found this page during my search. I think it would make a great addition to
your list: (URL of your page).

Thanks, again and keep up the great work :)

Regards,

Chris Lee

And that’s it!

Doesn’t get much easier than that does it?

Outreach is kind of like golfing. The pros make it look so easy, but when you try to
swing a club for the first time, it’s impossible.

Okay, so maybe it’s not that extreme. But outreach is all about testing wording.

62
Every word in this email has been strategically selected, and refined with a bunch of
testing and experimentation.

The result is a buttery sounding email where every line has a purpose.

This is one of the most effective outreach emails that I use to build links to my
site and it works extremely well.

It’s very broad and general and can work in any niche. At the same time, it’s specific
enough to not be considered as spam.

Furthermore, it doesn’t seem like an “ask” email at all.

We’re not asking for anything. We’re thanking them, which is always a welcoming
email to receive.

At the end, we’re simply recommending another link to add to the page.

But because the recommendation is coming from someone who’s clearly visited
every link on the page already, and did their research, it seems like a genuine
contribution and the webmaster is likely to check it out and add it in.

It just works!

Another reason why this strategy is so effective

With this strategy, we’re able to scale. Scaling outreach link building is almost an
impossible task. Simply because outreach requires communication and
personalization.

Sending only ONE email to a stranger and asking for a link is a difficult thing to do.
You need some warming up first.

But this email accomplishes that through the angle we use to recommend the link.

63
Now let’s take a look at the template again:

TITLE: A big thank you!

Hello,

I stumbled upon your page (URL of resource page), and I just wanted to thank
you for putting this together.

I’ve been looking all over the web for (topic that resource page helps with) and
your page provided me with all the resources I needed :)

Thanks a ton!

I also found this page during my search. I think it would make a great addition to
your list: (URL of your page).

Thanks, again and keep up the great work :)

Regards,

Chris Lee

Note how broad and general this is. This was done for a specific reason: so that we
can scale up.

We can save this template into a Canned Response in GMAIL or as a template in

Buzzstream or Ninja Outreach and just send it to a bulk of people fairly quickly.

All we need to change is the URL of their resource page. And that’s all.

This is so much easier than other outreach methods where you get personal, and go
back and forth with multiple emails before finally going in for the ask.

64
With this strategy, you’re able to jump into a numbers game, simply because it’s
possible to do so.

You’ll usually get about 10% of the people to link to you. That means that for ever 100
emails you send, you’ll get about 10 links.

Based on your industry, you might find it higher and you might find it a little lower.

Now 10 links might not sound like a lot, but it is. Trust me.

Note the TYPE of links we’re getting, and the WAY in which we’re getting them.

These aren’t some spam web 2.0 links here. These are links on relevant, existing
pages, most of which will have a high authority that can pass on a lot of link juice to
our site.

Based on my experience, building 30-50 links TOTAL to a website using this strategy
can be enough to build up enough authority to start ranking for a bunch of your main
keywords.

So you can see just how powerful even getting 10 links can be.

And 100 emails? That’s nothing. It’s very easy to send 100 emails using this strategy.

Remember, we already have the template loaded. All we need to do is open it up,
change the URL of the resource page, and then send and go off to the next one.

I bet building high quality links never sounded so easy, but it really is this simple
if you’re using this strategy.

I’m sure now you can see why this is my go-to strategy when I’m link building.

You might be wondering... this sounds like it’s the best way of link building through
outreach. Why even bother going through the other strategies when they take longer
and require more communication?

65
The more personalization and communication you have with your prospect, the
higher the chance you’ll be able to get a link.

That’s a pretty obvious rule in outreach.

So when should you go for more personalization and communication over using
this strategy?

ANSWER: When you find a SPECIFIC link prospect that you REALLY REALLY want to
get a link from.

For instance, if during your link prospecting you stumble onto a very strong page with
a ton of links pointed at it, and seems like it would be fairly easy to get a link on...

...in that case, I would go out of my way to make sure that I get a link from this site.

Rather than send an email like the one in this strategy, I’ll start off by saying hello, and
figuring out ways I can get an “in” with this guy. Whether it’s by helping him with
something or it’s by getting a conversation rolling.

But otherwise, use this strategy that I just taught you. It’s the perfect way to get
started with outreach, and you’ll see some quick results (and some really powerful
links).

If you’ve never built links with outreach before, you’re about to experience a new kind
of feeling.

It’s a different feeling of achievement when you acquire a link through outreach.

When you get that email response saying they’ve added the link, and then you go into
the page to see that there is indeed a link to your site, it’s an AWESOME feeling!

Why? There is absolutely no other way that you could have gotten a link from that site
other than by outreach. YOU made it happen, and YOU got the results to help
improve your site.

66
When you start building links in this way, and get good at it, you can consider yourself
a link building expert.

This is how they do it in the pros - well... the top agencies in the world.

Of course, they use sophisticated communications tracking tools, and are a little
more meticulous with their processes, but all that is a waste of time in my opinion.

The end goal is to get a link, and this is the most efficient way of doing so.

The result when you build links to a site this way? A truly long-term, sustainable
website that won’t be penalized in Google updates for spam link building.

I consider niche sites as businesses. And a link profile that’s weak or full of spam, or
full of links built with black-hat techniques can never be considered a business.

Why? Because it’s too high-risk. You will inevitably be caught by Google and your
business can come crashing down in a matter of days.

But not with outreach.

White-hat SEO is difficult to do, which is why most niche sites you see for sale in
marketplaces like Flippa don’t have link profiles like this - links from real websites
built from outreach.

A link profile like this is extremely valuable, and will seriously increase your website’s
value if you ever decide to sell it in the future.

There are just so many long-term benefits to doing outreach.

Hopefully, you learned a lot from this guide and I was able to open your eyes to how
link building should be done to really turn a niche site into a business.

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