How Lead Generation Tactics Can Boost Your Link Building Results

7. Optimize your landing page

Your linkable asset should make an instantly positive impression on the people you email. There may by different ways to achieve that, but certain things help for just about any SEO campaign:

Your page needs to be ad-free

I’ve seen lots of people not willing to provide “a free link” to a page that is monetized with ads. There’s no point in arguing with your linking leads on that. It’s easier to remove the ads from the page you’re actively link building for at the moment. Besides, more often than not,

Posted by AnnSmarty

How effective is your link building campaign? I bet your answer is “I wish it could be better.”

Talking to business owners and executives on a daily basis, I have yet to meet one who would be satisfied with their link building strategy.

Everyone needs links, yet they are getting harder and harder to get.

The solution?

Change your link building mindset.

How link building is similar to lead generation

In any business marketing strategy, we’re really interested in one thing: sales.

Yet, if we keep focusing on that end goal, we won’t achieve much. A customer may need up to eight touchpoints before they finally make a purchase. If you only focus on that final sale, you’re missing out on all those extra steps that drive your customer to buy.

It may sound obvious (so I’ll stop here) but the point I’m trying to make is: Marketers cannot focus on the final sale. We need something in between — a secondary metric that will bridge the gap between “a stranger” and a “a buyer”.

This is where the notion of a “lead” came from, i.e. a contact which we consider our prospective/possible/future customer.

A journey from a “a stranger” to a “lead” is shorter and much more predictable than a journey from “a stranger” to a “a buyer”, and once we turn a visitor into a lead, we can reach out to them in a much more meaningful and personalized way (via email, Facebook re-marketing, on-site personalizations, etc.).

What does this have to do with link building?

In link building we need links, just like in marketing we want sales. But focusing on the final goal is just as limiting in link building as it is in marketing.

Very few link builders these days do anything beyond sending an email, then using automated follow-ups. There’s no “lead generation” in link building. It’s either “link or no link” reporting.

And that’s where that process is broken.

In link building, all those bloggers, publishers, editors, etc. may also need several touchpoints (from something beyond an email). Furthermore, they may not be proper decision makers within the publication you are targeting.

If you apply that lead generation process to link building, you may see much better results, and more importantly, those results will keep growing the more leads you acquire.

How to add lead generation processes to your link building strategy

1. Define your linking leads prior to creating content

In B2B marketing, this is called outcomes-focused data strategy, which basically means you need to know exactly what you want to achieve (the outcome) before you start developing your strategy of achieving said outcome.

This concept is — sadly — seldom applied to link building.

What usually happens:

The content team creates what they think is a great content asset.
The outreach team identifies website owners who are likely to be interested in that asset, and starts the outreach.

Both teams are working in isolation.

But what happens if you turn that process around?