Link building is a process essential for the success of absolutely any kind of website, especially software as a service business. But why? How exactly will it benefit you?
Having lots of backlinks pointing to your SaaS resource from other web pages is very good for boosting your domain rating and your metrics in general. It is also very good for your traffic since the more links you have all over the Internet, the more people will see them and click on them.
And that, in turn, will convert to increased sales since people will grow more aware of your software.
But How Do You Run a Link Building Campaign?
I can give you a general idea of what it’s like to do link building, but this is going to be far from the most comprehensive guide. If you’re new to the entire concept, however, this should be enough to at least give you a sense of what you should be doing. So, what should you be doing first?
Find Link Building Prospects
Your targets should ideally be bloggers and influencers operating in your niche that are also likely to share external content. How do you pick them? Well, you should look for the golden middle.
That means websites that have already established a decent user base so that a backlink from them would actually bring you value but they’re not too big to be impossible to reach with a couple of emails.
And, of course, links from high-DR websites are more valuable.
To figure out if a blogger is eager to share external content, take a look through their blog and see if they have any guest posts, or skim through their tweets or Facebook profiles to see if they shared anything there. If they have, great! You’re one step closer to getting yourself that sweet, sweet backlink.
Next Up, You’ll Need Their Contact Information
Look for the header, footer, and about sections. Sometimes you’ll be lucky to find emails there, other times you won’t.
That’s where tools like Hunter.io come in. It will speed up your campaign by a ton and with a 90% success rate give you the emails you’re looking for.
For the other 10% though, you can use the Email Permutator, for example. If you know the name, surname, and domain name of your prospect, you can feed them to the permutator and get an entire list of all possible combinations. One of them is bound to be the right one. Paste the emails you get into Gmail and if an account shows up, you’ve struck gold.
Write Your Pitch
The four most common link pitch reasons are guest posting, broken link building, snatching links from inferior content, and unlinked mentions. To keep this short and noob-friendly, I will only talk about those four.
But, regardless of what exactly you’re trying to do, you should always remember that you’re talking to a real person, show respect and interest in them and their content. Go through what they write and like and make some references to it in your pitch.
That will show that you’re not a spambot and have actually invested some of your own time into learning about your prospects.
And don’t use email templates. Or, if you decide to (because of the scale of your campaign), do your best to personalize each one to the fullest.
Bloggers get hundreds of outreach emails daily, so they know a template when they see one. And nothing turns people away from you more than seeming like a bot.
Guest Posting
This is probably the surest way to get a backlink, but it also requires the most effort. To do this, you need to offer a good piece of content that will be beneficial for the other person and will be helpful for their audience.
You should avoid “write for us” forms and speak with the site owner directly since this is the best way to get actual results. Introduce yourself, your website, and make it clear how your content is good and actually beneficial for the blogger you’re talking to.
Nobody in their right mind will turn down an actually good piece of content, so I’m sure that won’t be a problem for you.
Broken Link Building Snatching Links From Lesser Content
For this, you will need to take a look behind the curtain and reveal the backlink profiles of sites you’re looking at. Just pick out from the best backlink checkers and scan away.
What you’re going to be looking for are dead links that used to point to articles on the same topic as yours or for links to posts that are less informative, shorter, or in any other way worse than your own.
Just make sure you’re clear on why your content deserves that spot and how exactly is it superior to the content already linked to.
Unlinked Mentions
Since we’re talking SaaS here, there’s a pretty high chance that someone has mentioned your site or software already, especially if you’re decently big. You can find unlinked mentions by doing a Google search or using a tool like Ahrefs.
If someone has already mentioned you, simply asking them to add a link to that mention should be enough. Just be polite.
Lastly, Don’t Be Afraid to Follow Up
Emails often end up in the spam folder. People can be very busy and simply forget about your pitch, or straight up not notice it. So, following up once is a great idea.
Just make sure you wait for 4 to 5 days, be brief and to the point.
Also, there’s no reason to do it more than once since you will be most likely just wasting your time.
Boost Your Sales, Increase Traffic and Metrics Through Link Building
A strong backlink profile will do wonders for your success on the Web and even a single high-DR backlink can increase your online well-being quite considerably.
So, don’t be afraid of words like “campaign” and “outreach”, your success is literally in your hands.
Link building is a process essential for the success of absolutely any kind of website, especially software as a service business. But why? How exactly will it benefit you?
Having lots of backlinks pointing to your SaaS resource from other web pages is very good for boosting your domain rating and your metrics in general. It is also very good for your traffic since the more links you have all over the Internet, the more people will see them and click on them.
And that, in turn, will convert to increased sales since people will grow more aware of your software.
