Complete Blogging Course to Grow Your Business

Hi, I'm Tim, Head of Marketing at Ahrefs. And I am happy to introduce you to Blogging for Business. It is a very detailed and innovative video

course

that will teach you how to increase traffic to

your

blog and turn it into a customer acquisition channel for

your

business

. Three things. First: This entire

course

is based on a true story of how we took our own blog from a resource that almost no one knew about to one of the most popular and reputable blogs in our industry. In terms of traffic, we went from less than 15,000 visitors per month when I joined Ahrefs, to over 150,000 visitors per month when I started working on this course.

Today, our blog's search traffic almost seems like a hockey stick. And I'll show you exactly how we did it. It took me six years and eight different blogs to discover the tactics and strategies that really work. So, in this course you'll get six years of blood, sweat, and tears condensed into 10 video lessons packed with actionable SEO and content marketing strategies. I honestly wish this course existed when I was just starting out, it would have saved me a lot of wasted time and money. Second: Watching your blog traffic

grow

is obviously exciting and satisfying. But you're running a

business

, right?

Last time I looked, they weren't accepting traffic at the banks. Therefore, you need to make sure you attract the type of traffic that will convert into paying customers for your business. Trust me, I'm a big proponent of content marketing that drives customers and sales, not just arbitrary traffic numbers. And that's why I called this video course "Blogging for Business." And finally, number three: it took me almost a year to carefully outline and record the 10 video lessons in this course. And judging by the comments from people who already took it, I was able to impress even the most experienced marketers, not just newbie bloggers.

But after creating this course, I decided to go even further and interviewed three amazing people and asked them all kinds of challenging questions. I interviewed Noah Kagan about how to

grow

your audience. I interviewed Bryan Harris about list building. And I interviewed Ramsay Taplin about how to start a blog from scratch. These three additional interviews are the real icing on the cake, believe me. So what are you waiting for? Take the course and I'll see you inside! Welcome to Lesson #1: “The Compounding Effect of Content Marketing.” As I promised in the intro video, this lesson will set the stage for the entire course and help you better understand why I'm advocating certain tactics and angles. everything else.

Here is the agenda for this lesson. We'll start with what your main goal should be if you're

blogging

for business, not as a hobbyist. Then, I'm going to break down three main customer acquisition channels and explain how

blogging

expands them. And finally, I'm going to show a very simple, but immensely important, achievement that keeps people away from the rapid growth of blogging. So, here we go. Part 1: The main objective of business blogs. In about two years we managed to grow the Ahrefs blog from almost 15,000 visits per month to 150,000 visits per month. Do you think this result is good or bad, considering that it took us almost two years to achieve it?

Well, if you ask me, I don't really care much about raw traffic numbers. Traffic is a vanity metric. We never had the goal of increasing traffic to our blog. Our main goal has always been to acquire new customers and grow our business. What's the point of going viral and attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors to a blog if none of them buy from you? It may be good for your ego, but not for your bank account. So instead of trying to generate as much blog traffic as we could, we focused our efforts on attracting highly targeted visitors, who would become customers and bring money to our business.

I know content marketing teams love to set all kinds of meaningless KPIs: number of articles published per week; Number of blog visitors per month; Number of email subscribers per month. Well, if you ask me, these are all bad KPIs. They make some sense, of course, but they are secondary. Number of orders or sales per month, this is the main KPI that you should be interested in first. You should treat your blog as a customer acquisition channel, not a traffic acquisition channel. Unless, of course, you make money from raw traffic. Like selling advertisements, for example. In that case, obviously, more traffic will generate more money.

But this course won't teach you how to create a media empire and make money from advertising. I don't have any experience with it, so I'm not qualified to create a course on it. This course is about creating the blog that will attract customers to your business. This is what we have achieved with Ahrefs Blog and I will be happy to share all our tactics and strategies with you. Part 2: Three main customer acquisition channels. Let's take a moment to step back and look at the big picture. How do people discover products and services to buy online? First of all, nothing beats a recommendation from a friend or someone you respect.

Good products generate a lot of buzz on social media and this boosts sales like a charm. That's called word of mouth. Then there is the search. Whenever you have a problem or have any kind of question, the first place to go is Google. And if there is a product or service that can solve your problem, it is very likely to appear in Google search results. And finally, advertising is a very old and proven way of presenting a product to potential customers. We see hundreds, if not thousands, of ads every day. Which actually dilutes your ROI quite a bit.

But this channel is still quite effective. Well, do you even need a blog to take advantage of these three main customer acquisition channels? Well not really. Let me explain it with a real example. Let's say you own an e-commerce store that sells shoelaces like lacesout.net. Once someone buys new laces from them, this person will most likely brag about it to their friends and recommend the website lacesout.net. That is, if that customer had a positive experience with that online store. Pleasing his customers is all he needs to generate word of mouth. Now, let's talk about search.

If I connect the lacesout.net website to Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool, I will see that they rank in organic search results for quite a few keywords related to their products. They rank at position 3 for the keyword “sneaker laces,” position 7 for the keyword “laces,” and position 5 for “sneaker laces.” And many other relevant keywords, of course. In other words, people searching for shoelaces on Google will inevitably discover lacesout.net because it ranks pretty well. And these people are the best customers you can hope for, because they express their direct intent when they search for these things on Google.

Therefore, search as a customer acquisition channel seems to work very well for lacesout.net. And finally, advertising. It appears that Ahrefs does not see any ads for lacesout.net in Google search results. PPC keywords say 0. But there is another great tool called Similarweb, where you can look for other forms of advertising besides Google pay per click. But it seems that lacesout.net does not advertise even according to Similarweb. Therefore, they must be quite satisfied with how the other two customer acquisition channels are working. But they can still spend some money on advertising whenever they want. So anyway, let's review this customer acquisition channel.

Now, since this online store can successfully leverage all three major customer acquisition channels, why do they have a blog? Well, let's take a look at this article from her blog that shows different lacing styles. According to Ahrefs, this article ranks on Google for over 600 related search queries. Here are some of them: "how to tie Nike shoes", "how to tie Nike shoes", "how to tie Air Max 90 shoes", etc, etc, etc. So people search for this kind of stuff on Google and find this. article on the Lacesout blog, they enjoy it, dig deeper into the lacesout.net website and finally buy laces from it.

This is a near-perfect example of how content marketing can drive customers to your business from Google. So let's place the blog next to the "Search" customer acquisition channel. What about word of mouth? Well, this article teaches you some interesting and unique ways to tie your sneakers. Guess what people will do once they learn a new way to tie their shoelaces? Post it on social media, of course. There's even a #shoelaceart hashtag on Instagram for that. And once their friends and followers ask them for a tutorial where they learned how to tie shoelaces like this, they will give them a link to this article.

Do you see where I'm going with this? It's not just the positive experience with your company and your product that can generate word of mouth. You can also generate a lot of interest with your content. So let's also put the blog next to word of mouth. And finally, you can spend money to promote content that talks about your product instead of promoting the actual product directly. It may seem counterintuitive, but very often content promoting your product will have a much higher conversion rate than a sales page for that product. But we'll talk more about this later in this course.

For now, let's put the blog next to the advertising. Ultimately, as you can see, creating a blog can greatly expand your reach across all three major customer acquisition channels. That's why interest in content marketing continues to grow. Just look at Google Trends for the keyword “content marketing,” and up! Part 3: The main reason why most blogs fail. As I just said, there is a lot of buzz around content marketing these days. Every online business wants to have a successful blog, but the problem is that most businesses have no idea how to run a blog. And that is why it is so common to come across a company blog that is regularly updated with new articles every month.

But the number of comments and shares on these articles is in the single digits at best. Which means no one is actually reading these articles. Which means that these items do not attract new customers. Which means all the work put into these articles is in vain. And I've totally been there. Just a few years ago I had no idea how to run a successful blog. So I just copied what other successful bloggers were doing and tried to follow their advice. Other bloggers said I should post more often to get more traffic, so I posted every day;

They said list posts are the best, so I published list posts; Then everyone started writing expert summaries and I followed them; Then they said that publishing your content in specialized communities was the key to success, so let's do it; They then said that the real key to success is to regularly submit your content to Facebook, Twitter and any other social network out there, no problem; I was doing everything the “guru” bloggers taught. And I actually saw some results. But did I get traction with my blog? No, I did not do it. In reality, each individual tactic worked like a charm.

My lists generated quite a stir on social media; My detailed guides got a lot of engagement in the comments; My guest posts were published on the most popular blogs in my niche. But all of that didn't translate into any traction with the blogs I was trying to grow at the time. Traffic was stagnating, sales were not coming. I even bought a bunch of pretty expensive blogging courses, thinking I was missing something important that bloggers weren't willing to share for free. And these courses were pretty good actually, they taught me some new and interesting strategies. But they didn't help me get the traction I was looking for.

I was getting better and better at executing different content marketing tactics, but I couldn't understand how all of these tactics came together into a single strategy that would grow my blog and attract customers to our business. This is what the traffic to each article I published on my blog looked like: Shortly after publishing an article you see the so-called "hope spike." This increase occurs because you send this new article to your email list and share it with your Twitter followers. You can also post this article on Reddit and share it with various relevant communities on Facebook or Slack.

Aside from that, you can send a bunch of outreach emails to famous people in your industry to get them to share your article with their audience. And if your article is really worthy, word of mouth will multiply the result of all your efforts. So sometimes that “hope spike” can become quite large, making you feel happy and fulfilled. But then, all this traffic quicklyfades away as soon as you turn off your content promotion machine. And what you get as a result is the so-called "flat line of no." By the way, the credit for these fun terms goes to Rand Fishkin.

So if you rely on those spikes of hope, here's what your total traffic to your blog will look like: As long as you invest your time and effort into publishing new articles and promoting them in every way possible, your traffic appears to be growing. . This is where the popular advice “you should post new content regularly” comes from. But as soon as you stop posting new content, the results you've achieved so far will start to fade almost instantly. But it shouldn't be like that. Because growth is not like that. I can only call this kind of performance "survival".

Here's something very important I want you to learn from this first lesson: if your content marketing efforts don't add up over time, you're doing it wrong. This is what this graph should look like, if you make your efforts add up. As you can see, the traffic to each newly published article does not fade away. On the contrary, it grows slowly over time, until it reaches a certain point. In this way, each article you publish will add to the total traffic of your blog. So even if you stop publishing new articles for a while, all your progress won't vanish immediately.

It will remain exactly where you left it. Or maybe even grow a little on its own. This is called “the compounding effect of content marketing.” It may seem super simple, and indeed it is, but I somehow overlooked that simple principle for quite a few years. And I see that too many bloggers overlook it these days. That's why I wanted to make sure you understand this general concept, before we delve into the actual blogging tactics and strategies. Because all of them will focus on generating passive and constant traffic to each article you have on your blog. Instead of teaching you how to generate an immediate increase in traffic to your newly published article, which will soon disappear.

So let's go back to the Ahrefs Blog, which I will often use as an example for many tactics and strategies in this course. Two years ago, when I joined the team, they were publishing 2-3 articles per week and the traffic was not showing any signs of growth. It was basically a flat line despite all the effort. Today we publish 2 or 3 new articles per month and our traffic is growing steadily and consistently, as you can see. But most importantly, our blog attracts thousands of customers to our platform every month, and the more we increase our blog traffic, the more customers we get from it.

But we'll talk more about customer acquisition with content later in this course. For now I just want to emphasize the importance of making every article you publish bring you consistent traffic every month. Because growth occurs when traffic to your articles does not decrease over time. Here is an example of such an article from the Ahrefs Blog. This article was published in 2016, and as you can see in Google Analytics, there was a "hope spike" right after it was published, but then the traffic didn't fade away. In reality, it was growing slowly from month to month. And near the end, you can see that we relaunched this article and generated an even bigger "hope spike." But the relaunch is something I'll cover later in this course.

So the main strategy behind growing the Ahrefs blog from 15,000 to 150,000 visitors per month is to make every article we publish work exactly like this one. The key is passive and constant traffic that does not disappear over time. Again, it may seem super simple and super obvious, but somehow most people only focus on making their peak hope bigger and wonder why their traffic doesn't grow over time despite all the hard work. job. Therefore, the rest of this course will focus on a single objective. How to create articles that generate constant targeted traffic and don't fade away. And how to convert that traffic into leads and sales.

If that sounds good, see you in lesson #2. Welcome to lesson #2. In this lesson we will discuss two main strategies to grow a blog with their pros and cons. I'm going to summarize the "big picture" I started painting in lesson #1 and prepare you for the tricks and tactics that will follow. So here is the agenda for this lesson. We will begin by studying the anatomy of the "hope tip." Then, I'm going to break down two main strategies for growing a blog and the challenges that come with them. So I'm going to bust the "you should post more often" myth once and for all.

And finally, I'm going to say a few words about the importance of converting random visitors to your blog into regular readers. So, let's go! Part 1. The Anatomy of “Hope Peak” According to my observations, most bloggers have an unhealthy obsession with “Hope Peak.” It is too satisfying and rewarding to see your traffic increase practically the same day you publish your new post. Instant gratification – our brains are too addicted to it. But let's take a closer look at this so-called "peak of hope." Where is this traffic coming from? Well, what's the first thing you do after publishing a new article?

You share it with your existing audience. You send an email to your email subscribers, share the link on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and any other social networks where you have some followers. In other words, you are asking your current audience to visit your blog because you have something new for them. That's the first section of your "hope peak." And the size of this section is determined by the size of your existing audience. Which means if you're just starting out, this section would be pretty small, if any. But the most important thing is that there are no new people in this group.

Your email subscribers and social followers discovered you a long time ago, so you don't reach any new people by emailing your subscribers or tweeting to your followers. This is very important to understand. Well, the next thing you need to do to drive more traffic to your newly published article is to share it with a group of relevant communities that thrive on different platforms. You post your article to a suitable subreddit; You share it with some relevant groups on Facebook; You promote it in some relevant Slack channels; And finally, you post it on some relevant specialized forums or community forums, where your target audience gathers.

If this is the first time you're sharing your content with a certain group or community, everyone who comes to your article as a result will be

complete

ly new to your blog. But if you've been consistently sharing content with this community for the past few months, most people will already know you. Therefore, this promotion channel is only effective at the beginning, but over time the number of new people you can reach this way will decrease drastically. And that was the second part of his "peak of hope." So what's the latest? It's word of mouth. This is the traffic that comes to your article when people in the first two sections share it with their friends and followers.

This usually happens passively, meaning you don't have to do anything except post great content that people actually want to share. But you can also proactively generate word of mouth by reaching out to people with large audiences and showing them your content in the hopes that they will share it with their large audience. Passive word of mouth will usually improve peak traffic by 10% to 20%, if you're lucky. This is because most of your blog visitors do not have a sufficient number of followers to give you good traffic when they share your article. But if you manage to persuade a few big influencers to share your content with their huge audiences, that can send you a tsunami of traffic.

Therefore, proactive word of mouth can improve peak traffic by approximately 1000%. But that rarely happens, to be honest. The most important people in their field are often very reluctant to promote others. Especially when your blog is new and they've never heard of you before. Okay, then let's finish. It turns out that the big increase in traffic you get immediately after publishing and promoting a new article will be primarily made up of people who have visited your blog before. Which makes little sense. Because for your blog to grow, you need to reach new audiences all the time. And this is where Google traffic comes into play.

As illustrated in my graph, traffic from Google does not come to your article immediately after it is published; It takes a long time to accumulate. Of course, if you invest in SEO, of course. With a pinch of SEO magic applied, your article will start ranking on Google for some relevant search queries, and this will give you consistent traffic that won't disappear over time. But at this point you may argue with me. Google traffic takes time to build up, while generating interest in relevant communities and social networks seems like a much faster way to attract people to your blog and increase your traffic.

But is that really so? Part 2. Two Main Strategies for Growing a Blog So, on the one hand, we have “viral traffic,” which arises as a result of generating interest in relevant communities and reaching out to influencers asking for support. And on the other hand we have “SEO traffic”, which arises as a result of trying to ensure that your content has a high ranking on Google. So which strategy is easier and more effective? First of all, I must mention that these are actually two extreme cases, which do not really exist without each other. I mean there is no way to constantly go viral and not get a single visitor from Google.

Additionally, there is no way to attract massive traffic from Google and not have a single person share your content on Twitter or Facebook. But to prove my point, I will discuss them individually. Below are the main challenges associated with each strategy. If you want to grow your blog with viral traffic, you need to be very good at creating content that resonates with your target audience. It should resonate with them so much that they can't resist sharing it with others. That is challenge number one. But virality doesn't come from nowhere. You need to get the support of influencers in your industry, who will promote your content to their large audiences and kick-start the viral effect.

It's incredibly difficult to promote influencers, so that's challenge number 2. And lastly, the goal of your blog is to constantly reach new people, who will become your new customers. So if you're relying on viral traffic spikes, you'll have to produce sticky viral content regularly and get support from industry influencers regularly. Because if you stop posting, your traffic will decrease. And that's challenge number 3. Now, what are the challenges of growing your blog with SEO traffic that comes from Google? Well, your content should still be amazing. It doesn't necessarily have to resonate with people a lot, but it has to be incredibly useful to them.

Which is still a challenge, if you ask me. However, the real challenge is getting backlinks to your content. Because backlinks are one of the key things that move you up in Google search results. And creating backlinks is something most people struggle with. But there is something positive about SEO traffic. No need to post regularly! This is because Google traffic does not disappear over time. Unless, of course, your competitors try hard enough to outrank you. But I'm about to teach you how to make sure that doesn't happen. That's my rough comparison of two blog growth strategies. I'm sure you've noticed that I prefer SEO traffic over viral traffic.

Well, the truth is that I don't have any truly viral articles in my portfolio. But almost all the posts we publish on the Ahrefs blog rank on the first page of Google based on their target keywords. And yet, I think viral traffic can be a valuable strategy for growing a blog. But for now, let me delve a little deeper into the “Viral vs. SEO” dilemma and explain where my strong bias toward the latter comes from. First of all, most newbie bloggers don't understand how viral traffic works. This is the image in your head: you publish an article and tweet it to your followers.

Some of them like it and tweet it to their followers, some of their followers like it and tweet it to their followers. This goes on and on and because of this snowball effect, your article goes viral and generates a lot of traffic. Good? Mistaken! A few years ago, the guys at Pulsar studied how content goes viral by examining a bunch of real viral campaigns. And these are the visualizations they created with the data they collected: What their study showed is that content does not go viral in the way I just described. There is no such thing as a "snowball effect."Even on the contrary, viral content actually spreads in decline.

Let me explain. Content only goes viral if it is exposed to a huge audience. In other words, someone with a large Twitter following has to tweet your article, so that thousands of their followers will retweet it to their followers. These two steps of the viral burst generate the most traffic and visibility. And from there, there is a fairly rapid drop in the number of retweets and traffic. Let's go back to these visualizations of real viral campaigns. You can clearly see the large centers that started the chain reaction. But here's the thing. Just because an influencer tweeted something doesn't mean that all of their followers will pick it up and retweet it.

That's why the two main challenges of viral content that I mentioned above are: creating super sticky content that everyone wants to share with others; And present the biggest influencers in your space to boost the viral effect. Both challenges are incredibly difficult to overcome. And that's why I'm not a fan of searching for viral content. Part 3. Debunking the “post more often” myth That's probably my favorite part of this lesson. What I like most about SEO traffic is that you don't have to publish a lot of content, but you can still get tons of traffic every month. If I put our blog URL into the Ahrefs Content Explorer tool and select the last 30 days, it will only show me two articles.

But look at our Google traffic over the last 30 days. It's growing pretty steadily. This is because we don't have the absurd goal of publishing a certain number of articles each week. Our goal is to create content around very specific keywords, closely related to our business, and have our content rank highly on Google for these keywords to attract new customers to us. In fact, you can build your entire business around a single item. I have a great example for you. Take a look at this article from healthline.com titled "How to Lose Weight Fast." If I put this article's URL into Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool, I'll see that it receives over 300,000 visitors from Google each month.

Let me take a few seconds to point out that the traffic figure you see on Ahrefs is just an estimate. We have a monster database of over 400 million keywords, which we use to calculate organic traffic for different websites. But there are clearly many more keywords that people could include in Google. So the organic traffic number you see on Ahrefs is just an estimate. And the actual traffic from Google to a website or destination URL is usually about 2 or 3 times higher. So keep this in mind when using Ahrefs for traffic estimates. Ok, talking about the keywords that Ahrefs tracks.

According to our records, the article I just showed you ranks for over 9,000 keywords. Let me click on that number and see what they are: "how to lose weight", "how to lose weight quickly", "lose weight quickly", etc. Just think about it. Every month, over 300,000 people find this article while searching for weight loss tips on Google. That is a great business opportunity. Even if you convert half of one percent of all of these people into customers, that's over a thousand customers every month, which is clearly a ton of money. But this example is, of course, an outlier, because it's quite rare for a single article to get so much traffic from Google.

And yet, why force yourself to publish dozens of articles every month, when you can focus your efforts on creating just a few key articles, ranking them on Google, and resulting in a passive flow of leads? But there is more! Viral traffic is mostly a gamble. You cannot know in advance whether your article will be successful or not. You can only guess. And if it takes off, you never know how much traffic it will generate for you. But SEO traffic is predictable. In fact, I just showed you how to take any article and estimate its search traffic potential with the help of Ahrefs.

Whatever topic you're going to cover on your blog, simply put it into Google, grab the URLs of the top-ranking articles, and plug them into Ahrefs to see how much traffic they get and what keywords they rank for. These traffic estimates will help you make informed, data-driven decisions and better prioritize your budget, efforts, and resources. And we're about to cover both planning and execution in the additional lessons of this course. The tactics and strategies you are about to learn will give you a huge competitive advantage over your rivals. I promise. But there is one last thing to discuss before we delve into SEO.

Part 4. How to Convert Visitors into Subscribers Regardless of which blog growth strategy you choose to follow, viral traffic, SEO traffic, or a combination of both, you need to retain the people who come to your website. You need to increase your audience! I'm sure you've heard it a thousand times: "You have to grow your email list." "The money is in the list." "Start growing your email list yesterday." Every professional marketer will tell you that you should grow your email list. Just think about it. If you don't convert a first-time visitor to your blog into an email subscriber, chances are you'll never see them again.

This means you won't be able to show them the next article you publish. You won't be able to introduce them to the next product you launch. And as a result, this person won't spread the word about your new content and new products to their friends. In other words, your audience is one of your greatest assets. So the sooner you start building it, the better. There are many tactics and strategies that can help you grow your audience. There are some technical tricks, such as popups, sliders, welcome mats, Hellobars content updates, lead magnets, etc. And there are some psychological tricks, like attractive characters, social proof, personal stories, building rapport, etc.

I'm afraid I'm not going to teach you how to build your audience in this very course because it will make it twice as long. But I recorded a very insightful interview with someone who is exceptionally good at converting visitors into email subscribers and growing a loyal audience. So be sure to check out the additional materials. You're going to enjoy it, I promise. And that's it for lesson #2. That was the big picture of growing a blog that I think is important to understand before learning the actual tactics and strategies. Making your "hope spike" bigger shouldn't be your main goal.

Getting over the “flat line of no” should do it. And the best way to achieve this is by getting your content to rank well on Google so that it brings you consistent targeted traffic every month. That's all! The basics are already over. Starting in the next lesson, I'm going to show you many very specific and practical strategies that will teach you how to generate traffic from Google. Let's start Lesson #3: with a boost to your keyword research skills. But don't worry, I'm not going to teach you the same keyword research tactics that everyone else teaches. I have quite a few unique ideas to share with you, which are based on my experience training writers for our own blog.

Sounds good? So I'll see you in lesson 3. Welcome to lesson #3. In this lesson, I'll show you how to analyze the full traffic potential and ranking difficulty of a keyword you want to target. Here's a quick agenda. I'll show you how to test your article ideas for so-called "search demand" and how to determine their full traffic potential. The emphasis is on the word "

complete

." Then, I'll give you some simple tips for choosing the best keyword to target. And finally, we are going to talk about analyzing your chances of ranking in Google and the difficulty metric of the keywords we have in Ahrefs.

And in case you are completely new to SEO and this is the first time you are hearing about the practice of keyword research, don't worry! I tried to make this lesson very beginner friendly, although there will be quite a few fairly advanced tricks. So, let's go! Part 1: How to Test Your Article Ideas for “Search Demand”? Can you guess what the biggest mistake newbie bloggers make? They write articles about things that no one searches for on Google. And in fact, newbie bloggers aren't the only ones to blame for that mistake. I see a lot of professional bloggers fall into that trap too.

Let me explain it with a short story that happened recently. I get a lot of emails from Ahrefs clients asking me for SEO advice. And one day I got an email from a lady who was a fantasy fiction writer. She had published some fantasy fiction books on Amazon, but she wasn't getting any sales. So she started a blog to get some traffic, create an audience of fantasy fiction lovers, and sell them her own books. She was posting new articles fairly regularly for almost a year, but her blog wasn't getting traffic, her audience wasn't growing, and as a result, she wasn't making any sales of her self-published books.

So I opened her blog to see what kind of articles she published there and they were basically short fantasy fiction stories or chapters of her upcoming books. I mean, the titles of her articles looked like this: "My new story: "Two Paladins and a Sword." "Chapter 12 of my next book." "The progress of my book "Flower of Ice and Fire." ." These titles immediately explained why your blog wasn't getting traffic and why your audience wasn't growing. As discussed in the first two lessons of this course, Google is the best way to get a steady stream of new readers to your blog. blog.

But how can you get visitors from Google, when no one searches for what you are writing? I mean, people don't even know that this lady exists on Google in the first place. to drive traffic to your blog was the lack of search demand for the things you wrote about. So does this mean that blogs are a bad customer acquisition channel if it's a book? Of course not? You just have to blog about things that your potential readers are actually searching for on Google, so they can find your articles and become regular readers of your blog, and eventually buy from you.

That was my advice to her almost word for word. So what do readers of fantasy fiction books search for on Google? After brainstorming for a few minutes and doing a simple keyword research exercise that I'll show you a little later, I found some interesting keywords that you could cover on your blog: "books like harry potter", "books like the hobbit," "books like The Lord of the Rings," "authors like Terry Pratchett." According to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, each of these keywords has a good monthly search volume, and "books like harry potter" is the most popular search query among them.

People search for it 3,700 times each month in the US alone, and the global search volume across all countries is 7,000 searches per month. Therefore, by targeting these search queries with your blog posts, you were almost guaranteed to attract a large number of highly targeted visitors to your blog. And because these searches clearly indicate that people are looking for book recommendations and are therefore willing to buy them, you could easily include recommendations of your own books in your articles and make some sales this way. So I hope my point is clear. Writing about things that no one is looking for almost guarantees that your blog will be a failure.

You should write about things that people actually search for on Google. And that's why keyword research is such an essential thing for any blogger or content marketer to master. Part 2. How to Determine Total Potential Traffic for a Keyword. Well, we have four interesting keywords to target and we know how many times people search for them on Google per month, which is called "search volume." Let's say I decided to write an article aimed at the least popular among these four, "authors like Terry Pratchett." According to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, it only gets 150 searches per month in the US, and the global search volume around the world isn't much higher.

By the way, the search volume figures you see on Ahrefs and virtually every other keyword research tool are estimates. Most keyword tools take their search volume from Google's Keyword Planner tool, which shows rounded annual averages. Which is not very accurate, as you can see. Here at Ahrefs we decided to go a step further than most keyword research tools. We pair data from Google Keyword Planner with an additional data source: clickstream. In this way we obtain slightly higher search volumesaccurate and we can update them more frequently than most other tools. But at the end of the day, they are still estimates.

So let's get back to the lesson. Having an estimate of monthly search volume in our hands, we can try to calculate how much search traffic we can get if we rank on Google's main page for that keyword. I'm pretty sure you already know that the number one ranking result on Google will get about 30% of all clicks. Then about 15% of the clicks will go to position #2 and about 10% will go to position #3. And if your ranking is below the top 3, you'll get even fewer clicks, so don't even Let's not even bother to calculate. Of course, these percentages will be quite different for each search query, but SEO professionals simply use these simplified averages to make traffic estimates.

So what do we have here? With the search volume for "authors like terry pratchett" of 150 searches in the United States, you will get 45 clicks if you are ranked #1, 22 clicks if you are ranked #2, and 15 clicks if you are ranked #3. These numbers They don't seem very interesting, do they? Especially when you consider how much work it would take to write a decent article on that topic. But in reality, you will get much more traffic than that. Here at Ahrefs Keywords Explorer we have a useful SERP button. It pulls the top 10 ranking pages for your keyword and displays a ton of useful data for each of them.

The column that interests us is called Traffic. And it says that the page ranking #2 for the keyword "authors like terry pratchett" seems to get over 100 search visitors each month. This is 5 times more than what we just estimated for that page. This is because this page does not rank solely for the keyword "authors like terry pratchett." It also ranks for many other related searches. Which can be seen in the column called "Keywords". It says that this article ranks on Google for 31 keywords. Let's click on this number and see what they are. This link takes me to the Organic Keywords report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool, which lists all the keywords we see this article ranking in the top 100 search results.

But I don't need the top 100, we just discussed that most traffic goes to the top 3. So let's use the positions filter to see the keywords for which this article ranks in the top 3. And except for my original keyword, "authors like terry pratchett", this page ranks for three more similar searches: "authors like terry pratchett" and "douglas adams", "authors similar to terry pratchett" and "books like terry pratchett" . A duplicate keyword icon in quotes tells me that in addition to the usual search list, this page also appears in a large featured snippet for each of these keywords. So, as you can see, different people can use different search queries to search for exactly the same thing on Google.

And Google is smart enough to understand that these searches are similar and therefore rank the same page for all of them. We've already discussed this in the previous lesson, where I showed you an article about weight loss, which ranked on Google for almost 10,000 weight loss-related keywords and attracted over 300,000 visitors per month from search. But that was well above average. Guess how many keywords an average high-ranking page will rank for? Here at Ahrefs we studied over 3 million Google searches to answer this question. And according to our data, the number one ranking page will rank for about a thousand related keywords.

Which leads us to the following conclusion. The search volume for a single keyword is a poor indicator of the total search traffic potential of the article on that topic. The search volume for the keyword "authors like terry pratchett" in the United States is only 150 searches per month. Which may lead to the conclusion that this keyword is not worth targeting. But according to Ahrefs data, the article that ranks #2 for this keyword generates over a hundred visitors per month from search, because it also ranks for some more similar keywords. One hundred new highly targeted visitors each month is a pretty solid number for most newbie bloggers.

And, as I said before, this number on Ahrefs is an underestimate. Which means the actual search traffic to that page can easily be up to 5x higher. Therefore, don't make content marketing decisions based on the search volume of a single keyword; Look at the total search traffic of the top-ranking pages for that keyword. I wonder if you've noticed something else here, which is incredibly cool. The page ranked number 2 receives 3 times more traffic than the page ranked number 1. How is that possible? Well, just open both pages and compare them. The top ranking page is a simple list of book authors, with no additional details about them.

But the page at number 2 is a public discussion on a forum, where people share their recommendations with some reasoning behind them. Which results in more content for Google to process. In other words, better and deeper coverage of a topic will often lead to ranking on Google for more related keywords and therefore getting more search traffic in total. But we'll talk more about this later in this course. Part 3. How to Find the Best Keyword to Target Here's that simple keyword research exercise I promised to show you. The one who helped me find these four interesting keywords we were discussing a moment ago: I told you I found them by putting myself in the shoes of people who love reading fantasy fiction books.

And just guessing what kind of things they might be searching for on Google. But the search queries I originally came up with were actually a little different: "what are books similar to Harry Potter?", "fantasy books like the hobbit", "books similar to Lord of the Rings", " what authors write in the style of terry pratchett." And according to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, none of them have a decent monthly search volume. But I don't care about the search volume of these queries. We already know that there are hundreds of ways to search on Google for exactly the same thing. That's why I always look at the search results for each of these search queries and see how much traffic the top-ranked pages get in total.

So, by clicking on the SERP dropdown, I can see that the page ranking #1 for the search query "Books similar to Lord of the Rings" receives almost 500 visits per month. And that happens only in the United States. The total search traffic to this page in all counties is almost a thousand visits per month. Clearly, this theme has decent search traffic potential. Although my original search query had almost no search demand. And if I want to drive all this search traffic to my own site, I'll have to write an article that's pretty similar to this top-notch one. So let's see what else we can learn about this number one ranking page.

Did you notice the column called Primary Keyword? It shows me a search query that is slightly different from the original, but has a much higher search volume. Where does this main keyword come from? As you can see, this article ranks for almost 900 different keywords. And the main keyword we present here is the one that generates the most traffic to this article. Which makes it safe to assume that the most popular search query people use to look for book recommendations similar to "Lord of the Rings" is exactly this. And it would also be safe to assume that if your article will rank high for this primary keyword, it will also rank for all the other longer tail keywords, which basically mean the same thing.

Because this is exactly what we see happening here with this top-ranking article, which occupies almost a thousand search queries. So if I were to write an article on this topic, I would not target my original search query and title my article "10 Awesome Books Similar to The Lord of the Rings" because it does not represent the most popular search query that people put into Google. Instead, I would target the search query with the highest search volume and title my article "10 Awesome Books Like The Lord of the Rings." This is how you find the most used search query for any topic you want to write about.

So pause this video and try this little exercise. Step 1: Put yourself in your potential customers' shoes and think about what they might be searching for on Google. Phrase these search queries in any way that makes sense to you and put them into the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool as is. Step 2: Browse the search results for each of your search queries and see how much search traffic they get in total. Step 3: Look at the main keyword, which drives the most search traffic to each of these pages and see how different it is from your original search query and if it has a much higher search volume.

Step 4: Write down the articles with the highest search traffic along with your main keyword. And that's exactly how I create my lists of content ideas. I have the main keyword, which describes the topic that needs to be covered, along with its monthly search volume. And I have the URLs of some high-ranking articles that get the most search traffic for that topic. And the next thing I want to know is how difficult it would be to surpass these articles and get all this traffic for me. Part #4. How to Determine Your Chances of Ranking on Google As you can see, analyzing the search traffic potential of your article idea is a very simple and straightforward process.

A much bigger challenge is determining your chances of outranking existing articles with your own and getting all this traffic for yourself. The truth is that no one knows for sure how exactly Google ranks pages in its search results. Google uses hundreds of different ranking factors and mixes them up depending on the search query. Many people, who are new to SEO, are often looking for some magic tool that will give them very specific recommendations on what they need to do to rank #1. Or better yet... a magic tool that will do it for them. But I'm afraid that tool doesn't exist.

For many years, Google was investing billions of dollars in building the most sophisticated search engine on the planet. Therefore, there is no way for some third-party tool to crack their algorithms and give you the power to effortlessly take your pages to the top. But what we can do is get clues from pages that are already at the top of Google. We can look at them from different angles, compare them to each other, and make assumptions about why certain pages outperform others. And there are only two sources of information for us: the page itself and links to that page from other websites.

I will cover the factors on the page later in this course. So for now let's assume that the top 10 ranking pages for your desired keyword are equally impressive. And your own page is no exception. Your page content is 100% relevant to that search query. Help searchers with whatever they are looking for. Loads fast, optimized for mobile. It provides a great user experience and is visually appealing. And I have a perfect example to illustrate such a situation. Take a look at my guide to keyword research that was posted on the Ahrefs Blog. This article is clearly relevant to the topic of keyword research and I doubt you'll need more than two seconds to notice.

But if you Google “keyword research”, our article only ranks #3. While Moz and Backlinko guides rank #1 and #2 respectively. If you take a look at their articles, each of them has its pros and cons. That's why it's really hard to know if our own article is better or worse than theirs. It is especially difficult to know if you are a machine and not a human being. So why does Google put us in the number 3 position and put Moz in the number 1 position? Well, as I mentioned above, they can use a lot of different factors to identify which page deserves a higher ranking.

For example, the guys at Google recently admitted that they track how users behave after clicking on a certain search result. How long do people stay on that page? Do they close it immediately after the visit? Do you navigate deeper into thiswebsite? Or do they go back and refine their search because they didn't find what they were looking for? But think about it for a second... In order for Google to measure how people behave after clicking on your page in search results, that page would have to somehow rank in the top 10 search results in the first place.

So how do you get to the top 10? Links from other websites are what take you to the Google home page. You can think of links as votes. When a website links to your page, you are telling Google that of all the pages on the same topic, you like your page the most. And the more votes your page gets, the more Google will respect it. So, as a general rule, the more websites link to your page, the higher your Google rankings will be. Now, let's go back to my example. If you look at these search results in the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool, you'll notice that the Moz article has many more backlinks than our own article.

It is much shorter and therefore not as in-depth as our own guide. But the large number of links tells Google that it must be better somehow. That's why they rank number 1. But I'm sure you've noticed that this relationship is not linear. I mean, some of these pages have more backlinks than our article, but they are not above us. Well, like I said, Google is using hundreds of different factors in its ranking algorithms, and the raw number of linked websites is just one of many. But it's a pretty strong factor anyway. Last year we did some interesting research on 2 million random search queries.

We wanted to study the correlation of different ranking factors with the position of a page on Google. And of all the ranking factors we've studied, backlink factors had the strongest correlation with Google ranking. Of course, correlation is not causation. But any SEO professional knows that links are very important for SEO. If the search results for your desired keyword have links from hundreds of websites, there is very little chance that you will be able to surpass them unless you get the same number of links to your own page. Let me show you another interesting case. Let's look at the search results for the keyword "chocolate lab": What you may notice right away are three outlier pages with tons of backlinks, ranking among pages with only a few backlinks.

And the next thing you'll notice is that these three pages are not perfectly relevant to the search query. I mean the other seven pages are clearly about chocolate labs, you can see that just by looking at their titles. But these other three are about the Labrador Retriever dog breed in general. How do they rank among perfectly relevant pages? That's because they have too many links to ignore! And if you were paying attention, you may have also noticed that these three pages with a lot of backlinks rank for a lot of keywords and generate a lot of search traffic.

We haven't studied this at scale yet, but I'm pretty sure that the number of links to a page and its total search traffic are well connected. That's why I always look at the total number of websites that link to the pages I want to replicate on my own blog. Remember my document with content ideas? I always put the number of linked websites next to each URL. Next, my goal is to select the content ideas that get the most search traffic with the fewest backlinks. That's why I advise you to stop this video and review the content ideas you have selected so far.

Put the URLs of the articles you want to replicate into the Ahrefs Site Explorer and note the number of referring domains in your document. Hopefully they don't have many websites linking to them, so you can easily get your own article to the top of Google with just a few backlinks. But that was a very simplified look at the concept of keyword difficulty. If you want to dig deeper, I published an interesting article on the Ahrefs blog titled “How to Measure Keyword Difficulty and Find the Easiest Keywords to Rank For.” Which I highly recommend you read. And before we conclude this lesson, there is only one last thing left to discuss.

Part #5. How to Use the Keyword Difficulty Metric in Ahrefs I guess you may have noticed that we have a metric called Keyword Difficulty or KD in Ahrefs. Remember I was talking about the magic tool that would solve all your classification problems? Well, many people feel exactly that way when they first see our keyword difficulty metric. And then they get quite disappointed when it doesn't live up to their expectations. All because there is nothing magical about this metric. It is simply a proxy of an average number of websites linked in the top 10 search results for your keyword.

Remember I told you that links will help you get in the top 10, and once you are there, many additional ranking factors will be activated? Well, that's why the hint under the keyword difficulty number says: "You will need backlinks from ~X websites to rank in the top 10 for this keyword." See? We don't promise that you'll be ranked #1. And we put a tick in front of the number of linked websites so you know it's an approximation. And my recent example with search results for "chocolate lab" is a great example of why you can't blindly trust this approach. Six of the top-ranked pages actually have fewer than 10 backlinks, but the KD score indicates that you'll need 38.

This is because the other three outliers skew the average to a higher number. And yet, keyword difficulty is incredibly useful when you need to narrow down a huge list of keyword ideas to those that you don't need many backlinks to rank for. Because going through the top 10 search results for a few thousand keywords will take you a lot of time. And to make a final decision on a keyword, you should always review the highest ranking pages. There is no way to avoid it. Please also note that our keyword difficulty score is not linear. Keyword difficulty 10 means that you will need backlinks from approximately 10 websites in order to rank on Google's home page.

While KD 70 means you will need links from 202 websites. And KD 90 means you will need links from 756 websites. It's up to you to decide which score is easy and which is difficult. But our customers kept asking us this question, so we had to define four ranges to make it a little easier for them. Therefore, a KD less than 10 is considered easy, because almost anyone can get links from up to 10 websites. From 10 to 30 we have the medium difficulty, because getting up to 36 websites to link to you is quite a challenge. We consider any value greater than 30 difficult, for obvious reasons.

And anything above 70 is very difficult because only a few websites can generate that many backlinks to their pages. So how many backlinks do you think you can get with your own blog? We have a report in the Ahrefs Site Explorer tool that can help you resolve this. Let me enter the Ahrefs blog URL and go to a report called Best by Links. Here I can see our best performing articles, based on the number of websites linking to them. And it seems that our best articles have between 100 and up to 350 referring domains. Which, according to our keyword difficulty scale, means that we can target keywords with a difficulty of up to 80.

And anything higher than that would be a challenge for us. So pause this video and connect your own blog to Ahrefs Site Explorer to see how many backlinks your best articles have. And by the way, you might be wondering where we get this number of backlinks from and if you can trust this data. I'm glad you asked, because it's our favorite thing to brag about. Ahrefs robots have to crawl the entire Internet to collect this information. Which is pretty hard to do to be honest. Today, we crawl 4.1 million pages per minute. And according to an independent study, the Ahrefs bot is the second most active after Google.

In other words, you can trust our backlink data. And that concludes lesson number 3. I hope you've learned a lot about keyword analysis to determine traffic potential and ranking difficulty, so it's about time I show you four sources of content ideas that will help you Fill your calendar with content throughout the coming year. Sounds good? So I'll see you in lesson 4. Welcome to lesson #4. In this lesson, I'll solve the common difficulty of finding great content ideas for your blog. So you never have to worry about it again. Here's the agenda for this lesson: I have four sources of great content ideas for you.

These four will be enough to fill your content calendar for a full year, I promise. And then we'll talk about prioritizing your list of content ideas and deciding which of them will have the biggest impact on your business. So, let's go. Part 1: How to Discover Great Content Ideas by Studying Your Niche Regardless of what niche your business falls into, whether it's business consulting, healthcare, insurance, photography, or anything else. Chances are, a lot of people are talking about it online. There may be forums or different online communities where your ideal clients gather. There may also be groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, or Slack.

And there may be some sites where people leave their reviews about relevant products or services. In other words, there is no shortage of places online where you can go and watch your target audience communicate and speak their minds. Even Reddit alone can give you enough content ideas to keep you busy for months. There is a subreddit for almost anything. Do you sell knives? No problem, let's search for "knives" on Reddit. And I see two interesting subreddits right away: r/knives/ and r/knifeclub/. It took me just a few minutes browsing these subreddits to find some great blog post ideas: But let's not forget what we learned in lesson #3: we need to make sure people are actually searching for these topics on Google, estimate the potential of total search traffic, see if there is a main topic we can target, and finally look at the number of websites linked to among the top-ranked pages.

So, let's put these three Reddit topic ideas into Ahrefs Keyword Explorer for quick research. And immediately one of them looks promising. I see an article on knifeinformer.com titled "Best Gentleman's Pocket Knife" and it gets almost 400 views a month in the US and it only has one website link. And the rest of the search results don't seem very competitive based on the number of backlinks they have. How cool is that? It took me just a few minutes to find an awesome article idea, that has a pretty decent traffic potential and a small number of links. Guess how many content ideas you'll find if you browse Reddit for about two hours?

And Reddit is just one of the wide variety of places on the web where you can go and study what your target audience is talking about. In fact, amazing content ideas can come from almost any source that is in some way related to your business! This time I was browsing in the airport bookstore, while waiting for my flight. And I saw a magazine that had a title too good to ignore: "How to Start an Online Business." So I bought it immediately. Not because I expected to learn something new from it, but because it was the magazine my target audience was reading.

And therefore it could help me understand them better. That's how this magazine ended up on my work desk and I flipped through it every time I wanted to procrastinate for a while. That's how I stumbled upon this article: "Search Engines: How to Get Listed" Really? Do people struggle with that? With over seven years of SEO experience, I couldn't understand how someone couldn't know this. So I pulled out the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool and entered that title in there. I reviewed the top-ranked results and was totally blown away by the amount of search traffic I saw coming to one of the top-ranked items.

Over 11,000 views per month from the US alone and 18,000 views per month globally. And the main keyword of this article is “submit a website to search engines”. This seems to be the most popular search query that people use to search for this topic. And its search volume is 1,400 searches per month in the United States alone. I thought this was a great topic to cover on the Ahrefs blog, becausePeople looking to submit their websites to search engines are actually looking to get traffic from search engines. And that was a perfect opportunity to introduce them to Ahrefs tools. So guess who published a detailed guide on that topic two months ago?

And today we already occupy the number 8 position in the main search query: "submit website to search engines." Which is the bottom of the main page of Google search results. And in just two months from the date of publication, this post has already brought us almost a thousand visitors from Google search. Which is a pretty decent result for such a short period of time. I hope this was a good example to illustrate how studying your niche and getting inside the heads of your potential customers helps you create highly relevant content on your blog and get targeted traffic from Google.

And before moving on to the next strategy, I suggest you stop this video and take action. Search Reddit and Facebook for relevant communities where your target audience is located. Spend at least 10 minutes exploring each of these communities and look for the things that bother people the most and the language they use to describe them; Whenever something sounds like a great idea for an article on your blog, don't forget what you learned in the previous lesson and test this content idea to determine search traffic potential and ranking difficulty. Try to find at least three interesting article ideas before moving on to the next strategy I'm about to show you.

And in case you need more guidance on researching your niche and getting into the heads of your potential customers, we have a great article on the Ahrefs blog about that. Make sure to check it out. Part 2: How to generate keyword ideas using keyword research tools. There are quite a few amazing tools that help you study what people search for on Google. Let me cover some of the most popular keyword research tools and explain how they work. There is a tool called Answerthepublic that is quite popular among SEOs and content marketers. Probably because of this charismatic guy on their homepage.

No, I'm just kidding, it's a really cool free tool, seriously. Give it any word or phrase and it will return a list of relevant questions that people ask on Google. For example, if I type "cats" into the search bar, it will give me almost 200 questions containing the word "cats": "can cats eat dog food?", "where do they like to be petted," "what cats shed" the least", etc. You're probably wondering: how does this tool know what people are searching for? Well, the source of its data is very simple: it's Google's Autosuggest feature. question like "can cats", it will immediately show you some popular searches.

And if you start typing the next letter, it will give you suggestions based on this letter. That's where this free little tool gets your search queries. homepage, they use the Autosuggest feature on Google and Bing to give you keyword suggestions. Here is another similar tool based on Google's Autosuggest feature. It is called Ubersuggest. The difference between the two is that Ubersuggest does not focus on questions. And all your keyword suggestions will start from your seed keyword, as you can see here. It all starts with the word "cats." Both tools don't show you the monthly search volume for the search queries they suggest, but you already know where to get it, right?

Now, let's move on to the next keyword research tool. Which you probably already know. It is called Google Keyword Planner and is part of AdWords, Google's advertising platform. This tool used to be the best source of keyword ideas in the past, but in recent years Google was taking more and more data away from SEO professionals. Nowadays, Google Keyword Planner is a great tool for advertisers who want to pay for traffic from Google, but not so much for SEO professionals, who want to get free traffic from Google. And yet, you can still get great keyword ideas from Google Keyword Planner.

If I enter the word "cats", I will get hundreds of interesting keyword ideas, and the tool can even sort them into groups, which is quite handy and useful. The main disadvantage is that you do not see the monthly search volume for these keywords. You only see ranges, which are not very useful. And if you want to see the real numbers, you will have to start an advertising campaign and invest some money in it. But in any case, Google's own keyword research tool should not be ignored, although they limit the data that is obtained for free. And finally, let's look at the keyword research tool we have at Ahrefs.

It's called Keywords Explorer and it runs on a monstrous database of 4.6 billion search queries. We used multiple data sources to compile a database of this size. But the main one is the clickstream. In short, clickstream data comes from a large group of mostly free apps that you install on your computer and give them permission to collect your browsing data, anonymize it, and add it to a huge stream database. of clicks. From this database, digital marketers can learn what people search for online and what websites they visit. But there is no personal information about any of these people.

Clickstream data is literally a rescue for the SEO community as many amazing tools and features can be created from it. Let's go back to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. If I enter the same word "cats", I will get a list of almost a million search queries that contain the word "cats". I guess when you compare this number of keyword suggestions to the number of keyword ideas in Google Keyword Planner you'll see why SEO professionals are so mad at Google, right? But what do you do with a list of almost a million search queries? Well, remember the previous lesson where we talked about Keyword Difficulty?

I said it's a great way to narrow down a huge list of keyword ideas to those where you don't need backlinks to rank. So let's put 0 in the KD filter and see what we get: "when do cats stop growing", "can cats eat bread", "do male cats have nipples". These search queries could easily be answered with fantastic blog articles. If I open the search results for the query "can cats eat bread?", I'll see that most of the top-ranked articles get a few hundred monthly views from search with almost no backlinks. Which seems like a great opportunity to me.

And that was a quick overview of how to use keyword research tools to get a ton of great keyword ideas to target on your blog. Simply feed these tools with words and phrases related to your niche and examine the result. And don't forget what we learned in lesson #3. Always look at the total search traffic potential of the top-ranking pages and how many backlinks they have. And take action before moving on to the next strategy. Try the tools I just mentioned and see how many amazing article ideas you can find. Part 3: How to Find Keywords Your Competitors Rank for "He who fights with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skills.

Our antagonist is our helper." - Edmund Burke This quote applies perfectly to content marketing and blogging. We can study our competitors, identify their best-performing content, and beat them. But first you need to know who you're up against. You may already know which websites you compete with in Google search results. But in case you don't, simply put the keywords found in the previous exercise into Google and see who ranks there. Those are your competitors. Let's try this with one of the keywords we discovered earlier: "can cats eat dog food?" When I browse Google search results for that keyword, I see an interesting website that catches my eye.

The name of the website is too impressive to ignore: lovemeow.com. I love it. So we know that the website lovemeow.com ranks well for the search query “can cats eat dog food?” Wouldn't it be great to know all the other search queries you rank for? Because we have a tool for that in Ahrefs. Let's put lowemeow.com into Ahrefs Site Explorer and go to a report called Organic Keywords. Here I can see all the search queries a target website or article ranks for. That's very cool, but not very practical to be honest. That's why I prefer the report called Top Pages.

It groups all these keywords that a website ranks for based on the ranking page. This way I can easily see which articles drive the most search traffic to this blog. The top-performing article on the lovemeow.com blog is titled “Why does my cat stick out its tongue?” And it arrives with almost 900 visitors from the United States alone. And the total traffic is 1,200. So how cool is that? Typically, when people see this feature for the first time, they are completely blown away by how much value they can get from it. In just a few seconds you will be able to see the best performing pages of any competitor.

And there is also a column with the number of domains referring to each of these pages. So all you need to do from here is select the pages that bring you the most traffic while also having the least amount of websites linking to them. And once you're done with the first competitor, you can click on Competitor Domains Report and see what other websites are ranking for the same search queries as this competitor. Here's an interesting one that I see right away: catster.com. Let's explore its main pages. It seems like your articles get a lot more search traffic than what we've seen on lovemeow.com.

And some of them have less than 10 referring domains. Which means it should be pretty easy to outrank them. And once you're done with catster.com, you can click on Competitive Domains again and dig even deeper into your competitive space. I'm sure you get the idea. So pause and take action! Spend some time researching your competitors' websites and better note their pages in your spreadsheet. And I have one last source of awesome content ideas left for you. Part 4: How to find user-friendly content ideas all over the web. I just showed you how to research your competitors' content and find some golden nuggets that you can easily replicate on your own blog.

But you can only do this with one competitor at a time. How cool would it be to research the entire niche at once? Let me show you how you can do exactly that. We have a tool called Content Explorer, which is basically a database of 846 million pieces of content that the Ahrefs crawler has collected from all over the web. And I can enter any word in the search bar and find all content that mentions this word in its content, title or both. Let's continue with the word "cats" as an example. I want to find all the pages on the entire web that have the word "cats" in their title.

Which results in more than a million pages. Now, let's see how many of these pages receive more than a thousand visits per month from Google. We have a filter for that here. And now we are down to just over 2,000 pages, which generate more than a thousand monthly Google visits. That's about 0.1% of all pages that mention the word "cats" in their title. Which says a lot about the performance of most published content, right? But how many of these pages generate search traffic without backlinks pointing to them? We also have a filter for that. It's called Referring Domains.

Let's put it 0. And now I only have 63 pages left. Let's sort them by the amount of search traffic to see the best ones at the top. And if I scroll down a little bit, I'll see a fantastic article: "The Best Flea Treatment for Cats of 2017." It gets almost 5000 visits per month from Google and has no backlinks! What an incredible opportunity! I can also click the Details button and see which keywords are driving search traffic to this article. It seems to rank very high on things like "best flea treatment for cats", "best flea medicine for cats", "flea treatment for cats" and so on.

It's an amazing content opportunity that took me less than a minute to discover. Here are some more great articles from that list: “How to Calm a Cat in Heat,” “Tips for Moving a Cat Long Distances,” “Safe Fruits for Your Cat.” They all get search trafficdecent with 0 backlinks. And I only tested a single keyword, “cats,” and only focused on articles with 0 backlinks and 1000+ search visitors. I can also try other relevant keywords like “kittens” and loosen my filters a bit to get content ideas with a little less traffic and a few more backlinks. Which will give me many more results to explore.

So how cool is that? As you can see, the Content Explorer tool is a unique and incredibly valuable tool, because it allows you to filter almost all content on the Internet. And find what generates the most search traffic with the least amount of backlinks. When I shared this trick with our Facebook community, people were totally impressed and immediately used it to find great content ideas for their sites. So pause and try it yourself. I'm sure you'll find something interesting for your own blog too. And one last thing I should mention is the domain rating of your website.

Which represents the strength of your website's overall backlink profile. As a general rule, it can be difficult to outperform websites that have a high domain ranking. For example, here you can see a Huffington Post article titled "The 100 Most Adorable and Cutest Cat Names." It has 0 referring domains, but huffingtonpost.com's domain rating is 80, which is very high. So if your own website's domain rating is much lower than that, like 60 or less, your article is unlikely to outperform huffingtonpost.com. I mean, if both articles have 0 backlinks, it's obvious that Google will choose the one. which was posted on a more robust website.

But if you build a ton of quality backlinks for your own article, you have a chance to outperform even high DR domains. Also note that the numbers you see in Content Explorer are cached. I mean there is a slight discrepancy in the backlink and traffic numbers for the same article in Site Explorer and Content Explorer. But that discrepancy shouldn't be too big, since we update all numbers pretty regularly. And that sums up the four strategies that will provide you with a nearly endless source of great content ideas. And now is the time to prioritize these ideas in your content calendar.

Part 5. How to Prioritize Your Content Ideas List If you were taking action while watching this lesson, I'm sure your content ideas spreadsheet is full of nuggets of gold. Which should be quite satisfactory. But how do you decide which of them you should tackle first? Well, in the first few lessons of this course I promised that we would focus on the business value of blogging. What's the point of investing your time and resources to attract people to your website, if these people don't buy from you? Therefore, we need to add one more column to our spreadsheet and call it Business Value.

To fill out a cell in this column, you'll need to ask yourself: "What are the chances that a person who searches for something on Google and reads my article on that topic will become my customer?" I usually give my content ideas a score from 0 to 3, where 3 means that my product or service is an absolutely irreplaceable solution to a target search query, leading to an easy sale; 2 means my company will help people with what they are looking for, but is not essential to solving their search query; 1 means that my business can only be mentioned in passing, because the search query is only loosely related to what I sell.

And 0 means I don't even have the chance to include a single mention of my business in the article. At the beginning of this course I told you that with the Ahrefs blog we never had the goal of increasing the amount of monthly traffic. We wanted to make our blog a customer acquisition channel and increase the monthly number of leads it generates. That's why we often had to ignore topics with huge traffic potential in favor of topics with huge business potential. Let me explain it with a very vivid example. Chances are you've heard of HubSpot. They are one of the biggest brands in the field of digital marketing software.

They have 1,800 employees and a huge content marketing team that runs their blog. According to Ahrefs, HubSpot's blog receives almost 2 million visits per month from Google. Which is an absolutely staggering number. So let's look at your best performing articles using the Top Pages report in Ahrefs. And here is their best article, which brings them almost 80,000 visitors a month in the US alone and represents 8% of all their blog traffic:. "How to make an animated GIF in Photoshop". Yes, it is not a mistake. Their best performing article is a tutorial on how to create a gif image. Does this article grow your business?

Well, the product that HubSpot sells can be described as a “marketing CRM.” And if you ask me, the path of someone looking for a tutorial on how to create a GIF image to becoming a paid user of a "marketing CRM" is something of a maze. I mean, people who Google “how to make a gif” are clearly not your dream clients. So this content idea would get a business potential score of 0 from me. Now, let's examine our own blog and see if we practice what we preach. These are the articles that drive the most search traffic to the Ahrefs blog: "keyword research", "top Google searches", "website traffic", "SEO tips", "SEO audit" , etc.

Obviously, these articles are nowhere near "How to Make a GIF" in terms of traffic numbers. But they convert readers into Ahrefs customers very well. Here's a tweet from last week to prove it. This guy made a free trial of Ahrefs after reading our long-tail keyword guide. And a few weeks later, he tweeted that he had become our paying customer. This is exactly what we aim to achieve with almost every article we publish on our blog. And it's extremely important to keep this in mind at all times. Search volume does not equal business opportunities. This is why marketers are so obsessed with search queries.

Keywords containing the word "buy" (or its synonyms): "best place to buy a DSLR camera", "hire a business advisor", "rent an apartment in London These searches clearly indicate that person". What is behind them is one step away from taking money from your wallet. But in all honesty, you shouldn't ignore their generic versions with much higher search volume just because the search traffic coming from them would be harder to convert into customers: especially if you have some experience writing good sales copy and persuading customers. people to buy what to sell. A person looking for a "business coach" may not be ready to hire one right away, but it's her article that might persuade them to do so.

So if the more specific search query with a clear purchase intent gets a business value of 3, the generic one would still get 2 from me. All you need to do is be reasonable with your business value scores and don't get fooled by writing guides on how to create a GIF image, unless, of course, you sell some kind of gif-creating software. And that's the end of lesson #4. Now, you should have a perfect understanding of where to get almost unlimited content ideas and how to vet them for search traffic potential, ranking difficulty, and business value. And in the next lesson I'll show you how to make sure your article is properly optimized for the search query you're targeting.

Sounds good? Then I'll see you in lesson #5. Welcome to lesson #5. How to optimize your article for a target keyword and generate maximum search traffic with it. Here's what we're going to cover: the all-important “search engine intent” and how to relate it to your article; How to optimize your article for a given keyword so that it is perfectly relevant in the eyes of Google; How to make the most of your article's search traffic; And finally, how to audit your existing content and get the most out of it. So, let's go! Part 1. What is “searcher intent” and how to combine it?

In Lesson 3 I said that the biggest mistake that prevents bloggers from getting search traffic is writing articles about things that no one searches for. Well, as soon as newbie bloggers learn about keyword research and how to identify the total search traffic potential of a given topic that we covered in Lesson #3, they start making their second biggest mistake: targeting the wrong keyword. How is that possible, you might ask? Well... let me share with you a short story. Once upon a time there was a proposal from one of our clients as a guest. I wanted to write a post on how to use Ahrefs for advertising research.

We have this paid search section in Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool, which shows you the keywords a target website is advertising through Google AdWords. Along with their ads and landing pages, where they send this paid traffic. And this is what he offered to cover in his guest post, along with some good examples. I thought it would be nice to have an Ahrefs blog post with this functionality, so I forwarded this email to my team and asked to do some quick keyword research and find a good keyword we could target with that guest post. And they responded to me with a keyword “ad research,” which has a monthly search volume of 450 searches per month in the US and around 100 visits from search to some of the top ranking results.

So that's a green light, right? Mistaken! Looking at the top 10 ranking pages for this keyword, I can see that they speak to advertising research in general. While the guest article they suggested to us was going to talk about researching their competitors' AdWords pay-per-click strategies. Which is a very specific and limited topic. I mean, people who Google "ad research" aren't necessarily specifically interested in pay-per-click advertising. Otherwise, you'd Google "pay per click advertising research," right? Therefore, we would be making a big mistake if we tried to target the keyword “ad research” with an article about pay-per-click advertising research.

That article would not meet so-called searcher intent, which Google can easily decipher by looking at how users behave after clicking on your article in search results. They would just bounce if they didn't see what they were looking for. So what search query would be appropriate for that article? I brainstormed some relevant searches, tested my assumptions in Keyword Explorer and came up with these: "Adwords competitor analysis", "pay per click competitor analysis", "pay per click competitor" . Sure, the search volume for all three isn't particularly interesting, but at least they're perfectly relevant to the suggested guest post. And the top-ranking pages for these keywords receive some search traffic, according to Ahrefs.

What I remind you is always an understatement. Unfortunately, we didn't end up publishing that article, so I can't show you the results. But at least I have an interesting story that illustrates the importance of targeting the right intent of the searcher. Too often, newbie bloggers would try to optimize their article for the keyword with the highest search volume, ignoring the fact that their article doesn't really match the intent of the people searching for that keyword. And while they think they're making a smart decision, they're actually shooting themselves in the foot, because Google is pretty smart at figuring out what people want when they search for something.

And if your page doesn't give them that, it won't rank at the top. So if you have a great idea for an article, but there isn't much search demand for that topic, don't try to trick Google and optimize it for something it's not: a broad topic with high search demand. You should choose the most relevant search query, even if the search volume seems low. At least this way you'll have a good chance of ranking for that keyword and getting very relevant search traffic. Here's a little exercise to help you reconfirm that you're targeting the right keyword.

Take the draft of your article and send it to some friends or coworkers, asking them what it is about. The words they will use to describe your article will help you understand what type of search queries it deserves to rank for on Google. But what if you don't have a yet?high. I see this happen quite often. And lastly, your previous articles may simply be targeting the wrong keyword and therefore not bringing you any traffic. Discovering the right searcher intent and re-optimizing your article for the right keyword can do wonders for your search traffic. This is how you audit your existing content.

Review all the published articles you have on your blog and assign them to one of the three groups below. Group #1: “Update” These are the articles that already bring you good traffic from search. I'm pretty sure each and every one of them could be improved in some way, using the tactics you just learned. Even your best performing items can be updated and improved. Take a moment to think about it. Most bloggers never bother to improve their top-performing articles, and that's a big mistake. Because the guys below you are probably working hard to surpass you. Group #2: "Merge" It doesn't make much sense to have several articles on the same topic.

It is always better to have one excellent and detailed article than five mediocre ones. Especially, if those duplicate articles have some backlinks. You can use 301 redirects to direct these backlinks to your main article on that topic and help you rank better. Group #3: "Delete" This group is optional. But here at Ahrefs Blog we have removed almost half of our old articles. The main reason for doing so was that these articles were massively outdated and were not generating any search traffic. So removing them made no difference to our traffic. However, some people believe that getting rid of low-performing content makes Google love your website more.

I can't prove or disprove that claim, but if I were in charge of Google, I would definitely use something like that as a ranking signal. And that's pretty much it. I'm sure you have many great articles on your blog that could be improved even more. Do this and you will see a nice increase in traffic in the coming weeks. And then you'll be able to go ahead and publish some amazing new articles, using all the tactics and strategies you've learned so far in this course. Speaking of writing amazing articles, that's exactly what we'll cover in the next lesson.

Sounds good? Then I'll see you there. Welcome to lesson #6. How to Create Great Content That Promotes Yourself Here's what we're going to cover: First, I'll explain why your content has to be great in the first place. Then I'll give you some practical tips on how to create the kind of content that people will be interested in reading and sharing with others. And finally, we'll talk about creating unique content that will help you stand out. So, let's go! Part 1. Why your content has to be great I already gave you a lot of great tips on keyword research and how to discover great topics to write about on your blog.

And I'm about to teach you how to promote your content and how to create backlinks to your content, so that it ranks high on Google and brings you passive search traffic every month. But there is something in between, which is tremendously important to the success of your blog. And that is creating great content. I know, I know, you've probably heard this advice a thousand times and your first reaction would be, "Tim, please, let's skip that and move on to the things that matter." But what matters are the things. The quality of your content predetermines the very success of your blog.

If your content is horrible, all the promotion and link building tactics I'm about to share with you won't work. And also the other way around: if your content is top-notch, you will have to put much less effort into promoting it. Word of mouth will do the work for you. So, to summarize: great content promotes itself. While horrible content is very difficult to promote. Let me give you some good examples from the Ahrefs blog. I'm sure you know Reddit. This is an online community where many very smart people gather. And they are very skeptical most of the time.

So if there are any problems with what you posted there, you can be sure that they will communicate it very clearly. And here is the thread, where someone posted an article from Ahrefs blog. When I saw it had 20 comments, my first thought was that Redditors were grilling us. But it turned out that they were actually super positive. And not only did they say good things about that specific article that was published, but about our blog content in general. Look at yourself: "Can't I be the one who finds Ahrefs blog posts really good?" "Ahrefs always seems to have great posts." “Yes, I like your posts too.” "I agree, I really like his stuff." So what did we do to get these rave reviews on Reddit?

Nothing! We didn't submit our article to Reddit, one of our readers did. We didn't ask our friends and coworkers to post positive comments; the Reddit community naturally enjoyed our content. As you can probably see, we get quite a bit of traffic from this Reddit thread. And it all happened without intervention from our marketing team. All we had to do was post a great article on our blog and the promotion on Reddit came naturally. Here is another example. You may know the GrowthHackers community, where some people submit content they liked and others review it and vote on it, if they like it.

The top-voted articles of the week are then emailed to all community members. And that's hundreds of thousands of people. So here is one of those weekly newsletters, where an article from Ahrefs Blog got the number one position. This case is very similar to Reddit in that we didn't have to do anything to make it happen. It was not our employee who submitted this article to GrowthHackers and all the upvotes were 100% natural. I didn't even know our article was trending on GrowthHackers until I received this newsletter via email. Again, no promotion was done to make this happen.

All we did was publish a great article that our readers enjoyed and shared with others. But don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating promoting your content on Reddit, GrowhHackers, or any similar community that exists in your niche. It's called the "Publish and Pray" approach and it won't get you very far. I recommend that you be active in all the places where your target audience is. And promote your content to these people, whenever you have the opportunity. With these two examples I was trying to illustrate how easy it is to get traction in these communities, when your content is objectively amazing.

So instead of spending your time looking for “secret” marketing tactics to help you hijack these communities, you should spend all this time making your content as awesome as possible! Because this is the best way to conquer any audience and turn them into your fans. Your goal is to make your content so amazing that anyone who reads it will want to share it with someone else. I love what Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, tweeted the other day: "When I write a post, I think about answering just this question with a Yes: "Would someone email this article to a friend?" With Too often bloggers think their content fails because they don't promote it enough, when in reality their content fails because it's horrible.

In the words of Ryan Holiday: "Promotion isn't how great things are made, it's just how they are. "So before you start promoting your new content, make sure it's worth promoting in the first place. Part #2. How to create content that people will be interested in reading and sharing with others. Most of the resources that What I've examined while preparing for this course will advise you to "create great content" and call it a day. I mean, what does "create great content" mean? And how do you know if it's not? Well, I don't consider myself a marketing superstar? contents, but in the last few years I managed to make Ahrefs Blog one of the best in the SEO space And I think, along the way, I discovered some ingredients that will make your content great: here they are: quality, uniqueness and authority.

Let me expand on each of them one by one. Quality Honestly, there is no shortage of tips on how to improve the quality of your content So I'll do a quick summary of the things I'm sure you're already familiar with. Learn to write well. Writing is a skill that almost anyone can learn and master. Think about playing a guitar. When you try it for the first time, you can surely make some sounds, but it can hardly be called music. But then you learn some chords, how to play strings, etc. And after a while your friends ask you to pick up the guitar and play something for them.

The same goes for writing, at first it will be very clumsy and difficult to read, but after you learn and practice a little, people will start to enjoy your articles. Fortunately, there is no shortage of advice on the topic "how to improve your writing." Just start learning and practicing as soon as possible. Now, the next thing you should do to improve the quality of your content is... Improve its appearance. It is a well-studied fact that most people will skim the article before reading it, which will help them evaluate whether it is worth reading. And if your article doesn't look good, people are unlikely to risk their time reading it.

These are the things that make your content visually appealing. The design of your blog, quality images, short paragraphs, subtitles, quotes, lists and all kinds of formatting tricks. All of these things make your article pleasing to the human eye and convey the message to your blog visitors that the author of the article invested a lot of time to ensure a pleasant reading experience. But let's move on. The last but not the least. You need to create an eye-catching headline. The title is the only part of your entire article that people will see on Twitter, Facebook, Google, and on your blog's home page.

Which means you only have a dozen words to persuade people that your article is worth their attention. Writing headlines that draw people to your article is as much art as science. There are many ready-made headline templates that you can try using, as well as many psychological tricks that will teach you how to create your own attention-grabbing headlines. I won't teach you any of that because I'm not a professional copywriter. But there is one piece of advice I can give you. Be sure to brainstorm at least five different headlines for each article you write. If you don't invest the time and effort into creating just five headline variations to choose from, the entire article will almost certainly fail, no matter how good it is.

In the words of Uber's Andrew Chen, "Titles are often written as a vague idea, but in fact, it's the most important creative decision you'll ever make." And that concludes my brief summary on how to improve the quality of your content. But honestly, all these things are just a representation of the real idea behind your article. Which brings us to the second ingredient of great content: uniqueness. I see a pretty disturbing trend in the blogging and content marketing space. When searching for a keyword, many people research everything that has already been published on that topic and then try to summarize it all in a single article.

But this way you are only creating a copy of the existing content and not adding any additional value. And if it's a clone, it doesn't deserve any more attention than the original. So, with this approach, you will immediately put yourself one step behind your competition. If you want to stand out with your content, it has to be unique. So how to create unique content? Well, you still have to research everything that has already been published on the subject. But then you don't create a clone. You create something that would be different from what already exists. The ideal is to say something that has not been said before.

Which is quite difficult to do as it requires you to be at the forefront of your industry. These people are called opinion leaders. And chances are you're not one of them yet. So another option is to find a new angle, which would be somewhat different from the conventional opinion on that topic. The ideal would be to make a 180 degree turn and challenge the status quo; This usually generates a lot of commotion. But only if you have good arguments to defend your point. And finally, if the above is not an option, you can simply try to explain that topic better.

You may not be the thought leader of your industry, but you could be a great writer, teacher, and storyteller. If you spend enough time finding better arguments, better evidence, and better examples, you have a chance to surpass the original article on that topic. And now, here's the last ingredient of great content: authority. As I just mentioned, in order to say something completely new and unique, you have to be at the forefront of your industry. You have to be an authority in your niche. Let's say I do research for a few weeks and write aInteresting article on the topic of Mars colonization.

Would you read my article on that topic? Or would you prefer to learn about the colonization of Mars from someone with more authority on the subject? Like Elon Musk, for example. If you go to YouTube and search for his talks on that topic, you will see that they get millions of views. This is because Elon Musk is probably the most qualified person in the world to talk about the colonization of Mars. Then you know that he can teach you many things that you won't be able to find anywhere else. Hence the incredible number of visits. And that's a good example of the impact that authority and credibility have on the content you create.

But what if you're not the Elon Musk of your industry? Does that mean you're doomed to oblivion? You are welcome! There's a simple trick to "hacking" authority that writers have been using for years. Take a look at this article on Wait But Why, which explains the colonization of Mars from start to finish. It's very long, so you'll need a pretty compelling reason to spend time on it, right? Well, how about that? This article was co-written by Elon Musk. I bet you're thinking now that every paragraph of this post is worth it, right? This is how authority is "hacked".

If you're not the best person to talk to about a certain topic, find that best person and interview them. Obviously, it is almost impossible to contact a person like Elon Musk and interview him for his article. But I'm sure that whatever industry he's in, there are plenty of high-profile people who are easily accessible. Let's think about journalists. This is one of the central duties of your profession: finding credible sources and using them in your writing. If you want to create great content, you must be a journalist. Here is an example from our own article on the Ahrefs blog, where we tried to answer a question “how to become a marketing manager”.

We could easily publish an article on that topic in a few hours and call it a day. But instead, we took the time to reach out to 10 high-profile marketers and used their advice to create a great resource on that topic. As you can see, we feature all 10 at the beginning of our article, to show our readers that there are quite a few very smart people behind what they are about to read. Part 3. How to Create Unique Content That Stands Out As you may already know, I'm a big proponent of creating 100% unique content instead of rewriting what's already published.

If you write about things that can't be found anywhere else, your blog is almost guaranteed to be a success. But where do you find these unique things to blog about? I really like what Rohin Dhar, CEO and founder of Priceonomics, said in his Content Marketing Playbook: "Authentic information that your company has access to is the currency of truly valuable content marketing. Sure, there may be more There is "shareable" content: cute animal pictures, snarky comments, celebrity gossip and the like, but those things won't give your customers information, on the other hand, they can be data that your company produces, insights that you produce. have experience in the industry or stories about the people you have access to.

Let's focus on that last sentence. You can create unique content from: The data your company produces; Information you have due to your experience in the industry; And stories from the people you have access to. I admit it's easy for me to defend these things, since I work at Ahrefs. We have tons of data that we can study. We have tons of unique knowledge we can share; And we have access to the best minds in the SEO industry. But what if you are a newbie blogger and don't have these kinds of luxuries? Well, actually yes! Anyone can collect unique data about their industry.

Anyone can contribute unique ideas related to their industry. Anyone can connect with industry experts and get a little help from them. I know this because not long ago I was a newbie blogger myself. Check out this article I wrote on my personal blog back then. I wanted to write a post about guest blogging, but there were already a ton of articles on that topic, published by well-known people with a lot of authority and a large audience. My only option to stand out among them was to do something completely unique. What no one else did before me.

Well, remember my advice from earlier in this lesson? I decided to do a 180 degree turn and challenge what all the existing guides said about guest blogging. I wrote a few guest posts before and didn't see any of the results that all these guides promised me I would get. Then I could easily write an interesting article based on my own experience in guest blogging. But why would people listen to a random blogger with no credibility, right? As we just mentioned, people want to learn from authorities. So I followed another tip from this lesson. I acted as a journalist and reached out to over 500 bloggers, big and small, and asked them to share with me some data about the performance of their guest posts and whether they were happy with the results.

This entire undertaking resulted in one of my best articles to date. And even though it was posted on my personal blog, which barely gets any traffic, that article generated quite a stir and garnered over a hundred links from 60 different websites. And it generated a total of 10,000 visits to my blog. And it's still generating some passive traffic even years later. Could you get these types of results by writing an article with the same tips that can be found in other guest blogging articles? Of course not! My article worked so well because it was 100% unique. So I hope my story discourages you from creating new clones of existing content and encourages you to bring something completely new to this world.

Let's be honest. The vast majority of people are too lazy to do this kind of thing. But that's actually a good thing! The more steps you take to make your content amazing and unique, the less competition you will find. And that concludes the lesson on how to create amazing content. And in the next one we'll start talking about link building and the type of content that attracts links. Sounds good? Then I'll see you in the next lesson. Welcome to lesson #7. How to create link-worthy content (and stop worrying about link building). This is what we are about to cover.

Do you always need backlinks to rank? How to create content that attracts backlinks. And finally, the rarely mentioned “secret” to acquiring backlinks. So, let's go! Part 1. Do you always need backlinks to rank? This is a difficult question to answer. So let's start with some facts. Fact #1: Google's Andrey Lipattsev has revealed that backlinks are one of Google's top three ranking signals; Fact #2: Most SEO professionals agree that it is not possible to rank on Google without backlinks. And fact number 3: There were quite a few SEO research studies that showed a pretty notable correlation between the number of backlinks pointing to a page and that page's position in Google search results.

A while back we even ran our own correlation study here at Ahrefs. We analyzed the search results of almost 2 million random search queries and found that backlink factors correlate with Google rank much better than any other factor. Even using an exact match keyword in the title, headline, or even the actual content of that page had a weaker correlation. So, it seems like everything is in favor of backlinks, right? Well, in that case, why did ⅓ of the SEOs in my survey vote that you can rank on Google without any backlinks? This is because the question itself is complicated.

Can you rank on Google without backlinks? This is not a “Yes or No” question. The only correct answer here is "it depends." So let me explain with a nice example what caused such contrasting opinions. I'm a big fan of a video game called Fallout and I also have a bad habit of researching anything on Ahrefs. So when I discovered that there was a Wikipedia for all of Fallout, naturally I put it on Ahrefs to see what was going on there. It turns out that this website generates over 20 million Google visits every month! Which is a pretty impressive number.

So the next two things I wanted to know were: how many pages are responsible for this huge search traffic? And how many backlinks do they have in total? I can see the number of linked websites directly in the Site Explorer tool overview report. It says 7,500. And to see the number of pages that are driving you traffic from search, I need the Top Pages report, which can be found in the Organic Search section. The default is US, so I change to All Countries and get over 65,000 pages driving search traffic to this website. So what do we have here?

More than 65,000 pages with search traffic; And only 7,500 linked websites. Do you see where I'm going with this? Looking at these two numbers, you realize that there is absolutely no way that all pages with search traffic have backlinks, right? Let's see if that's the case. I'm going to look for pages on Fallout bobbleheads (because I actually have some on my desk). As you can see in the RD column, many of these pages do not have any websites linked to them, and yet they receive thousands of visitors per month through search. So, did we just get proof that you can get search traffic without backlinks?

Well... Yes and no. There are three things in place that allow these pages to get a lot of search traffic without any backlinks pointing to them. First of all, there is simply a lack of competition. The amount of content that can be found on Google on the topic of Fallout bobbleheads is very small. If I put "Fallout 4 intelligence doll" into Google, it will only return 1,500 results. That's nothing! It means that only a few pages on the Internet mention this. Try another topic, like "keyword research," for example, and you'll get 450,000 results. Second, the top-ranking pages don't have any backlinks pointing to them.

Let's put "Fallout 4 intelligence bobblehead" into Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and see how many backlinks the top 10 ranking results have. The "SERP Overview" report shows me that 8 of the top 10 ranking pages have 0 backlinks. Which means that a quality, relevant page has a good chance of ranking for this keyword even without any backlinks pointing to it. And finally, third point. All of the top 10 ranking results have a high domain rating. See that DR column? It stands for Domain Ranking and reflects the strength of the overall backlink profile of each website. Therefore, the top-ranking pages do not have backlinks pointing directly to them.

But the websites they belong to have many backlinks. And in this particular case, the weakest DR is 68. Which means that all of these high-ranking pages belong to very strong websites. And if your own website's domain ranking is much weaker than that, it's highly unlikely you'll be able to surpass it. Unless, of course, your page has some good backlinks pointing directly to it. Like that outlier I'm sure you've noticed. The domain rating of this website is only 59, which is much weaker than 68, especially considering that Ahrefs DR scale is logarithmic. But that page has 9 backlinks coming from 4 different websites, allowing it to rank among the sites with a much higher domain rating.

And besides, that page isn't even perfectly relevant to our search query. I mean, the search query specifically asks about "intelligence doll", while that particular page talks about "doll locations". So how is it possible that a page is not perfectly relevant to the search query? Well, that's because it has more backlinks than other pages, which sends a signal to Google that this page must be very important. And I think this is a pretty good example of how backlinks help you rank on Google and generate search traffic. So let's figure everything out real quick. For your page to rank on Google without backlinks, three requirements must be met: First, you must be missing pages on that topic on Google.

Second, the top 10 ranking pages for that keyword should not have any backlinks pointing to them. Thirdly, your website's domain rating should be higher or at leastcomparable to the domain rating of top-ranked websites. Obviously, I'm simplifying things quite a bit, but you get the general idea, right? And in fact, it almost never happens that a popular search query with good business potential meets these three requirements. Therefore, in the absolute majority of cases, you will need backlinks pointing directly to your page in order for it to rank high on Google. And in case you decide to focus on some "unpopular" topic where the top-ranking pages don't have any backlinks pointing to them, you still need a decent domain rating.

This indicates that your website has accumulated enough of the so-called "link juice" that it can be transferred to other pages via internal links. And the natural question that arises at this point is: How can I increase the domain rating or domain authority of my website, so that pages that do not have backlinks still rank well in Google and generate traffic? search? Well, all you need to do is create content that attracts a lot of backlinks so you can then funnel the “backlink” from these pages to pages that are having a hard time getting links through internal links.

In SEO we call this type of content "linkable content", "linkbait", "link-worthy pages" or "linkable assets". All of these terms mean more or less the same thing. And the next section of this lesson is about just that. Part 2. How to Create Content That Attracts Backlinks The entire lesson number 6 (the previous one) was dedicated to the topic of “great content.” I showed you that making your content great is very important. Mainly because great content promotes itself, while horrible content will always fail, no matter how much you promote it. Well, great content also tends to attract a lot of backlinks.

Great content = linkable content. End of lesson. Just kidding. Great content doesn't always attract backlinks. There are a few more requirements that must be met. In essence, linking is just a form of sharing. But just because some content is "great" doesn't necessarily mean you'll share it with others, right? Let's say you're having trouble tying your tie and you found a great video that solved this problem. So would you go ahead and tweet it? I do not think. Linking to that video is even more unlikely since it requires much more effort than a simple tweet. And also, to link to content, you must own some type of web property that you can link from.

Something that the vast majority of people do not have. This is why link acquisition is a tough nut to crack. If you want your article to attract backlinks, you need to make your readers want to share it with others. Fortunately, there has been a lot of research into how word of mouth works and what makes people want to share something with their social circles. Generally, the things that people like to share are classified into one of four categories: Emotion, Utility, Numbers and Stories In the first group we have content that will provoke an emotion in you, for example, the news will often take us by surprise. , they will make us angry or in very rare cases, they can also annoy us. encourage us.

And once you feel that emotion, you naturally want to share it with others. Humans are social creatures and we tend to transmit our emotions to each other, rather than keeping them inside. If we discover something particularly useful, we will be inclined to share it with others. This is a way to earn the so-called "social currency." If you provide value to society by helping them solve their problems, society will do so. I love you too. The third group has to do with numbers. Numbers help us make a point and add credibility to what we say. That's why we like to reference research to solidify our argument.

And finally, stories. We love them because they are easy to identify with. It's one thing to read some general tips on how to lose weight. But it's totally different to read a true story of how someone has lost weight and learn from their first-hand experience. These are the four general types of content that people like to share and some basic psychology behind them. At this point I must tell you that I am not a doctor in Psychology and the advice I have just given you is quite basic. But it should be enough to get you thinking in the right direction.

And if you decide to go beyond that advice (which in fact I suggest you do), there is a great book that I can't recommend enough. Contagious by Jonah Berger – An absolute must-read for any content marketer. So that was the theory. Now, how about some practical tips? I just gave you four types of content that should attract backlinks, but how do you know which type will work best in your specific industry? You may decide to try everything and see what works. But it is usually not necessary to do this. Because? Because chances are your competitors have already done the hard work for you.

All you need to do is analyze their content and find out what generated them the most backlinks. Let me show you how it's done using Ahrefs Blog as an example. I'll copy our blog URL and put it in Site Explorer. The report I need is called "Better by Links." This report will give me a list of all Ahrefs blog articles ordered by the number of links they have. Looking at this report, I can see that six of our 10 most linked articles are research studies. Which means that in our industry people prefer to link to data-driven posts.

The most successful of our research studies is the one that gives a numerical answer to an extremely popular SEO question: "How long does it take to rank on Google?" This study has links from almost 500 websites. What about the other four of our 10 most linked articles? These are included in the "Utilities" group: a guide to keyword research, a guide to link building, a guide to outreach, and a collection of practical SEO tips. These are very detailed and practical guides that teach people different aspects of SEO. And because of their usefulness they brought quite a few links to our blog.

This is how you analyze what tends to attract backlinks in your industry by studying your competitors. Simply connect your site to Ahrefs Site Explorer, go to the Best by Links report, and look for patterns. Try it now! I'm sure you'll get plenty of ideas for link-worthy content in less than five minutes. And this concludes the section on creating link-worthy content. I guess you won't be surprised if I say that we have covered this topic on the Ahrefs Blog. The article is called “Deconstructing Linkbait” and I recommend you check it out for additional information. But don't be fooled by the terminology.

Linkbait, linkable assets, link-worthy content – ​​these things sound like they generate backlinks out of nowhere. Which is obviously not true. If you want your content to get links, you need to take a look at it first. Because people can't attach themselves to things they don't know exist! In other words, even link-worthy articles require a lot of promotion to get links. And before I give you a list of the best content promotion strategies, here's a "secret" to acquiring backlinks that marketers rarely talk about. Part 3. The Rarely Mentioned “Secret” to Acquiring Backlinks I hope you noticed that I am using quotes around the word “secret.” This is because it's not really a secret that someone would hide from you on purpose.

It is rather an "unsexy" topic that marketers cannot present to their audience. And you're about to find out why. Let's look at another poll I did in our Facebook group. I asked what percentage of backlinks our clients were proactively creating, rather than acquiring them naturally. And more than 30% of respondents said that the majority of their backlinks are natural. But let's define the term "natural backlink." Definitions may vary from person to person, but in my opinion, a backlink can be considered "natural" if you made no effort to connect to the linked website or anyone associated with it.

Let's say you sent someone a personal disclosure email with a notice about your article. You didn't ask for a link directly, but they linked to your article anyway. By my definition, that is not a natural backlink. You made a specific effort to acquire a link from that specific website, so that link is considered manually created. But let's say you tweeted your newly published article and one of your Twitter followers linked to it from his website. In that case, it is a perfectly natural link. This time you did not direct your efforts towards that specific person and his specific website.

This was a message spread to all his Twitter followers. And we've arrived at that link acquisition "secret" I wanted to share with you. You can acquire tons of natural backlinks by broadcasting your content to a large audience of your fans. Here at Ahrefs we only create about 20% of our backlinks manually. While 80% of them arise naturally as a result of broadcasting our content to a large audience of people. We have an email list of almost 50,000 blog subscribers. We have notifications built into our software, which tens of thousands of people use daily. And we have many followers on Twitter and Facebook.

These three channels alone allow us to reach a fairly significant number of people without spending a single dollar. And then there's also paid outreach. For every article we publish, we have a decent advertising budget, which we can use to reach relevant people on different platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. The more money we invest in our ads, the more people we will reach. So, with each article we publish on the Ahrefs Blog we can easily reach a relatively large number of people. And if your article deserves a link, some of these people will naturally link to it.

This is how almost every article we publish ends up in Google's top 10 without our marketing team doing any manual link building. That's the "unsexy" secret to acquiring backlinks. Large audience of fans plus a solid advertising budget. I'm sure now you understand why I called him "unsexy." Because most people don't have a large audience of fans or any budget for content promotion. Well, I was there too when I ran my personal blog and started my own projects. And in those days my link building was the exact opposite of what it is today on Ahrefs. I was creating 80% of all my backlinks manually and only about 20% of them came naturally.

That was very tedious. So if you are just starting out with your blog, I have bad news for you. Until you get a large audience to stream your newly published content or allocate some money to spend on ads, you'll have to create most of your backlinks manually. The bottom line: start building your audience as soon as possible. The sooner you build a large audience of people you can easily reach with your newly published content, the sooner you can ditch all those tedious link building tactics. Speaking of what. The topic of our next lesson is content promotion.

Sounds good? Then see you in the next lesson! Welcome to lesson #8. How to promote your content and get it to rank highly on Google. This is what we are going to cover in this lesson. Four common mistakes in content promotion. The best content promotion strategies. And how to compete with the "big guys" in Google search results. So, let's go! Part 1. Four common mistakes in content promotion Let me ask you a question: what goal do you have in mind when promoting your content? For the vast majority of people, the goal of content promotion is to get as much traffic as possible to their newly published article.

And they are super happy and satisfied if they manage to beat the traffic record of one previously published. Sounds like a great goal to pursue, one that aligns perfectly with the goal of growing your blog and your business, right? Well, no. If your only goal with content promotion is to generate short-term traffic, I suggest you go back and watch this course again, starting from the first lesson. Because by focusing on short-term traffic, you're focusing on the "hope spike," which, as we've discussed in those first few lessons, will eventually fade and take you back to where you started.

If you want your blog to grow, you should focus your efforts on generating constant, passive traffic. Which is obtained byPlace your articles at the top of Google search results! And that's pretty hard to do, I must say. Guess how many articles make it to the first page of Google within a year of being published? 5.7%!!! And by "get to Google's front page" I mean rank for at least a single related keyword, not even the main topic you're targeting. This percentage arises from a study we carried out last year. We tracked the performance of 2 million newly published pages and it turned out that only 5.7% of them appeared in Google's top 10 for at least a single keyword within a year of publication.

This means that a staggering 94.3% of all newly published pages never reach the first page of Google and never receive any search traffic. Can you guess why? This is because most people prefer to rely on the “Publish and Pray” approach and expect their pages to rank on Google on their own. Which obviously never happens. In the previous lesson we have discussed that your website cannot rank on Google without backlinks. Which brings us to the conclusion that the main goal of content promotion should be to create quality backlinks for your content so that it starts ranking on Google.

And this brings us to the first mistake of content promotion. Mistake #1: Focusing on short-term traffic instead of backlinks. But wait a minute, didn't I say in the previous lesson that Ahrefs Blog articles acquire 80% of their backlinks naturally as a result of driving traffic to them and hoping that some of these people link back to us? Which means “generating traffic” is basically equivalent to “acquiring backlinks.” So why am I saying now that you shouldn't focus on traffic? Well, the thing is, this equation is only valid for large, established blogs and won't really work for those who are just starting out.

Let me give you three reasons. Reason #1: Only a small percentage of all your visitors will link to you. From my personal experience, acquiring one natural backlink per thousand visitors is a pretty good result. So if you want to get just 10 natural links to your article, you should aim for that specific article to receive at least 10,000 visitors. If that math doesn't scare you, do it. But for most newbie bloggers, 10,000 visitors on a single article is far from achievable. Reason #2: People tend to link to websites they know and trust. This explains why Wikipedia has a ridiculous amount of backlinks and its articles are very difficult to top.

Most people would prefer to link to a Wikipedia article rather than a similar post on a blog they've never heard of before. No one wants to risk sending their readers to some questionable website, right? This is why new blogs have a hard time acquiring links naturally. And finally, reason number 3: Most people don't have a website to link from. It's easy for me to talk about acquiring natural links, while Ahrefs blog belongs to the Internet marketing niche where almost everyone owns a website. Usually even more than one. But in many other industries that is not the case.

Which makes acquiring natural links almost impossible. As you can see, converting traffic into natural backlinks is the kind of luxury that is only available to well-established websites and success depends largely on the type of industry you are in. If you are not in the fortunate position Despite being a well-known and established website, I am afraid that you will have to manually create your backlinks, rather than waiting for them to arise naturally. And I'm about to share with you quite a few practical link building strategies. But not before discussing three more mistakes in content promotion. Mistake #2: Giving up on content promotion too early.

Most bloggers have a so-called “content promotion checklist” that they refer to when promoting each new article they publish. It usually looks like this. Send a newsletter to email subscribers. Publish on social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc.). Submit to Reddit and any relevant forums and communities; Contact everyone who was mentioned in the article, etc. Some bloggers have more items on their checklist than others. But as soon as that list is completed, they forget about that item and move on to a new one. And that is a big mistake! You shouldn't stop promoting your article just because you no longer have items on your content promotion checklist, no matter how big that list is.

Your goal is to rank high on Google and generate passive search traffic for your article, remember? Therefore, promoting your content should not stop until you reach that goal. There is a fairly famous tip that suggests that you should spend 20% of your efforts creating content and 80% of your efforts promoting it. These numbers are intended to illustrate that content promotion is very important. And while I completely understand what the author of that advice was trying to say, I actually think it's a very misleading analogy. So I made up my own rule. It's called the 110/110 rule. And it means you have to go the extra mile on both: creating absolutely exceptional content that your readers will love; and promote it very hard and not give up until you reach the top positions in Google.

So why don't you do some research and add a few more items to your content promotion checklist? Luckily, there's no shortage of different tactics you can use, just do a little Googling and you'll find plenty of ideas. Let me add a few more items for you to consider. Submit your article to relevant groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.; Mention it in relevant conversations in public Slack channels; Repurpose your content in different formats (video, audio, slides, images) and distribute it on suitable websites with a link to the original; Please contact everyone who has linked articles on the same topic;

Please contact anyone who has published articles mentioning that topic; Publish a guest post referencing that article and make people want to read it. And here is something very important. Most of these strategies can only be used once, but some can be extended almost indefinitely. As a guest post. What's stopping you from publishing more and more guest posts that link to your article, thus helping it rise in Google rankings? The same goes for outreach, it fits quite well and is a great way to get quality backlinks. We will cover both strategies later. And now, mistake number 3: abandoning your old content Imagine the following situation.

A year ago you published a great article. You promoted it a lot and got some cool backlinks that helped it rank in the top 5 of Google for your main keyword. Being in the top 5 is a very good result, so you decided your job here was done and moved on to creating new content, without bothering to revisit that article. That doesn't seem like a bad scenario, right? Well, first of all, why would you settle for any Google position other than first? I mean, if that article brings customers to your business, you want it to get as much relevant search traffic as possible, right?

And furthermore, if the search query you are targeting has good commercial value, you can be sure that sooner or later your competitors will try to surpass you with their own articles. In other words, abandoning your content is a no-no. But what are your options? You can't just keep promoting the same article with the same content promotion strategies, because this way you will only irritate people. Well, there is a loophole you can use. After your article has been published for a few months, you should revisit it and find ways to improve it. And once you update your article, you can re-promote it with the same content promotion strategies as if it were new.

Here at Ahrefs we only spend half of our time and efforts creating new content. The other half goes to updating old content. Here's why we do that. First, if the article receives traffic from Google, we want to ensure that our visitors get the most up-to-date information on that topic. Letting our items age results in a poor user experience. Second, simply updating your article with new information sends a positive signal to Google and often leads to better rankings on its own. And finally, in most cases our updates are quite substantial. We often rewrite the entire article from scratch, which then allows us to promote it again to our audience as if it were new.

In fact, when we email our blog subscribers with a link to an updated article, we reveal that it's not entirely new. And so far there has not been a single complaint about it. In fact, we have found the opposite. The increase in traffic we get from promoting an updated article is almost always greater than when it was first published. Our “SEO Tips” article is probably the best example I have. We relaunched it three times in two years and each time we generated more and more traffic. You can bet we will continue to update and re-release it in the future.

And there is one last mistake in content promotion to discuss. Mistake #4: Not spending money on content promotion. As you already know, we have a decent advertising budget for every article we publish on the Ahrefs blog. This allows us to reach a large number of people that we would not otherwise be able to reach. But every time I mention this to other bloggers, most of them tell me that they can't afford to spend money on content promotion. Well, in psychology they call this a Limiting Belief. The truth is that you can afford to spend money on content promotion.

You just can't justify it. So let me try to help you with that. I have two good arguments that should work. Argument #1: “Free content promotion methods” are not free. So how long does it take you to promote new content? One hour? Five hours? Ten? And your time is worth something, right? So why don't you multiply your estimated hourly rate by the time it took you to complete all the items on your content promotion checklist? This way you'll get the cost of what you think are your "free" content promotion methods. And now that you know the price, why not add 10% to that sum and use that money to run a Facebook ad campaign?

Think of it as an extra item on your “free content promotion methods” checklist, but this time you're paying with your money instead of your time. And you may find that investing your money in Facebook ads has a much better ROI than spending your time on some of these other free strategies. Argument #2: Your content should sell your product. The best way to justify spending money on content promotion is to get this money back in the form of sales or customers. If an item doesn't bring new customers to your business, I can understand why you wouldn't want to spend money on it.

But why did you spend your time promoting it then? And in fact, if an article doesn't help you get new customers, why did you create it in the first place? See where I'm going with that? Promoting paid content is a litmus test to determine the commercial potential of your content. Here at Ahrefs we are not afraid to invest money in content promotion, because we know that our content generates conversions. Check out this tweet I saw the other day: "Great content on long tail keywords. Also allowed me to sign up for a free trial. Great job @ahrefs :)." And a few weeks later, Thomas also tweeted that he became our paying client.

Which is a perfect example of how our blog attracts new customers to our business. And here are the four content promotion mistakes I wanted to warn you about. Here's a quick refresher. Mistake #1: Focusing on short-term traffic instead of backlinks. Mistake #2: Giving up on content promotion too early. Mistake #3: Abandon your old content. Mistake #4: Not spending money on content promotion. And now it's time to review the actual content promotion strategies. Part 2. Best Content Promotion Strategies I'm sure you've researched the topic of content promotion before and seen plenty of tactics, strategies, and even so-called "growth hacks." And just when you think you've learned it all, you stumble upon a new case study that shows you how someone generated billions of visits to their blog with an incredible new tactic.Sounds familiar?

Well, you won't get any of that in my course. First of all, it is very important to understand that there is no tactic or strategy that will make horrible content popular. The quality of your content always comes first! And second, if your content is objectively amazing, it will promote itself. Which is something we covered earlier in this course and I showed you some examples from our own blog. So instead of introducing you to some super smart, secret, ninja-killing content promotion tactics that will make you a superstar tomorrow, I'll just briefly review a short list of the most popular content promotion strategies and explain what they are. you are good for.

In fact, most content promotion strategies can be organized into just six categories. Reach your current audience. Reach relevant communities. Reuse and distribution of content. Guest blogs. Beat. And paid promotion. Let's go through them one by one. #1 Reach your current audience. Typically, you do this by sending an email newsletter to your blog subscribers and posting a link to your newly published article on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, and any other social networks where you have followers. But if you are just starting out, your email list is very small and you don't have many followers on these social networks.

Which means you can't expect traffic and backlinks to magically appear out of nowhere. Therefore, it makes sense to start building an audience as soon as possible! If you invest time and effort into building your email list and social media following, they will become your most effective content promotion methods later. #2 Reach relevant communities. You can do this by submitting your article to relevant groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. You can also submit it to a suitable subreddit or any other relevant forum. And finally, there is a new trend to create Slack channels in different industries. So you can join them and publish your articles there.

In theory, that sounds like the holy grail of traffic. But once you try it, the harsh reality will appear. The thing is, most of these communities hate self-promotion. You may be able to get away with mentioning your article once or twice. But if you overdo it, you'll almost certainly get banned. So instead of joining one hundred communities with the sole aim of spamming them with your content, I suggest you choose 5 or 10 of the best ones and become an active member there. Once the moderators realize that you consistently provide value to the community, they will pretend they don't notice that you post your own articles from time to time.

And what's more, if you make enough friends within each community, they'll start including your articles in conversations without you having to do it yourself. #3 Reuse and distribution of content. It's not too difficult to repurpose your content in different formats (audio, video, slides, images, etc.) and then submit it to the appropriate platforms. Even if no one finds your content there, you'll still get plenty of good backlinks to your article, right? And besides, if the original content is fantastic, why should the reused version be doomed to oblivion? In 2016 we published an interesting tutorial that teaches people how to perform an SEO audit.

To date, that article has generated more than 60,000 views. But guess what, we also created a short 15-minute walkthrough based on that same article and posted it on YouTube. That video has generated 10 times more views than the article: more than 600,000 views. In fact, much of the traffic to our article was generated by this video. It is ranked #1 on YouTube for the keyword “SEO audit” and continues to drive more views and traffic to our blog every day. I've also seen similar results when repurposing your content in a slideshow. And you might also consider repurposing your best blog articles into a podcast.

In other words, you should try a few of these formats and see which one works best for you. #4 Guest Blogs. I don't think I need to explain guest blogging to you, do I? In my opinion, it's one of the best ways to get high-quality backlinks and sometimes even some nice referral traffic to your blog. I won't expand on this topic now, as we're about to have a whole section on guest blogging in the next lesson. If you are having difficulty posting on other blogs, you can try answering relevant questions on Quora or any other question and answer site that exists in your niche.

Or you can simply leave comments on other blogs, referencing your own articles. Most bloggers hate seeing comments with links, but if the comment is genuine and the article it references is fantastic, they may let it pass. Aside from that, you can also try to get journalists to quote you. There is a good service for that, called Help A Reporter Out. And we have a good case study about it on the Ahrefs Blog. And finally, if you have already achieved some notable results in your industry, you can try participating in podcasts and interviews. which often leads to quality links and referral traffic with little time commitment. #5 Disclosure.

This strategy is absolutely essential. If you don't have outreach on your content promotion checklist, you're seriously missing out. The basic rule of thumb is to send personal notices to everyone named or mentioned in your article. But don't ask them for links or tweets, it's your content that should be the motivator, not you. A completely different strategy is to reach out to everyone who has linked to similar content. Or who has mentioned similar topics in their own articles. These are very powerful dissemination methods that deserve special attention. So the last lesson of this course is totally dedicated to extension.

And we have one last group left. #6 Paid promotion. As mentioned above, paid promotion is an absolute must if you consider your blog to be a business tool, not a hobby. Almost every major social network has its own advertising platform: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, you name it. I'm sure you are also aware of Google's advertising options. These things are pretty obvious, right? A somewhat unusual advertising option is a paid email newsletter. In our digital marketing niche, quite a few websites offer this service, but the price per visitor is always much higher compared to Facebook ads or even Google ads.

That's why we've never paid to be included in someone's email newsletter. And that concludes my review of the most common content promotion strategies. I hope you now have a much clearer idea of ​​how to promote your next content. Or restart the previous one. Part 3. How to Compete with the "Big Guys" in Google Search Results No matter what industry you're in, chances are someone has already "made" the best search queries. And that “someone” is usually a big, established website that is better than you in every way possible. They have a strong brand, full of credibility and trust.

They have many resources to create amazing content. They have a large, loyal audience that they can promote their content to and get links to. They have a huge advertising budget to reach a huge number of people. And to make matters worse, they are already at the top of Google for all those cool keywords you want to rank for. Which means they receive consistent, highly relevant traffic to their pages every month. Which means that some of these people will end up linking to these pages. The mere fact that you rank #1 on Google makes your page link-worthy. And then a constant flow of new backlinks will obviously strengthen the leading position of your pages in Google search results.

That's a very discouraging cycle, right? I call it the “SEO vicious circle.” Take any page that is in the top three on Google for a popular keyword and drop it into the Ahrefs Site Explorer tool. Like this guide to Moz keyword research. Do you get a ton of new backlinks every week because you are actively promoted? Of course not! You get all these new links on full autopilot! It ranks high on Google and therefore has a constant flow of targeted visitors, many of whom will link to it later. As you can see from the Ahrefs graph, the rate at which this article acquires new backlinks is quite high.

It would be almost impossible to keep up with them if you were creating all your backlinks manually. So how can you get into this vicious SEO cycle and outperform those big guys? Well, I'm afraid there's no way to do that. Unless, of course, you can create much better content and have enough resources to reach a comparable number of people. This is the only way to have the opportunity to create a comparable number of backlinks in a relatively short period of time. So the only advice I have for you is this. Don't go after "big" keywords until you have a large enough audience and amassed enough resources to effectively fight whoever currently holds the top spot.

And furthermore, there is absolutely no reason to target highly competitive search terms, while there are tons of untapped opportunities to easily increase your search traffic. In the previous lessons of this course, I have shared some great tips and strategies on how to discover user-friendly content ideas that would get you a lot of search traffic with minimal effort. But "minimal effort" does not mean "no effort." Even those low-reach content ideas will require some backlinks to rise to the top of Google and give you search traffic. And, as we've discussed before, you can't just sit back and wait for backlinks to emerge naturally.

You need to build them manually. And that's exactly what we'll cover in the next lesson of this course. Sounds good? So I'll see you in Lesson 9. Welcome to lesson #9. How to Build Backlinks to Your Blog Content Here's what we'll cover in this lesson: Best Link Building Strategies for Blogs. How to get backlink ideas from your competitors. How to build links through guest blogging. And finally, some simple guest blogging “tricks” to get better results in less time. So, let's go! Part 1. Best Link Building Strategies for Blogs The word “best” in the title of this section means that I am not going to cover every link building strategy out there.

Because there are too many. So I am just going to share some of the most effective ways in which one can create links to their blog articles. Based on my personal experience. But before I give you my short list, here's a quick refresher on what we've discussed so far: You're unlikely to top the top 10 ranking pages for your target keyword without at least as many good backlinks as you have. They point to their own page. Popular blogs tend to get natural backlinks by simply broadcasting their content to a large audience of fans and hoping that some of them link to it.

Pages that rank high on Google tend to get natural backlinks on autopilot. I call this a “vicious SEO cycle.” And finally, if you're just starting out, you shouldn't wait for links to come naturally to you. You have to build them manually. Which you can do with these four strategies: Leave comments; Replicate your competitors' backlinks; Guest Blogs; And extension. Let me expand on each of them. Strategy #1. Leaving comments. You're probably rolling your eyes right now. But no, I'm not living in 2010. In fact, I think this is a great strategy to boost your link building efforts and help spread your content.

Note that I didn't say "blog comments" but comments in general. This is because blogs are not the only place where you can leave comments with links to your articles. We also have specialized forums, online communities, question and answer sites and even YouTube videos. For example, in our own niche (which is SEO), Reddit and Quora are quite popular places where people exchange opinions and link to relevant content. I have a pretty solid comment history on both sites, so you know I'm defending something I'm actually doing myself. But if you look closer at my comments on Reddit, you'll see that only a few of them have links to our blog articles.

Reddit hates spammers and if you only post there to put up links you will get banned. But if you take the time to provide value to the community in a wayconstant, no one will have a problem with you linking to your own content from time to time. Which is exactly what I do there. Quora is a little different in that sense. I left over 100 responses there and most of them have links to my articles. But that's not because Quora suffers from a lack of moderation. Believe me, they are also very strict with spammers. But my comments on Quora look like spam?

Each one is unique, well formatted, and above all, provides great value to the conversation, before asking readers to click my link for some additional details. And although I haven't been active on Quora for quite some time, my answers still get thousands of views each month, resulting in good referral traffic to my content. Therefore, I highly recommend that you find some popular communities in your own niche and start actively participating in them. But what if you're struggling to find relevant online communities in your niche? Well, you can still leave comments on blog articles, right? As a fellow blogger, I'm sure you know how great it is to receive intelligent and insightful comments on something you just posted.

But on the other hand, no one wants to receive comments from people who are only looking to promote their own products. So my advice when leaving comments on blogs relevant to your industry isn't much different from what I just said about community sites: it only works if you add real value to the conversation. And now it's time to recognize the elephant in the room. In 99% of cases the comments you will publish online will have nofollow links. And since the nofollow attribute means that the link does not transfer any SEO value to your website, why bother? Two words: "Secondary benefits." Look at two of my latest answers on Quora.

One has 800 views and the other has 8,000 views. And since both comments link to Ahrefs Blog articles, I'm sure we get good referral traffic from them. And I have no doubt that many people who visited the Ahrefs Blog after reading my comments on Quora ended up becoming our regular readers. And as you already know, the larger your audience of fans, the more links you will naturally acquire, as a byproduct of transmitting your content to them. So, did these links from my Quora answers help my articles rank better on Google? I do not think. But did my comments on Quora help me reach a lot of people with my content, convert them into fans, and get some natural links from them afterwards?

Absolutely! Leaving comments on relevant blogs also has many secondary benefits! Check out Ryan Stewart's story that he shared in his guest post on the Ahrefs Blog. Ryan posted a very revealing comment on Robbie Richards' personal blog. And at the end of the comment, he linked to an article from his own blog. Not only did Robbie not delete that self-promotional comment, he tweeted Ryan's article. But there is more. He later invited Ryan to participate in an "expert roundup" that was published on his personal blog. Which means Ryan got a perfectly legitimate dofollow link from a relevant and perfectly legitimate blog.

In other words, a simple comment with a nofollow link sets off a chain reaction of valuable events: referral traffic from a blog comment; a tweet from the blog owner; a dofollow link from that blog; some more referral traffic from that link, etc. Not bad for a simple blog comment! You betcha, Ryan! I hope that was a vivid enough example to persuade you that leaving comments online isn't some sort of old-school spammy way to promote your content that does more harm than good. I honestly believe that leaving comments on relevant blogs and communities is the best way to boost your link building efforts, get your name out there, and start making valuable connections with notable people in your niche.

But be sure to look for quality, not quantity. And that was the first link building strategy on my list. What about the other three? Well, we're about to cover more in this very lesson: replicating your competitors' backlinks and guest blogs. And as for Disclosure, I decided that this strategy requires a lesson of its own. So we'll cover that in the next lesson of this course. Which is the last one. And now let's talk about replicating your competitors' backlinks, shall we? Part 2. How to Get Backlink Ideas from Your Competitors Analyzing your competitors' backlink profiles can generate a gold mine of link building opportunities that you might not otherwise discover.

But some competitors have tens of thousands of backlinks. Therefore, there is no way to review them all manually; it would take too long. For example, here at Ahrefs one of the blogs we compete with for search traffic is backlinko.com by Brian Dean. We have quite a bit of overlap in the keywords we target with our articles, so it would make sense for us to know which websites link to backlinko.com so we can present our own content to them. But if we put backlinko.com in Site Explorer, we will see that more than 11,000 websites are linked to it.

That's a lot of backlinks and we certainly don't have time to go through them all manually. So how do you analyze your competitors' great backlink profiles without going crazy? Well, let me show you three great strategies that will help you quickly understand such a large data set. Strategy #1. Find your "superfans." Let's continue with an example of backlinko.com, which is a competitor of the Ahrefs blog. Brian Dean has published quite a few amazing articles over the years and I'm sure he has built up a large army of fans who constantly link to his content. Wouldn't it be great to know who they are?

If someone is so eager to link to your competitor's content, they may be interested in your content too. So how do you find these superfans? You can try going to the Referring Domains report, filtering only for dofollow links, and then sorting the results by the number of dofollow links from a domain. But because the web is full of junk, there's a good chance you'll see a lot of very strange websites that don't look like websites you'd want to appear on. So there is a better way! Go to the Best by Links report and set the HTTP Code Filter to 200.

This will give you a list of the pages on your competitors' website that have generated the most backlinks. Now, take up to 10 of these pages and copy/paste them into Ahrefs' Link Intersect tool. Make sure to remove the protocol from each URL and use the Prefix setting. This will give better results. Let me do that with five of the most linked articles on backlinko.com. After clicking Show Link Opportunities, I only get 66 websites that link to our competitor's five articles. If I start exploring them, most of them will probably turn out to be legitimate websites worth getting a link from.

And since they link to not one but all five articles on a blog we compete with, there should be a good chance we can get a link from them as well. That's how we went from over 11,000 random websites linking to our competitor to just 66 that deserve our immediate attention. But the fun doesn't end there. Maybe some of these websites are already linked to us? We have an interesting setup for that in the Link Intersect tool. Simply enter your own website there and all sites that already link to you will be excluded from the results. So, let's enter ahrefs.com and see how many websites link to the five articles on backlinko.com but have never linked to any page on ahrefs.com.

And there is no one except ourselves. Which means all your "superfans" already know us. But we still have not finished. We can go back and change this little setting from Everyone to Anyone. This will expand our results by including websites that link to four of these articles, three of these articles, two of these articles, and even just one of these articles. Let's see what that looks like. And now we get 3400 results. These sites link to our competitor's articles, but never to us. Which makes them perfect outreach targets. Clearly, there will be some junk here too, but many legitimate websites can be easily identified just by looking at their domain names: bestitpoint.com, ezmarketing.com, ecomtuning.com, Futurecontent.co.

These four look good and when I open them, I can see that they are digital marketing agencies. Each of them has a blog from which they link to articles on backlinko.com. And because our content overlaps so much, it shouldn't be too difficult to connect with these guys and find a way to be featured on their blog. Now, 3,400 websites is a lot to sift through, even if you just quickly scan them for attractive domain names, like I just did. But if we look at the intersection column, we will see that it drops to 1 already on page 7.

Which means that we have just over 300 websites that link to 2 or more articles from our competitor but have never linked to us. The rest only link to a single article, so they aren't really superfans. Now, 300 is a totally manageable number. You can scan this many websites in less than an hour and find quite a few good link opportunities. And then you can take five more articles from your competitor's blog and analyze them with link intersect. Then you can do this with some other competitor of yours. Strategy #2. Find the "power linkers". I just showed you how to use the Link Intersect tool in Ahrefs to identify "superfans" who constantly link to your competitor's articles.

But there is another interesting way to use Link Intersect. You may find websites that link to some blogs you are competing with, but they have never linked to your own blog. Sounds good? Let me put five well-known blogs in our own industry and see how many websites link to all five but never to ahrefs.com. And we have more than 200 results! Now this is a real goldmine of link building opportunities. All of these websites have mentioned content from our five competitors, but have never linked to us. This has to be fixed! I'm sure that if we send a personal outreach email to all 200 site owners and introduce them to the Ahrefs Blog, many of them will end up linking to us.

I know this for a fact, because we visit these types of sites regularly. And once you're done with all the websites on that list, you can repeat with five other blogs that you compete with. Or you can play with that “Everyone/Any” setting to expand the results list the same way we did when we searched for “superfans.” All in all, with the help of the Link Intersect tool in Ahrefs you should be able to uncover a ton of great link opportunities with just a few hours of work. And we have one last competitor research strategy left to discuss.

Strategy #3. Analyze your latest backlinks. When taking action on the two strategies above, you should always pay attention to the date each of the linked websites was last updated. Chances are, many of the websites linking to your competitors have done so for quite some time, but are no longer actively updating their website. While there is still a chance of persuading them to link with you, the probability decreases significantly. So why not take a look at the most recently acquired links by your competitors? At Ahrefs we have a report just for that and it's called New Backlinks. So let's see who has linked to backlinko.com in the last few days.

I usually just skim through a list of backlinks and look for domain names that look good. Here's an interesting name that caught my attention: marketingninjas.com. If I do a Google search, I will see that they have never mentioned Ahrefs on their website. I can also go to the ahrefs.com Referring Domains report and search for marketingninjas.com among them to verify that they have never linked to our website. And they haven't done it. That's the kind of link opportunity I was looking for. Browsing through their website I can see that they are another marketing agency that has an active blog.

So all we have to do is approach them and present them with our own content. If you like the articles on backlinko.com, I have no doubt that we will be able to impress you with our own blog. And they may link to some of our articles later. This is how you can take advantage of great link opportunities by researching who links to your competitors. In just a few hours of browsing your latest backlinks, you can find enough opportunities to keep you busy for weeks to come. Here's one last tip. With Ahrefs you can receive alerts forNowadays, most bloggers are very sensitive to self-promoting links, so very often they will only allow a single link to the home page of their website. of your author biography.

So if you send them an article full of links to your website, they may get angry and not post anything at all. In my experience, you should not include more than two self-promotional links in your guest post. But that largely depends on the blog owner. Trick #3. Link to your other guest posts. This is a good loophole for when the blog owner is very sensitive to you linking to their own website. Linking to other guest posts is good for two reasons: Reason #1: According to Google's PageRank formula, by linking to a page that links to your website, you increase the power of that link.

Reason #2: You can reach out to this other blog owner and let them know that you just got them a quality backlink. They will be very happy with this and may return this favor to you in the future. This is a simple but very powerful trick. Make sure you put it into practice. And finally… Tip #4 – Write guest posts for blogs that have never linked to you before. It is a well-known fact that the number of unique domains linking to a page correlates well with the ranking position of that page in Google. Correlation is not causation, but the experience of thousands of SEO professionals confirms that the more unique websites link to your page, the higher your Google rankings will be.

So when building links through guest blogging, it is in your best interest to feature blogs that have never linked to your website before. In Ahrefs Content Explorer we have a cool feature just for that. Remember we had a list of 5,000 potential guest blogging targets? Well, we can click on a button called Highlight Unlinked Domains and see which of these websites have never linked to our own website. We can then go ahead and export them using the highlighted Export Only checkbox. As easy as that! And if you're looking at a random blog and want to know if they've linked to you before, simply go to your own website's Referring Domains report and look for that domain there.

That's all! But how strict should you be with this rule? Should you say “no” to every blog owner who gives you the opportunity to write another guest post for them? Well, as we just discussed, Google's PageRank formula counts backlinks between pages, not websites. But clearly each subsequent link from the same website will have less value. Otherwise, it would be too easy to manipulate Google by creating a single website with a million pages linking to you. So this is what I think. You should only write a second or third guest post if it's a really good blog.

Or if you don't have better guest posting opportunities right now, but you have some finished articles that you need to publish somewhere. And that was my last tip for guest blogging. We have one last link building strategy left to discuss. That's disclosure and I'll share everything I know about it in the last lesson of this course. Sounds good? Then see you there! Welcome to lesson #10. How to build links and promote content through blogger outreach. This is what we are going to cover in this lesson. How to use disclosure for content promotion. How to find thousands of high-quality outreach leads.

And how to write ridiculously effective outreach emails. So, let's go! Part 1. How to use outreach for content promotion. First of all, outreach is not a digital marketing strategy. Influencer marketing, guest blogging, broken link building – these are the strategies or tactics of digital marketing, whichever you prefer. And disclosure is just a tool used to execute them. If you want influencers to promote your content, you need to reach out to them. If you want bloggers to post your guest posts, you need to contact them. If you want website owners to fix their broken backlinks, well… you get the idea.

That said, there is no “definitive guide to disclosure.” It simply cannot exist because there are too many use cases to consider. That's why in this lesson I won't teach you all the possible applications of outreach, which actually go far beyond marketing and encompass business development and networking. We'll just focus on using outreach to spread your content and get some high-quality backlinks along the way. And before we address the two common outreach problems (where to find outreach leads and what to say in your outreach emails), I want to address three things people often get wrong when promoting their content through outreach.

And the first thing that many people don't understand is that outreach is, in fact, content promotion. Imagine the situation: you sent an email to 100 people with a link to your article. 80% of them opened his email, 30% clicked on his link and read the article, 10% emailed him back with their comments, but none of them tweeted or linked to him. Most people would conclude that their outreach effort has failed and would probably never bother doing it again, because "it doesn't work." But think about it: by sending 100 emails with an 80% open rate, you're putting yourself on the radar of 80 hand-picked awesome people in your industry.

A 30% click-through rate means that 30 of these amazing people actually visited your blog and read your content. And a 10% response rate means you just made a connection with 10 amazing people in your industry. Which, as we learned in previous lessons, can often lead to many additional benefits. Yes, you didn't receive any tweets or backlinks. But it would be wrong to say that your communication has failed, as long as your emails are opened, your links are clicked, and people respond to you. That's why I said that dissemination is the promotion of content. Obviously, 30 people visiting your blog is far from a life-changing amount of traffic.

But you've only sent 100 emails. What happens if you send 1,000 or even 10,000 emails? That will translate into 300 or even 3000 people visiting your blog. And I have no doubt that many of these visits will eventually result in tweets, backlinks, and all sorts of other "side benefits." "Tim, but isn't sending 10,000 emails called SPAM?" That's a great question and brings us to the second thing people often get wrong: #2. There is a fine line between disclosure and SPAM. Yes, if you send 10,000 emails in a week, or even a month, that is SPAM. There is no way to properly vet that many people and send each of them a personalized email in such a short amount of time.

So when I talk about reaching 10,000 people, I'm actually talking about a long-term strategy, which would be executed over the course of a year or maybe two. Which gives you enough time to do it right and not be a SPAMmer. Think of disclosure and SPAM as two ends of the same spectrum. This spectrum represents the amount of effort you put into each individual email you send. This includes finding the person you want to contact; research them to make sure they are a good fit; and, obviously, write them a personalized outreach email. At one end of this spectrum we have an automatically generated list of people you never bothered to review manually.

Plus a generic disclosure template that you copied from some popular "disclosure guide" and barely customized. This approach is more or less the definition of the word SPAM. And on the other end of this spectrum we have a small list of people who you took the time to thoroughly research, giving you the opportunity to write a unique and very personal outreach email to each of them. This is how outreach should be done in the ideal world. But in all honesty, both ends of this spectrum are just extremes you should stay away from. You don't want to send 10,000 almost random people a generic email template.

Especially if you care about your reputation in that industry. That would be equivalent to shooting yourself in the foot. But at the same time, you don't want to spend weeks researching a handful of people and crafting the most perfect outreach emails possible. Only to realize that they are too busy right now for whatever you send them. The right approach is somewhere in the middle, although it leans more towards the "Ideal Scope" end of the spectrum. Every industry is very different, and I recommend experimenting with the amount of effort you put into each outreach email before deciding where on this spectrum is right for you to settle on.

And in case you're not willing to compromise on the quality of your scope, I have one last tip for you: #3. A perfect scope does not guarantee any results. I just mentioned a situation where you spend weeks thoroughly vetting a handful of people and sending them the best outreach emails they've ever received. And then it turns out that they are too busy to respond. Honestly, this is a pretty common scenario. If you tried disclosure before, I'm sure you'll agree with me on that. And the reason why this happens is painfully obvious. Life gets in the way. Your “perfect outreach email” can fail due to hundreds of different reasons that you can't even control.

What time of day the person will see your email. Will they open it on their mobile phone or desktop? Are they in a good mood? Is your schedule full right now? How many other emails have you received today, etc, etc, etc... So yes, perfect outreach does not guarantee any results. You need to mentally prepare for this and not get discouraged when people don't respond to your emails. Here at Ahrefs we rarely get open rates above 80% and the response rate almost never exceeds 30%. And we consider these figures to be quite good. If your own numbers are much lower than ours, here are some quick tips.

If your open rate is low, make sure you send to the correct email address. Especially if you are using some automated software to obtain these email addresses. We have a great post on the Ahrefs blog that should help you with that: "9 Practical Ways to Find Anyone's Email Address." Also experiment with your email subject line. If you use a generic email subject like "something you might like," don't expect people to open it. You should create subject lines that somehow reflect your disclosure excuse. More on this later. Now, if your click-through rate is low, spend more time examining your outreach leads.

It may be that you are simply communicating with the wrong people or that they are no longer interested in that topic. Or be sure to clearly specify what is unique and surprising about your article that would make them want to click on the link and view it. And lastly, if your response rate is low, be sure to ask them for their opinion. A simple request like "Tell me what you think" works quite well in getting responses. Also make sure you are not asking for a favor. Most people prefer not to respond to emails because they don't want to say "no." As you can see, these tips are mostly based on common sense and may even seem obvious.

But I get so many terrible outreach emails that I felt like I had to include this tip in my lesson. And we're done with the basics. Now, let me show you how to find thousands of high-quality outreach leads. Part 2. How to Find Thousands of High-Quality Outreach Leads Let's go back to the beginning and read the title of this lesson one more time: "How to Build Links and Promote Content Through Blogger Outreach." I put “build links” first to remind you that this is the primary goal of your outreach efforts. As for “content promotion,” we just discussed that it is a natural byproduct of your outreach efforts and not the primary goal.

So who should you contact? Who are the people most likely to link to your content? What about people who have already linked to existing articles on the same topic? or you have already published articles that mention that topic. Do I even need to explain why these two groups of people are perfect targets for outreach? It doesn't matter, I'll be quick. They clearly have websites to link from and clearly have some interest in your topic. It sounds fair? Now, let me show you how to easily find these people. Group 1: People who have linked to existing articles about thesame topic.

The logic here is painfully obvious. If these people have previously linked to other articles on the same topic, they could also link to your articles. That is, of course, if your article is in any way better than the one already linked to or if it offers a unique perspective. Otherwise, they just won't care. So how do you find people who have linked to similar content? Well, the best place to start is, of course, to do some Google searches on the topic you want to rank with your article, see who ranks first, and then look for who has links to them.

I usually use Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool to do that. So let's see who ranks first on Google for the keyword "SEO audit". There is our own Ahrefs blog article which holds the #1 position with over 80 websites linking to it. And there's a Moz blog post that's ranked #2 with almost 300 websites linking to it. Although we are already at the top, it wouldn't hurt to get a few more backlinks to our article, to secure its number one position. And those 300 websites linking to the Moz article are perfect targets. Let's see who they are. All I need to do is click on that number of referring domains and I will be redirected to a suitable report within the Site Explorer tool that lists all 300.

From here I usually activate the "dofollow" filter and reorder my list to see the sites with fewer dofollow links at the top. Then I use my classic link research approach called "find domain names that make sense." It always works for me. In this particular situation, Platinumseoservices seems interesting. By clicking on the Backlinks dropdown, I can see that they have linked to the Moz article from their own blog. In my opinion, that's a perfect disclosure perspective. And I'm sure that by going through all these 250 websites that link to the Moz article with dofollow links, I'll be able to find quite a few more awesome websites to reach out to and submit our own article.

And that's just one of the top-ranked articles for the topic we want to rank #1 for. Just look at the Domains column which shows how many websites are linking to each of these search results. I'm sure if I go through them all, I'll find plenty of great outreach opportunities to promote our SEO audit guide. And once I'm done with the search results for the keyword "SEO audit", I can think of some other relevant search queries, such as "how to find SEO problems", "analyze a website's SEO", " find SEO problems on a website", "diagnose SEO problems", etc. These additional searches might help me discover some more relevant articles that have links to interesting websites that I could access.

And I know what you're thinking. "Tim, that's great, but how can you persuade all these people to link to your article when they're already linking to your competitors? Don't worry, the entire next section of this lesson is dedicated to answering this very question. And Now let me show you another cool way to find articles on the same topic as yours, that have lots of backlinks to take advantage of. And this time I'll use the Content Explorer tool. Let's find all the articles that have the words "seo audit" in their title. And there are over 2000 of them in the Content Explorer database.

Now let's see how many of these articles have backlinks from at least 20 websites .And we only have 100 results, which I can then Sort by the number of linked websites. And I immediately see an interesting article from Distilled titled "SEO Technical Audit Checklist for Humans." Here's another one from Entrepreneur.com that also has a ton of websites linking to it. I didn't see these articles when I was browsing Google's top 10 search results for some relevant keywords just a minute ago. which makes Content Explorer an incredible source of unique outreach opportunities that you probably wouldn't be able to discover otherwise.

But that's not all! If these articles have generated so many backlinks, there's a good chance someone will link back to them in the post. future. This especially applies to articles that rank well on Google for their topic. Remember the “SEO vicious circle?” Let's take this article that is ranked #5 in "SEO audit." According to the Site Explorer tool, it has been attracting new backlinks fairly steadily over the past few years. So wouldn't it be great to know when some new website will link to this article? Because I can easily keep an eye on it with Ahrefs Backlink Alerts.

I can set up alerts for a number of articles that receive consistent traffic from Google and receive an email notification every time they get new backlinks. That's great, right? But let's move on to group #2: people who published articles mentioning your topic. Let's go back to my example of an Australian blog that linked to an SEO audit guide published on Moz. From the context of this link, I can tell that the author simply wanted to reference a good guide to performing an SEO audit. I mean, they don't really mention anything specific about that Moz article, just the SEO audit in general.

In other words, they could also be linking to any other article. Now where am I going with this? Chances are, there are plenty of people who have mentioned “SEO audit” in their articles but didn't bother to include any links. Let's see if that's the case using our Content Explorer tool. I will search for "seo audit" again, but this time not in the Titles but in the actual content of the pages. And I get almost 14,000 results. There are a lot of articles that mention "SEO audit". But let's see how many unique websites they belong to. We have the One article per domain checkbox for that.

And we are left with just over 6,000 articles that belong to different websites. I can also filter by language to focus only on English articles. But there are still 5,000 results. That's not a number you'd be excited to review manually, right? But if you've been watching my course from the beginning, I'm sure you're now familiar with the functionality of Content Explorer and how to narrow down your list of results using its awesome filters. For example, I can use the Domain Ranking filter to focus only on popular websites. Or vice versa, I can target smaller sites because there is a better chance of impressing them with my content and persuading them to link to me.

Alternatively, I can filter by search traffic. And I see that there are 40 articles that receive more than 1000 visits per month from search while mentioning my topic "SEO audit". I would go the extra mile to persuade these people to link to our SEO audit guide. Your articles get decent search traffic, so if you link to me, some of that traffic will eventually make its way to my blog. And finally, I can use my favorite Highlight Unlinked Domains feature to differentiate between websites that have already linked to our own website and those that have never linked to us.

People who have linked to our website before should probably know us pretty well. Then, when we get closer, we can use this "connection" to our advantage. But those who have never engaged with us will need a more careful approach. More on this in the final section of this lesson. This is how you will find people who have previously mentioned your topic in their articles. Guess what I'm going to say next? You can easily keep an eye out for newly published articles that mention your topic with the help of... Drum roll please! Ahrefs Alerts. Simply go to the Mentions tab and click the New Alert button.

Put your keyword in there, maybe even use the OR operator to specify several of them in quotes. Select where you want to search for it: in the article title, in the content, or both. Exclude domains you don't want results from. Like YouTube, for example, or perhaps your own domain. And choose the frequency of updates. I suggest you set this to "Daily". Think about it. Being a blogger yourself, you won't feel excited when people contact you about articles you wrote months ago. But when you publish a new article and people reach out to it within days or even hours, you're very open to a conversation, right?

That's why it's so important to use all types of alerts in your marketing and act on new outreach opportunities as soon as they land in your inbox. Well, we just covered two groups of people: those who have linked to similar articles and those who have mentioned your topic in their articles. But if you've studied outreach before, you might say I'm missing one more group of people you could reach. That's group number 3: people who tweeted articles about that topic. Let's search for "seo audit" in Content Explorer once again. This Moz article was tweeted almost 400 times. The one from Entrepreneur.com was tweeted almost 200 times.

I can click on these numbers and it will redirect me to a Twitter search for the article URL that shows me who recently tweeted it. Or I can click the Who Tweeted button directly in the Content Explorer and get a list of these people directly from Ahrefs' own database, which I can then easily export. I know many blogging and marketing experts suggest that you should reach out to these people who have tweeted content similar to yours. However, I'm not a big fan of this strategy. Do you memorize everything you tweet? I certainly don't. I barely remember what I tweeted yesterday, let alone a week ago.

So when I get outreach emails that say something like, “Tim, you tweeted this article three months ago and I have a similar one I thought you might be interested in reading…” I just click “delete.” In my opinion, "you tweeted a similar article" is a very weak excuse for anyone to care. Especially if that tweet was sent a long time ago. Yes, you could start monitoring Twitter for new mentions of your topics or when people tweet articles similar to yours. But why send these people an outreach email when you can simply send them a tweet? "Hey, that's a great post!

You might want to check this one out too... Talk about this and that that wasn't covered in the article you tweeted." So, in my opinion, this is more of a "social media engagement" strategy than an email outreach strategy. But you don't have to trust me on that. Try it both ways and see which works best for you. And now, let's move on to the last piece of the puzzle: writing incredibly effective outreach emails. Part 3. How to Write Ridiculously Effective Outreach Emails Let's go back once again to that Platinumseoservices.com.au article that links to the Moz SEO audit guide.

What's the point of reaching out to these guys with our own SEO audit guide? I mean, what do I tell you? "Hey! Moz article is bad, our article is great! So you should exchange that link to us." I'm pretty sure this type of informational email will go straight to the Trash. But I think I see a pretty decent disclosure excuse here. This Moz article is six years old! In other words, by linking to this article, you are giving your readers an outdated resource. Isn't that reason enough to email them? Now, in all honesty, our own SEO audit guide isn't very recent either.

Today he is 2 years old. So we'll need to update it first so we can effectively present it as a better replacement for that outdated article they're linking to. And my disclosure email would probably look like this: "Hi Ghan, I noticed you're linking to the Moz SEO audit guide from one of your articles. But I'm afraid the Moz guide is dated 2012, which means it's It's 6 years old and therefore very outdated. We just published an amazing guide to SEO auditing on our own blog and I invite you to check it out! It talks about some new technologies that are being used in SEO audits. starting today! and gives people pretty clear instructions on how to audit and fix their websites.

And if you find our guide useful, maybe you should consider linking to it from your article. Thanks, Tim. It's pretty interesting. Decent outreach email that feels personal and doesn't seem like spam. All because I'm using a good outreach excuse - the reason I'm contacting them. This is very important! If you don't have a compelling reason to approach a person, don't be!Get closer to her! That aside, did you notice that my disclosure excuse focuses on them and not me? They are linking to an outdated resource, while they could be directing your blog readers to newer, much better content.

Therefore, your outreach email should focus on the recipient, not you! Why would anyone care about a random person approaching them out of the blue? So you have to find a way to send your outreach email about them! Just like I did in the example I just shared. And to jump-start your thought process, let me give you three common excuses for disclosure. #1. You know they are interested in the topic and your article offers a new angle that they can't afford to overlook. #2. You know they have a strong opinion about something and your article has new and unique evidence that further reconfirms their position. #3.

In fact, you mentioned them in your article and presented their work. As you can see, the first two disclosure excuses are very similar. And they are based on the “Fundamental Rule of Content Marketing” that I can't stop rehearsing over and over again. If your content is amazing and unique, many people will be happy to receive a personal notice about it. You can use the first disclosure excuse if you are 100% sure that your article talks about something your recipient doesn't know. Just be sure to articulate that something in your outreach email, don't force them to read the entire article to find out what it is.

And the second disclosure excuse is to send them some additional details or arguments about things they already know. This could be a new case study that proves your point, or perhaps some relevant news. Now, the third disclosure excuse is completely different. This time you are not appealing to his knowledge, but to his ego. Who doesn't like others to say good things about them and highlight their work? If you ask me, I sure do! And every time people reach out to me to tell me that some of my work was mentioned in their article, I feel like a complete idiot if I don't check it out and respond to at least say "thank you." In marketing we call this strategy “EgoBait”.

So whenever you mention other people's work in your article, you should always give them full credit and you should always send them personal thank you notes for doing such an incredible job. But as with any other strategy I've shared in this course, it won't work unless it's genuine. If you try to shoehorn dozens of people into your article for the sole purpose of EgoBaiting them, trust me, that won't work. Well, these were the three general disclosure excuses that I recommend you use when approaching people. But what about backlinks? So far we've only discussed how to get people interested in and responding to your outreach email.

But how do you actually persuade these people to link to your article? Well, I'm afraid there's no way to do it. Unless, of course, you offer them money or... kidnap their cat. Which is something I don't really support. But I just showed you an almost bulletproof disclosure excuse, right? Linking to a six-year-old out-of-date article is clearly a big problem these guys would like to fix, right? Eh, not really. Chances are good they don't really see this as a problem. And even if they do, they may not use the replacement we offer and change that link to something else.

I'm afraid there is no magic disclosure excuse or choice of words that can persuade these guys to link to our article right there right now. That's why I didn't even ask them to do it. At least not directly. Do you remember how I formulated my request? "And if you find our guide useful, maybe you should consider linking to it from your article." I didn't say "could he link to our article?" That type of request would cancel everything I wrote previously to contact them. And obviously they would ignore it. That's why I don't insist with a link request.

Remember the “Fundamental Rule of Content Marketing”? Well, I hope my content does the job of persuading you to link to it. It is not my direct request. And also, in my own experience, most people are very reluctant to go back and update their old articles. But if you manage to impress them with your content, many of these people will gladly link to it from one of their future articles. Here's how to write ridiculously effective outreach emails without being pushy or ruining your reputation in the industry. One last piece of advice: follow-ups. I don't know who was the first to say that it's a good idea to send follow-ups, but from my own experience they do more harm than good.

So I don't advise you to send follow-ups! Okay, maybe just one. I mean, have you seen any case studies where people got a lot of positive responses on their third or fifth follow-up? I have not done it. But I've seen quite a few cases where people publicly ridiculed bad disclosure emails and annoying automated follow-ups. And that was my last outreach tip. But in all honesty, I could easily record another long lesson on disclosure because I have quite a bit of experience being both the sender and the recipient. And in fact I published two articles on the topic of disclosure that I highly recommend you read.

And that is the end of this lesson as well as the end of this entire course. I sincerely hope that you enjoyed it and that you put all those tips, tricks and strategies into practice and increase your blog traffic and your business income. That's all! Sign out now and I hope to hear from you soon! Bye bye!