Link-Building Checklist for Beginners

If you do the same things over and over again it’s likely that you’ve developed a checklist. Many business people use checklists – from the realtor who sold you the lot to build your house on, to the builder who built the house, to the lawyer who handled the closing. Checklists are essential parts of doing business even if you’ve done something over and over again. It’s the one way to ensure that something isn’t overlooked.

When you embark on building a website and implementing a link-building strategy, it helps to have a workable checklist. This is a checklist for beginners. You might choose to add or subtract from this list this over time depending on your needs and the current technology.

Before you get started it’s important to know your audience, make everything about your customer, and understand and use their language. Give outbound links yourself to those who provide quality content relevant to your audience.

Create Profiles on Social Media Accounts

Know where your audience hangs out and go there – whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or others. Create full profiles and participate by commenting intelligently on discussions and adding new discussions. Also use your social media accounts to promote all your content, products and/or services.

Get Listed on Relevant Local Sites, Industry Sites and Directories

It really doesn’t matter if your business is locally or naturally focused – getting listed on locally focused sites will help you get more relevant links as well as more business. Check out Yahoo, Google, the Chamber of Commerce and other locally focused organizations to ensure that you are listed. In some cases you may get to list your business free and in some cases you’ll need to pay, so research each one for relevance and site rank so that you can determine if it’s worth it or not.

Create a Sharable Newsletter

Whether it goes out weekly or monthly isn’t the point. Ensure that it’s very useful to your audience and something they want to share. By sharing it, they create a link to your site; by being relevant it will make your newsletter an authoritative piece of content that will get a lot of buzz.

Add Social Media Share Buttons to Your Website

Seems simple, but you’d be surprised at how many people forget such a simple thing. If you use WordPress it’s easy to add social media buttons; if you don’t, you can look on the social media site itself to figure out how to create or grab a button for your site.

Create Guest Blog Posts for Relevant Blogs

Guest blogging is going out of vogue for some people, but not for relevant websites with high quality content. While some spammers took over the process for a while, it’s still a good idea to engage in guest blogging on relevant, authoritative sites by contributing excellent, useful, relevant and well-written content. Your bio will create a link back to your site and the authority of the site will determine how well it boosts your ranking.

Comment and Discuss Intelligently on Relevant Blogs, Social Media Sites and Articles

You already know that commenting is powerful, but you may not realize that even if you get a “no follow” link it’s still relevant and a good link to get back to your site. You never know when someone will read your comment and want to find you so that they can purchase your products or services.

Create Great Content Consistently

It shouldn’t have to be said, but remember to create relevant content that is well produced in many different formats from articles, to blogs, to infographics, to videos, white papers and more. If you are creating shareworthy content on a regular basis, you’ll get even more links back to your site than you thought possible – all naturally occurring.

Finally, you can enter contests, become a social media source and more to help increase the number of links you have coming into your site. The important thing to do is to ensure that everything you do to get a link is as natural as possible, and links to relevant and interesting content that your audience will find useful.

In case you're curious, I started working online in 1997 - in the dinosaur days of the internet. My purpose here at HomeFreeMedia is to help YOU build the business of your dreams by developing and recommending top quality products and tools. This will also result in profit and affiliate commissions for me, so we both win!
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