As somebody who focuses 100% of their time link building, I thought I’d put in my two cents on the two most popular ways to build links to a website. Before I go into it, I will say that I’m definitely on the side of content marketing, although both methods have their pros and cons.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging has been around for a long time and doesn’t show any signs of going away. For those of you who don’t know, guest blogging is the method of contacting blog owners and asking them if you can contribute to their website in exchange for a link.
The main positive aspect of guest blogging is that if you find a blog with a decent following and post something interesting on there, it can lead to a decent backlink and potentially a new audience. With guest blogging, you also have complete control of what is written and it’s possible to dictate where the link goes and even what anchor text is used.
If you are a prolific guest blogger, it’s likely that you are also networking and creating relationships in your industry that might benefit your website in the future. Regular guest blogging is also a fantastic way to improve your writing ability.
Add to that the fact that it is proven to work well and help a site’s ranking, and you have a pretty decent way to build links. Because you are contacting the sites with guest blogging opportunities, you are able to pick exactly which sites you want to appear on.
Despite all the positives, there are a few things that make guest blogging a risky practice. One is that Google have stated on many occasions that they don’t recommend guest blogging as a link building method. Another negative is that you are contributing great content to a different website instead of your own. If a guest blog ends up gaining links, the blog you’ve contributed to will be the main beneficiary of your work.
I also feel that the practice can be time consuming, and because of the sheer amount of guest bloggers out there, it’s fairly saturated. For every decent guest blog out there, there is ten times more spam, and the fact that there are millions of people selling guest posts is a potential banana skin with Google and penalties.
Content Marketing
In my opinion, content marketing is the practice of creating excellent content for your own website and using outreach in order to gain backlinks.
Content marketing, to me, is much more fun than guest blogging. Creating great content for your own site and then sitting back and seeing people mention your work is very rewarding. I would say that content marketing leads to more link opportunities than guest blogging. There are some websites and blogs out there that don’t accept guest blogs but are happy to link to good content in the industry.
Using this link building method is less time consuming than guest posting as you only have to create one main piece of content. After that, you have to prospect and outreach for links which doesn’t take as much time (or you can even outsource) as writing countless articles.
You can also build links from pages that already exist and have built page authority. With content marketing, you aren’t limited to just writing content – you can include graphics, videos and all kinds of fun additions. As well as these benefits, content marketing is probably the safest link building method in regards to being penalised by Google.
Despite the benefits, you need to realise that content marketing is difficult. Thinking of creative ideas that websites will like is more challenging than writing an article for a site. As outreach is a numbers game, you may find yourself with links from less authoritative domains. Because of the nature of content marketing, you can’t give yourself and clients any guarantees on the amount oflinks the work will bring in.
Winner: Both
Although I like to focus mainly on content marketing, I’m also using the guest blogging method now. As many people recommend, having a diverse backlink profile is something that’s recommended.
I would strongly recommend to anyone that content marketing is something you need to do in order to protect your link profile from being hurt in the future, however, guest posting is a fantastic way to get your point across and reach new audiences.
Author Bio:
Daniel Kidd is a link building specialist. He set up LinkJuiced last year to provide high quality, white-hat backlinks to businesses and agencies.