Backlinks play a very important role in your search rankings. Every do-follow link acts as a positive vote for your website. The more backlinks you have more is your website’s reputability.

This backlink craze leads to some spammy activities like comment spam, fake profiles, forum spam etc. Many people pay to get backlinks. But most of the websites participating in such activities are penalized by Google. It is very hard to recover from such penalties.

Spamming is not everything to get backlinks. There are many ways to get natural backlinks without spamming. Such backlinks are called Natural Backlinks.

What are Natural Backlinks?

Natural Backlinks are the links not generated by you. These links are naturally or organically generated. Whenever others find your contents useful, they link to your site.
Perfect example – Wikipedia. Almost 80% blogs have at least one link to Wikipedia. Wikipedia never asks users to link to them nor it gives links to anyone. They are the users who link to Wikipedia.

How to get Natural Backlinks without Spamming?

1. High-Quality content

The higher is the quality of your content, the more often it is loved by users. I am not talking about Language alone. Suppose, you are running a blog and providing content copied from somewhere else, it will destroy your users’ experience. But if you provide in-depth analysis of a topic, with related examples, references and good readability, users will get attracted towards your site. This will increase the possibility of people linking to your site.

Example – Wikipedia. Almost every article on Wikipedia is well written and well presented. Articles are not just written, but they cover the topic in detail. Most of the articles provide 100% information related to the topic or term.

2. User-Generated content

User-generated and editable content often fetches lots of attraction. This includes user reviews, opinions and comments. Even Guest Blogging comes in this category. Many times forums provide more information than a blog. Because those who have knowledge or experience, respond to the discussions. Many times useful discussions are shared on other sites. Such sites are harder to manage and face problem of spam however.

For example – JustHost reviews. If you find the review on a blog, you often find the list of all the features, which you already know. But if you find the discussion about JustHost on a forum, you find real experiences and opinions of users.

3. Distribute Open Source content

Distributing Open Source content is the best way to get natural backlinks. Open source means software or script with its source code made available to users. It is licensed with an open source license (OSL). The copyright holder provides all the rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.
If you distribute your own work with OSL, there is a high possibility of users linking you back. This increases your Natural Backlinks. Developers also take interest in it. Your work becomes a great community.

For example – Self-hosted WordPress. Millions of WordPress users mention their site is proudly powered by WordPress. WordPress doesn’t put forced links in the footer. But yet users themselves link to it.

4. Free contents

If you can’t create your own open source work, it is still OK. You can distribute other contents like Free Software, Themes, Plugins, Frameworks etc. Try to provide more and more free useful stuff. Many times Give-aways fetch lots of user attraction.

5. Reward your users

If you reward your users, users will love you more. Rewarding users does not mean giving revenue to them. Sections on your site like ‘Top Referrers’, ‘Top Developers’, ‘Top Contributors’, ‘Top Commenters’ etc. fetch user attraction.

6. Advertising

Advertising makes your site get noticed. If you provide a great service, users will link to your website and you will get backlinks.

7. Affiliate program

Affiliate program helps a lot for any eCommerce site. Note that, the page ranks flows through affiliate links. Provided, the link is do-follow. Affiliates not only link to your site but increase the traffic of your site and make your website noticed.

8. Maintain a Blog

There is no excuse for any reputed site not to have a blog. The blog keeps your users updated. Posting offers on blog is a great way to get backlinks. You should be careful about the blog URL. Try to run the blog on a directory instead of sub-domain. Link to YourSite.com/blog will be counted as the link to your site. Whereas, blog.YourSite.com is a different site.

This was my short-list of ways to get backlinks naturally, without spamming. Let me know if you have something to suggest.

With tech advancements and global events changing our reality in 2020, we expect 2021 to be focused on technological innovations that are all about automating everyday tasks. The marketing and design tools we will be using will be more automated and user friendly to cater to increased daily demands. Below are some of the top marketing and design tools for 2021 worth noting and taking a closer look at.

Website Builders

It’s easier than ever before to create your own website without needing to hire a developer to make your website and you don’t need to know anything about html or learn code. You can create your own blog or portfolio if you are a photographer or graphic designer or just want to make a website for your personal resume, or maybe you are looking to make an online store or a website for your wedding. So depending on your needs you can do some research online and find the best website builder for your specific individual needs. Some of the most well known website builders are Wix, Weebly, Godaddy, Squarespace and if you want to create an online store you can use Shopify or Woocommerce to help you make a personalized e-commerce platform. Finding a website builder that will fit your specific needs, is easy to make and looks professional can sometimes be confusing so maybe you can check out the website builders by Sitetrail that might help you decide which one is the best for you.

Email Marketing Tools

If you want to build your audience and your email list in the most efficient way possible without losing time manually sending emails then you could benefit from using an automated email marketing tool. Email marketing tools are also one of the most basic marketing automation tools which means that they can be useful for small business owners, entrepreneurs or influencers that are just starting out and trying to build their email list. They are also a lot cheaper and more user friendly than an automated marketing tool that can fully integrate all aspects of your business in one tool such as Hubspot, Pardot, Marketo and Omnisend to only name a few. Email marketing tools can save you time and effort by automating the emailing process, marketers are able to create complex campaigns and audience segmentation to make sure that your emails are relevant and thus increasing your open rate. Some of the most popular email marketing tools that can be easily integrated with other automation tools and have free versions available are Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Mailjet, Constant Contact, Automizy and many more that you can easily discover with a simple online search.

Digital Marketing Research Tools for SEO

If you want to get higher rankings on Google then you’ll need to use a digital marketing research tool for SEO that can help you create backlinks that are the number one factor to ranking higher on Google. Digital marketing research tools can help you optimize your website by showing you which keywords are bringing the most traffic to your website, optimizing your meta descriptions and title tags and getting more clicks. These platforms also have backlink checkers that can help you check the backlinks to your website and help you identify and remove bad links and also compare the content of your website with that of your competitors. Some of the most popular digital marketing research tools for SEO out there are Ahrefs, Google Console, Ubersuggest, Semrush and many more tools that you can check out on the Sitetrail comparison guide.

Graphic Design Tools

When looking to create the perfect design without hiring a graphic designer or needing to have some graphic design experience yourself, you can use one of the many graphic design tools that have templated content that makes the process quite simple. You can create personalized content by using existing templates that these tools offer and customize them by using your own photos, fonts, color scheme etc to create website and social media posts, ads, and flyers. Some of the most popular graphic design tools that have a great host of templates are Canva, Adobe Spark Post, Picmonkey and Stencil just to name a few, you can always do your research online and find the tool that best suits your personal needs.

As you’re probably aware, as an Affiliate Marketer there are literally 1000’s of niches and sub-niches you can work in. But it’s important to choose a niche which has plenty of buyers, hungry for products and information. Because obviously, if there are no buyers, you aren’t going to make any money.

The simplest way to become a successful affiliate is to find a good offer, then find a TARGETED audience for that offer. Keep repeating that and you’ll be making money hand over fist. It makes so much sense.

So let’s say you’re promoting in the ‘make money’ niche (good move by the way, as it’s very lucrative), you can send ‘general’ traffic to your site, on the off chance they might want to make money online, but wouldn’t your site be far more successful and make many more sales, if you only send ‘targeted’ visitors to your site?

In case you’re unaware of that phrase, ‘targeted’ simply means you already know they are interested in your niche.

So in this example, wouldn’t it be much more sensible to find a crowd who you KNOW are interested in making money online and promote your site to them?

Of course, it would.

Someone being sent from a non-specific webpage/forum/blog etc arriving on your site, is very unlikely to buy what you’re offering. But someone who is clicking through to your site, from a ‘make money’ based forum or blog for instance, well . . . if they are visiting other sites in your niche, it’s much more likely they’ll be interested in your offers, right?

So be very careful where you source your traffic from.

Yes, you’ll see the banners and ads for 10,000 visitors for just $15 and of course, it sounds attractive. “Mmm… 10,000 visitors?! I MUST make sales with that amount of people.”

Wrong.

It’s normally a waste of money and more importantly, time. Concentrate your efforts on finding, helping and educating people who are targeted to your offers, by hanging out online where they hang out.

Also remember that if you build your traffic by joining relevant communities, blogs, forums etc and posting useful info with a link to your website, those posts etc that you make, will be there for years into the future. They’ll continue to get clicks. Buying ‘trash’ traffic however, will be one chance and that’s it, gone.

Back to Facebook for a moment. You can send traffic from Facebook to your website, but you need to either use PPC (Pay Per Click), as Facebook has its own program and you can really target your ads, or you can build a Facebook Fanpage. And it’s free.

It takes around 20 minutes to do, around 5 to 10 minutes per day to update it and you’ll have your very own source of visitors who you KNOW are interested in what you are offering.

Use your Facebook Fanpage to target them, educate them, entertain them and give them lots of useful info and then when they click through from the Fanpage to your website, they will certainly be far more receptive to what you have to offer.

You can do the same with Squidoo lenses, Blogger blogs, Pinterest, Tumblr etc, as they are all free to set up, are massively popular, get tons of traffic and you can direct the traffic to your own website.

To recap

just remember that it’s important to target your visitors to ensure more of them buy. The more targeted, the more sales. It’s worth spending a little time to build your traffic the correct way, as it will pay off by bringing you more sales, along with more visitors who will come back and buy more of your offers.