Natural Link Building: 4 Types Of Linkable Content You Can Create Today

Since the Google Penguin update avoiding unnatural-looking link profiles has become ever more important and one major way to avoid this is with natural link building.

Rather than focusing on building links in a manual and artificial manner natural link building focuses on producing the type of content that other websites will want to link to and then promoting that content in all manner of ways with the goal of other websites spontaneously linking to it of their own accord.

Natural Link Building In Action

As an illustration of natural link building consider these two articles for a moment and ask yourself which one you’d be more likely to click through to and read. The first is an article entitled “How To Make Money With Adsense” whilst the second is entitled “How A New Jersey Marketer Makes $24,000 A Month From Home With Google Adsense”.

Even if the content itself was exactly the same I think you’d agree that you’d be far more likely to click on the second article. Furthermore I think you’d agree that, assuming the content of this article was good, far more people would share it on social media sites or mention it on their blogs. It’s a perfect example of natural link building in action but why does it work?

The answer is “uniqueness”. We all know that you can make money from Adsense and in our time online most of us have seen dozens, if not hundreds, of “me too” articles about Adsense so a basic article no longer excites us. What excites us, and indirectly leads to natural link building, is the unique viewpoint of an article like the second example.

Natural link building is all about producing such amazing content that other websites will want to spontaneously link to it simply because they feel it offers their readers such value.

As a result it’s clear that if you’re serious about growing your organic traffic through natural link building then we need to create less “me too” content for our site and instead focus more on content that offers something totally new and unique whilst still remaining on-topic.

Easy Content Creation Ideas For Natural Link Building

Producing top-quality, unique content for natural link building doesn’t need to be as hard as you might first imagine. Certainly there are experts at natural link building that write incredible blog posts and attract vast numbers of links as a result but articles are only one type of content we can produce.

Fortunately based on my own experiences over the last few years I’d like to suggest four alternative types of content that seem to attract more links than others on a regular and predictable basis.

Infographics For Natural Link Building

Infographics help us to visualize data in a new way – whether that is for clarity, for intrigue or for educational purposes. Try hiring an infographic designer on the various outsourcing websites (like I did) and even for a simple infographic you’ll often end up spending several hundred dollars.

Real “top level” infographics can cost into the thousands but if you’re seriously considering the benefits of natural link building right now I have some good news for you. Thanks to the power of infographics for acquiring links naturally here are now a growing number of services such as Visua.ly that will let you create basic infographics yourself for free with no graphic design experience.

Charts, Tables And Graphs

I run a review website in quite a profitable niche where there is plenty of competition and great content so it can be quite hard to stand out from the crowd. This can make natural link building with standard articles difficult however I recently spotted a natural link building opportunity in that all of these review websites are focused on simply pre-selling visitors with their “impartial” reviews.

I realized that it could be really useful for visitors – and hence a great resource for natural link building – to create a genuinely impartial comparison chart that laid out all the competing products side-by-side so that visitors could compare features and prices to decide on the best solution for them. To date, thanks to some gentle promotion and the natural link building that has occured as a result of this, the table I created has been my most successful piece of content for the site and is still attracting links and referral traffic on a daily basis.

Consider how you might be able to take a complex subject and make the information easier to digest by turning it into a useful chart, table or graph that people can refer to in order to make more informed decisions.

Often all the data you need is at hand – possibly even already on your own site – it just needs to be displayed in a new, more unique and user-friendly manner for natural link building to happen.

Resource Lists

Unless you’re in a very small niche there are probably all sorts of other websites around producing equally great content for your market. One great way to create a unique and highly-linkable piece of content for natural link building is to produce a resource list that can act as a central “hub” of information on a subject.

Maybe you curate all the best YouTube videos on a subject, or link out to all those articles you yourself have bookmarked and place all the links into a user-friendly piece of content that is both interesting and covers every element of the subject.

Not only are these incredibly useful for visitors and as a result will often get referenced by all manner of other websites but additionally there is a chance of getting links back from the very sites you link out to in the first place meaning even more natural link building opportunities.

Personal Experiences

Let’s end this article where we started, back with our New Jersey Adsense kingpin. Your experiences are unique to you – after all that’s why we call them “personal experiences” – but they can be of great interest to other people and a great tool for natural link building. Many websites today are too heavy on theory and too light on practice and people are far more interested to learn from actual results rather than theory.

So tell us about a product that you used. Or a test you did. Or an experiment you carried out. Tell us what you did, what the results were and what you’d do differently. And remember that personal experiences don’t necessarily have to be positive for natural link building – if you tried something and it didn’t work that can almost be as useful or interesting as the things that do work.

Natural Link Building Conclusion

Natural link building doesn’t need to complicated. Infact, for people who enjot creating content it can actually be great fun and highly rewarding. Finally you can focus more on producing amazing content and let the links come to you naturally without having to “force” the promotion of your latest blog post or article.

Try out these different types of content to see what works with your audience and you’ll not only boost your visitor engagement but also your traffic from Google thanks to the ongoing process of natural link building.