Plenty of websites struggle to earn high-quality links and boost their rankings. They pour their time and resources into SEO, only to come up short.
Do you know the biggest reason why?
Because they’re not creating anything worth linking back to—and this is seriously slowing down their journey to online success.
That’s why I created this guide to help you understand the #1 rule for attracting links naturally: content is king.
So if you want to stop wasting your time and money, and if you want to get those highly coveted editorial links, the best way to do it is to create linkable assets: high-quality content that people actually want to see and share.
This article explains:
- What linkable assets are
- How to utilize linkable assets in your link-building campaigns
- How to share your linkable assets
- How to track your link-building progress
Let’s get started…
What Are Linkable Assets?
A “linkable asset” is any piece of content that other people want to link back to.
Linkable assets attract backlinks, shares, and citations because they provide something of value to your target audience.
It could be a unique take on a current issue, a new solution to an old problem, something interesting, exciting, controversial, educational, or entertaining, or all of the above.
Linkable assets can take many forms, such as infographics, guides, and case studies. You can use any format that works for you and the topic you’re trying to highlight.
BONUS: FREE Guide on How to Acquire High-Quality Links
What linkable assets usually aren’t: product or service pages, commercial sections of your site, and other pages that don’t really do much for your readers (except promote your brand).
The bottom line? Linkable assets are linkable precisely because they offer something of value. If something is useful, educational, or even just entertaining, then you’ve got a good linkable asset on your hands.
The Benefits of Linkable Assets
Linkable assets are so powerful that they can benefit your business in a multitude of ways.
Here’s a snapshot of how linkable assets can give you a return on your investment:
🚦 Linkable assets increase traffic to your website
Creating something helpful and relevant to your niche is a great way to drive traffic to your website. After all, if your linkable assets are that good, then people will seek out more high-quality content from you—and, as a bonus, they’ll probably check out your other pages, too.
👀 Linkable assets increase brand awareness
If someone links to your content from their website, then you get to engage with an entirely new audience. The more great content pieces you produce, the more your reputation will grow among these new visitors.
Now, that’s how you become a thought leader within your industry and edge out the competition!
💪 Linkable assets build your website authority
A backlink is a vote of confidence. It tells Google and other search engines, “Hey, this page is extremely helpful and worth boosting.”
Each backlink you get adds points to your domain authority, which in turn helps you rise through the search engine results page rankings.
The Challenge of Linkable Assets
Of course every business would love to go viral, but there are a number of challenges to producing linkable assets, namely:
⚠️ Most content isn’t valuable enough
According to Backlinko, out of the millions of blog posts that they analyzed, a whopping 94% of them don’t have any backlinks at all.
Source: Backlinko
Your content might be good, but it needs to be genuinely valuable to get lots of people sharing it and linking to it.
⚠️ Linkable assets are difficult to create
Linkable assets take a lot of time, money, and resources to create. Even then, there’s no guarantee they will be successful.
For example, if you were to create a research report, you might need to:
💡 Carry out the research.
💡 Analyze your findings.
💡 Write the report.
💡 Create assets like a PDF report, blog article, accompanying video, etc.
💡 Publicize your research.
This takes a lot of time and expertise. In most cases, companies will pay others to do this, but that can cost a lot of money.
⚠️ Success is difficult to predict
It’s often difficult to predict how your linkable assets will perform. You might think you have a killer idea, only for it to fail for reasons you couldn’t foresee.
For example, let’s say you provide online music lessons. You know that a competitor site offers a free online instrument tuner that is attracting links. But you also know the tuner isn’t very good and it could include several more advanced functions.
You spend months developing your own free tuner that incorporates all the missing features and offers more functionality than your competitor’s tuner does. But when it comes to the launch, your tuner generates few external links.
There could be several reasons behind this:
⚠️ People habitually use the competitor’s tuner, despite its flaws.
⚠️ The competitor brand has strong brand loyalty.
⚠️ There are too many other free tuners available.
⚠️ A bigger competitor launches their own advanced free tuner on the same day.
Now that you know the pros and cons of linkable assets, I’m going to list some common types of linkable assets and provide tips for building powerful backlinks with them.
7 Types of Linkable Assets
1. Studies and research
This is when you conduct your own original research into a topic related to your business.
It usually takes a lot of time, money, and manpower.
Original data is super linkable—you’ll get links from other people in the industry who want to share your findings. You’ll also get external links from people, writers, and journalists using your research to back up their points.
And the best part?
Your research provides original information and a unique perspective that your competition doesn’t offer.
Tips for creating original research
Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating research reports:
- Brainstorm useful data and analysis that people in your industry need to know. Choose a topic that best aligns with your area of expertise.
- Develop a thorough research methodology to gather and analyze your data—otherwise, your research may not be deemed credible. If you can’t do this, then you should outsource the research to a freelancer or a specialist agency.
- Create a PDF report, videos, and other collateral so that audiences can engage with your research across different channels. You may wish to hire a graphic designer and a writer to help you with this.
- Publicize your research over social media channels and reach out to others in your industry to tell them about it and ask them to consider linking to it.
Example: Ahrefs’ link building case study
A great example of original research is Ahrefs’ study on organic search. It revealed that 96.55% of all content gets no traffic from Google.
This is naturally shareable because it’s a surprising finding that most people wouldn’t be aware of.
However, it’s particularly useful for those in the SEO industry, as it shows the competitive advantage that companies get from optimizing their websites for search.
This incredible insight rightly resulted in a ton of backlinks, including some from well-known SEOs like Neil Patel, as well as websites like Search Engine Journal and Backlinko:
Source: Ahrefs
2. Infographics
Infographics are when you present data or information as graphics or images. You have many options to choose from, including:
- Highlighting interesting statistics.
- Quickly communicating complex concepts.
- Explaining a process.
- Comparing two things side-by-side.
- Presenting geographical information.
- Explaining the different parts of something.
People often share infographics for the same reason as original research. However, people are more likely to share infographics just because they find them cool or interesting, rather than wanting to prove a point.
Tips for creating infographics
The process for creating infographics is largely the same as that of original research.
In fact, infographics are often produced as part of original research collateral.
The main difference is that you must use a professional designer to create your infographic. Infographic link building is competitive, and yours needs to be high-caliber if you want it shared online.
Infographic example: Doctor Who 50th Anniversary
For example, Virgin Media commissioned this infographic of TV series Doctor Who in 2013 to celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary.
The infographic provides interesting information about the series, including:
🌀 The names and tenure of each actor who played the role of the Doctor.
🌀 The period they portrayed the character.
🌀 How many episodes they starred in.
🌀 Key facts about the Doctor.
🌀 Interesting facts from throughout the show’s existence.
This campaign works on several levels. First, it’s interesting, especially for fans of the show.
Second, it was connected to a current event that was getting a lot of attention online at the time. And third, it’s relevant to Virgin Media’s services, as the company provides broadband and TV entertainment packages.
3. Free tools
Free tools and online calculators are another great way to attract links.
It’s especially useful for SaaS companies that can offer access to a part of their software for free. This means that the basic code is already in place, so creating a free tool takes less time than starting from scratch.
It also encourages casual users of your free tools to eventually become paying customers.
But even if you’re not a SaaS company, there is enough software available to you—as well as affordable freelance developers on Upwork—to make it easier for you.
Tips for creating free tools
Before you set out to create a tool, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is there a process or formula that people in your industry rely on, but it’s too complicated or time-consuming to do on your own? This is a good way to determine what kind of tools you can make.
- Do you have the time and skill to develop the tool yourself? Or are you going to outsource it to another developer?
Here are some examples of good online tools:
🧮 HubSpot’s Advertising ROI calculator allows you to quickly see the ROI you can expect to make from your online ad campaigns.
📏 Third Love’s Fit Finder interactive tool helps you find the right bra, providing tailoring services that you would normally have to visit a shop for.
🎨 This Coolors color scheme generator provides the kind of color scheme suggestions that you would typically have to pay a graphic designer for.
We’ve even created our own Domain Authority Checker tool, which allows you to quickly and easily see a site’s authority rating.
4. Videos
Videos can cram a lot of information into a short period of time, thanks to a combination of words (audio narration/voiceover) and visuals.
One of the reasons videos are so popular is that our brains can process images 60,000 times faster than text.
This makes videos perfect for explaining a complex concept, describing a process, or instructing people on how to do things. Alternatively, they could just be entertaining—the possibilities are endless.
Tips for making linkable videos
When producing linkable videos you have two options:
- Post them on your website
- Post them on social media (think YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram)
But which is better?
From a link-building perspective, posting on your website results in far more valuable links. That’s because any shares or links from social media going back to your website will be “no follow”.
However, your video is more likely to be discovered if you post it on social media—especially on popular platforms like YouTube—so it’s well worth posting on them.
🤔 What is no follow?Nofollow is an HTML tag in your website’s code. Put simply, backlinks with this tag give you little or no ranking benefits. However, they are not worthless and can still drive organic traffic to your site, as well as indicate to search engines that you are engaging with your audience. |
Video link building example
This video from music retailer PMT explains how to make your music sound like that of British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran.
In the video, two presenters take you through the different instruments and equipment you’d need to reproduce the artist’s sound.
Needless to say, the company supplies all of these products!
This works well because Sheeran is a hugely popular artist, and other musicians will be keen to sound like him.
The page currently has 25 backlinks from 19 domains. Not bad.
When you take a look on YouTube, you’ll see that the video has 152,340 views and over 3,900 likes.
Because it’s so popular, the video is likely to be shown on Google and YouTube for search queries relating to Ed Sheeran’s musical equipment. People watching it will likely visit the company’s online store, resulting in increased organic traffic.
5. Rankings and other roundups
Articles like “Top 10 Burger Joints In Manhattan” or “The 20 Best Ad Campaigns Of 2021” are extremely powerful linkable assets for a few different reasons.
- People love lists and rankings because they get information on multiple options in one place.
- Readers aren’t interested in the mediocre—they want to know which brands to trust, buy from, and listen to.
- The individuals or companies that make the list will want to show it off, increasing your reach and earning you that all-important backlink.
BONUS: FREE Guide on How to Acquire High-Quality Links
Tips for creating rankings and roundups
The tricky part about making it onto award lists or rankings is that you need to have some level of credibility or authority already established to really reap the benefits from this type of asset.
Awards are only as meaningful as the award-giving body, and rankings given by a small business are less trustworthy (and newsworthy) than rankings given by an industry leader.
Of course, if you’re a new or small business, that doesn’t mean that you can’t publish your own top 10 list! Just make sure that your list is well-researched and based on what people who are trusted authorities within your niche are saying.
Example of a roundup: Experts share their SEO secrets
We compiled an article called “Link Building: 30+ SEO Experts Share Their Secrets”—it’s a listicle-style article with opinions from 30 SEO experts.
We published it back in 2018, so it’s quite dated by now. But it nevertheless gained 256 backlinks from 64 referring domains at one point or another since then.
It works because of point number three above—the people featured in an article are likely to share it. In this case, the article was shared by LeapFroggr, SEO-Hacker, and SEOteric.
5. Guides, tutorials, and how-tos
Most people want to learn something useful, so there’s demand for well-written, thorough, and easy-to-understand guides.
Tips/tricks, how-tos, and other short-form articles are great to share on their own. But if you really want to milk your linkable assets for all their worth, then a “definitive” guide or resource is the way to go.
By “definitive” I mean those guides that cover literally everything you need to know about a particular topic.
It’s much easier to read and link to one “ultimate” guide than it is to go through dozens of different pages, websites, and blogs just to get all the information you need.
Tip for creating guides, tutorials, and how-tos
If you’re going to compile a definitive guide, you need to be an expert on what you’re talking about. Sure, you could always do research, but writing from personal experience and knowledge is always going to be more genuine, more unique, and more helpful for your readers.
Example of a guide: anchor text optimization
I created this guide to anchor text optimization. At a length of around 12,000 words, it covers everything you need to know about optimizing your anchor text for SEO.
Because of this, it has a ton of backlinks.
6. Coined terms
A “coined term” is any term that you create to describe a method or concept within your niche.
Examples include:
💡 Stoozing: Named after Motley Fool UK discussion board contributor Stooz, it refers to the practice of living off 0% interest credit, while putting your spending money into high interest savings accounts.
💡 Cyberspace: This term was created by science fiction writer William Gibson in his 1982 book Burning Chrome.
💡 Podcast: A portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcast”, first coined by journalist Ben Hammersley in The Guardian newspaper.
If you can successfully coin a term and it gains actual traction, then you will get tons of links from people referencing your work.
Tips for coining terms
Of course, the real challenge is getting your coined term popular enough to be linked to. You can popularize your term through guest posts, keyword alerts, and a strong marketing push.
There are two other requirements:
- The name needs to resonate with people.
- There’s a need for a new name.
Example of a coined term
Just think about the term “Skyscraper Technique”, created by Brian Dean of Backlinko.
It’s likely that others were applying the technique at the time, but they hadn’t put a name on it—and even if they did, it probably wasn’t as evocative.
The SEO industry adopted it, and now its original page has a ton of backlinks—and it continues to get even more every month.
As you can see, the original article that coined the term has gained a whopping 7,700 backlinks from 2,100 referring domains.
7. Other interactive assets
This is similar to tools and online calculators—only much broader. Hereby, I mean:
🖱️ Polls
🖱️ Quizzes
🖱️ Assessments
🖱️ Games
🖱️ Interactive infographics
🖱️ Augmented reality and virtual reality
You would create these in a similar way to tools and calculators. However, interactive content is often more about education or entertainment than fulfilling any sort of practical function.
However, it is also a great way to attract links and traffic, especially if you take your time to execute it right.
That means providing useful information in a unique format.
An added bonus? You can often mine this particular asset for data about your target market, helping you improve your business
Example of an interactive asset: Oracle Cloud Stacker
Here’s an example from the technology firm Oracle. The business is known for providing cloud-based enterprise resource planning systems.
Source: Oracle
The interactive asset is a simple game where players must catch red cloud blocks and avoid enemies. Each cloud block represents a layer of a real-life cloud solution and layers must be placed in the correct order.
This helps players learn about cloud infrastructure while bringing some fun to a rather dry subject.
How to Create Incredible Linkable Assets
1. Identify and understand your target audience
One of the first things you need to do is to determine who you want your linkable assets to cater to.
In fact, this step is so crucial to success that “understanding your audience” doesn’t just apply to creating linkable assets, it also applies to any marketing effort—period.
BONUS: FREE Guide on How to Acquire High-Quality Links
If you know who your audience is, you are in a much better position to create content that will actually get backlinks.
Take your time to identify your audience’s interests, likes, dislikes, challenges, and pain points—then use that information to narrow down topics, choose the right medium, and market your linkable asset.
2. Figure out search intent and what your competitors are doing
Next, you need to do some keyword research to see what is ranking. You can find relevant topics to create linkable content around through competitor research and trend analysis.
For competitor research, enter the keyword you want to rank for in Google. Then, check out the top three or five hits on the page—what kinds of content do they feature?
If they’re all videos, then you should make a video. If they’re all in-depth articles, then that might be the best format for your own linkable asset.
Say you wanted to create a linkable asset for the keyword ‘SEO Tools’. When we take a look at the search engine results pages (SERPs) for the term ‘SEO Tools‘, we can see that the large majority of the top results are all listicles.
So, taking that into account, the best linkable asset format for this keyword would be a listicle.
New and trending topics are another great source of inspiration. Check Google Trends, social media, and other trend-spotting tools to find out which keywords are in high demand.
3. Pull from multiple sources for information
Whether you’re creating a video or conducting your own research, chances are you will have to turn to other websites, books, films, and studies for additional information.
It’s important to pull from as many sources as possible, for two major reasons.
The first reason is that collating information from different sources means that you’ll have a more complete and thorough understanding of your subject matter, and it will be easier to write your own expert take on it.
The second reason is that you’ll be better able to identify knowledge gaps that current published content isn’t filling—providing you with the opportunity to fill them.
4. Create content with S.U.C.C.E.S.S.
The S.U.C.C.E.S.S. framework was created by Dan and Chip Heath and introduced in their book Made to Stick. While this model wasn’t designed specifically for linkable assets, it was created to help people communicate more effectively, especially when it comes to business or sales.
According to the S.U.C.C.E.S.S. model, these are the elements that your linkable assets should have to resonate with your audience and really “stick”:
- Simple: Break your idea down to its core concept and don’t try to tackle too many things at once. Structure your thoughts simply but logically and use easy-to-understand language.
- Unexpected: Don’t say something that people already know. Surprise them with a unique idea or innovative execution. Create curiosity and grab their attention!
- Concrete: Talking in vague abstracts only muddles your message. To illustrate your point, use concrete images, definitions, and examples that make it easier to grasp and remember.
- Credible: Back your claims up with proof, statistics, or even just personal experience and anecdotal evidence. If your readers can test out your ideas and come to their own conclusions, even better.
- Emotional attachment: Emotions play a huge role in our decision-making process and memory retention. Appeal to the wide range of human emotions to get people reading, clicking, and converting into customers.
- Stories: Narratives are extremely powerful because they give context (and emotion) to otherwise disjointed ideas, which allow us to make sense of things and inspire us to take action.
As always, focus on creating high-quality content instead of a lot of content. If you are more thorough and more accurate than your competitors, then chances are that you will earn the link, not them.
It will take a lot of time and effort, but the results will be worth your money and energy many times over.
6. Design it to look beautiful
The prettier your piece, the more likely it is that someone would link to it. Don’t sleep on this—it matters more than you think.
In this day and age, busy people sometimes won’t take the time to read your entire article, but they could make a linking decision based on a quick overview and how your article looks.
Looking for an example of a well-designed piece? Check out this lead generation article by Hook Agency.
The article has it all:
- Custom graphics
- Social proof
- Responsive design
- Call-outs
- Multimedia
6. Share your linkable asset
You’ve probably heard the saying “great content shares itself”. And this is true to some extent—if you make linkable assets that people care about, then it’s more likely that they’ll share it with the people they care about. But you can’t get those clicks (much less those backlinks) if no one knows about the amazing piece of content you created.
BONUS: FREE Guide on How to Acquire High-Quality Links
Gain exposure by sharing your content as much as possible. There are many different ways to do this, such as posting on your blog, guest posting, sharing it via your email list, putting up Facebook ads, reaching out to influencers and other website owners, and more.
7. Track your progress
Just because your linkable asset is out there in the wild, it doesn’t mean that your work is over.
In fact, what you do after you’ve finished and shared your content is just as important as creating it!
After all, how can you truly say that your linkable content was “great” and “effective” if you have no data to back that up?
Tools like Ahrefs make this easy. You can check how many referring domains and backlinks any single page has received, as well as the overall dollar value of the traffic you’ve received.
For example, here’s a report on a keyword cannibalization article I created:
I got 46 backlinks from 40 domains and it cost me only my time to create this asset. Here’s a list of its referring domains. Not too shabby:
8. Regularly update your content
Some industries are super fast-paced, and things change all the time.
If this sounds like your industry, your “definitive” guides and “ultimate” how-tos could become outdated in just a few months! Stay on top of your linkable assets by regularly updating your content when applicable.
It’s always going to be easier to update your main resource materials than it is to create entirely new ones.
In addition to that, you can always re-promote your linkable content and make it gain even more backlinks.
The Secret to Backlink Building
It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into link building, if you don’t create anything worth linking to, then you’re not making the most out of your backlinks.
Creating a successful linkable asset is one of the best ways to get more backlinks and citations, but you have to do it right.
At this point, you should be armed with the following knowledge:
- What linkable assets are and how they can be a valuable tool in your link-building arsenal.
- 7 unique linkable asset strategies to implement into your next link-building campaign.
- How to share your linkable assets to gain the maximum number of backlinks.
- How to track the link-building progress of your linkable assets with tools such as Ahrefs.
Now it’s up to you to put that knowledge to good use. If you need help promoting your linkable content, then contact us. We’ve been building links for businesses since 2016 and we know how to help you rank higher on search engines and drive traffic to your site.
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