Creative Content Marketing and Link Building for eCommerce Websites Podcast

Right, sure. I got into the online marketing industry in the year 2011. So, I became a content writer for a publishing company. So, I started from that and then been involved in the SEO industry. So, I was hired by John Cooper – one of the best Linkbuilding experts in the world. And so, he hired me to be his link prospector.

So, he got into the – all of the inaudible and the Linkbuilding – from link prospecting, outreach down to the content creation. And so, I learned about it and what I did is I started my own SEO blog. It was digitalphilippines.net. And so, from that simply just posting all of the learnings, it became inaudible you know clients in the first year.

And in 2015, I started my Linkbuilding agency with my partner Joseph, who now handles the operation side. And so, we are here in Manila, Philippines (where) we are based.  We are a team of eighteen (18) linkbuilders, including all of our virtual assistants and our content writers.

ARLENE

Okay, great. That’s awesome. Well, you definitely got into the field I would say really a good time as many of our listeners know SEO, as you can probably The field I would say it really a good time as many of our listeners know SEO, and as you can probably testify to the fact that SEO has changed quite a bit and it continually will change.

And a lot of it is really spearheaded by Google and the changes that they make in their algorithm changes. All of that is really totally spawned by Google. These days link building is really – there’s really a huge focus on link building more so than ever I think because not only the – is link building important, but I do believe content is also really a big, you know, it’s pretty much where it’s at, you know content building and Link building really kind of go hand and hand these days.

So, I think you’re really on point is to where you are in your career. Now for all of the listeners out there that aren’t really too familiar with the process, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what is link building? And what is the best way that you see it for an e-commerce company to get started doing it?

VENCHITO

Basically, link building is a – just a discipline in marketing wherein you are based on the term, you just actually getting or earning links from other relevant websites that will inaudible whatever site that is and not just drive traffic, but also generate some assisted conversions, helping those visitors actually know more about your brand and hopefully buy your products or services.

And so, when it comes to, you know the best methodology, so I think there are a lot but I’ll just give you some of the techniques that we’ve been using as an Agency for most of our e-commerce clients.

Number one (1) would be to actually start with connections and partnerships because if you are a – whether you’re a retailer, a manufacturer or you’re a supplier of products, you would always find our to buy pages.

So, let’s say for example, you are a retailer, you can just make an inventory of all the products that you sell online and just check manually each manufacturer of those products. So simply by reaching out to those owners or those manufacturers and if you can actually see pages that are dedicated to listing down retailers, then you can actually get a link simply by doing that kind of outreach.

And so, you start with connections. You start with all of the partnerships that you had whether it’s an offline or online thing. And another thing is that I’ve seen this with all of the eCommerce sites. There are a lot of blogs or websites that might or that have mentioned your products or brand name, but then giving you the actual length, so if you can actually track those mentions and say simply just sending them pitches and saying “Hey, we’ve noticed that you mention us on your blog da, da, da”, and then from that you can actually inaudible link. From that simple pitch, you can actually gain a lot of links in the first few months, if you haven’t done that.

And probably one of the underrated and even forgotten methodology is the forum marketing because in 2009, I think in 2011, it’s been you know, many marketers have spammed all of the forum sites, and I’m looking forum marketing from early generation perspective and I’m just trying to spam the threads with links waiting to the sites. But basically, giving value by answering questions in forums, if you look at that, it’s not just getting a link but actually driving potential customer to your website. And I think those methodologies – those approaches will really help you get started with the inaudible.

ARLENE

That’s some really great advice, you know from one, the first thing that you mentioned as far as building relationships that’s really kind of where it all starts as forming these relationships and you talked about what you can do is there may be a lot of companies out there that are referencing your brand or your company, but not giving you a link or maybe they’re linking to an old piece of content or something that maybe is – not where you want to direct people maybe it’s older landing page.

And so yeah, one thing you can definitely do is reach out to them for sure. Another thing that I mentioned to companies that I deal with and I’m actually in the process of posting a video on this because we put out a lot of SEO videos here at inaudible to help enlighten our customers and recently launched the channel actually called the e-commerce Brothers channel on YouTube and they’ll be putting out a video where it talks about a little bit about what you said as far as forming these relationships.

And one thing that you can do also is to really try to get some of the heavy hitters pointing to you people that have a higher authority is you can link to them and then don’t ask for anything and just start forming relationships that way just link out to them and various articles and then just let him know I linked to you this is a great piece of content. We really appreciate it. And that’s one way to kind of get your – your foot in the doors.

So yeah, it’s just something else wanted to add to that which I think is very useful and something that an e-commerce business can take advantage of right away. Now, I know the listeners that are out there can be a variety of businesses – a variety e-commerce businesses or people that are working for e-commerce businesses on the marketing side, and one question that I typically get with regards to any type of marketing is and specifically with link-building is, is this something that can really be done internally by a business owner or somebody that’s in charge of their marketing? Or can it be outsourced? Or what is your take as far as getting started with link building?

VENCHITO

I think it really depends on the industry. If you are in a very competitive space, you might want to not just do it internally as you get all of the processes were trying to you know, hire someone or linkbuilding agencies to do that for you because the thing is when you are doing it internally, it will really require you to set up processes because sooner or later when the demand for links is increasing it will require you to just hire more members and make sure that the prospecting, the content creation, and outreach are all set up.

So, you can do it internally, but just make sure you already have some setup process documents for you to scale the entire process or the entire campaign. And inaudible, of course, for example, you can just simply you know, hire a freelance writer to do the content for you, graphic designer to create the formats and make sure the page is visually appealing to its targeted visitors and so on and so forth.

And so, there are just certain areas in linkbuilding where you can just simply outsource but make sure if you’re doing it internally you have to set up processes. The thing with outsourcing is that and I always get this a lot because they’re bad companies, especially link building agencies will simply just you know, send you all of the live links they’ve acquired for your website. And but if you look at the quality of those things it’s doing more harm than good. So, if you are trying to outsource it, make sure you do some research – the quality of the links.

I really recommend e-commerce site owners to get some recommendations, and referrals is a good indicator to really check if the agency has high reputation inaudible but if it’s can perfect in really give you the quality links that you’re looking for.

ARLENE

That’s really good. I appreciate that answer and I think one of the key things that you mentioned and I think not only internally do you need to have your own process documents, but I think for even for the outsourcing, I think that’s really a key thing because I think a lot of times especially these days, see it’s a lot easier these days to get freelancers and get people to do stuff remotely, but you can’t just hire somebody and just expect them to run with stuff.

You have to have things documented well, otherwise, you know, it’ll be frustrating not only for the remote worker, but also for yourself as far as you know hand-holding that you may have to do if you don’t have your process documents in place, so that’s really the main key thing, I think, no matter what.

The process has to be in play for both sides of it. Now, switching gears a little bit because I know you’re really – really an expert also on content marketing. These days you do have to be creative because I think as you can probably agree on the internet is really diluted, I think you could say almost with just a ton of just content some of it a lot of it is really no good.

And so, in order to have content out there that’s really appealing and attractive and in order for people to link to your content, what are some creative ways that you can suggest to do content marketing?

VENCHITO

The key is that it’s not just making your, you know, infographics or visually appealing – all of those things, but really trying to identify your audience or when getting you should actually create content assets that will not just give you first or initial set of links, but can actually, in the long run, can actually help your site earn links even without doing outreach.

And so, one of the key ways is to actually create a content that’s targeted to a linkable audience. So, this term linkable audience is – was coined by Garrett French of Citations Lab.

So, basically linkable audiences are groups of people or creators of pages that have their own resource pages. So, for example for the recycling or the disposal page, it’s simply lists down all of the references and resources of that given topic. And so how you can actually approach your content marketing by targeting linkable audiences, simply for example, if you’re selling batteries, if you’re an e-commerce site that sells batteries you can actually either target inaudible or to create a content about battery recycling or if you are targeting teachers or parents, for example, you can create a guide or a research guide about battery 101 for the kids.

The thing here is that you’re increasing the chances of your content to gain so much to links. And in the long run if the page is able to rank for keywords, then it will be referenced by other publishers once they find it to Google search. And so those things I think creating a content asset for a targeted audience is one thing.

Another methodology that I think will really – is very effective nowadays is creating an asset about data or statistics because this type of asset is mostly you know, reference by publishers and content creation. Our content creation teams or content creators and so the opportunity to get an inaudible rating is very high.

And the last thing is to recreate broken pages or dead pages. So, what you can do is to actually reverse engineer your competitors and see what are the pages that already given them links that have been shut down by them that you can actually recreate.

So, these are the pages that are broken, but if you look at this using a link analysis tools, you’ll find out that the – these pages have gotten a lot of links. And so, when you create that content make an improved version of it, what you can do is reach out all of the blogs or sites linking to the original content and then from that process you can actually get a lot of links through that.

ARLENE

Great. As far as you mentioned, of course creating this content that’s really the heart of it creating content that you want people to link to and kind of flipping it, then once you’ve got that content created and like you said if it is solid content people we want to link to it, but then on the other side of it is you want to get a link out there on these other sites.

And so, how does a company determine what’s a good site to get a link on? Is there a criteria that you typically follow and what is it?

VENCHITO

I think the basic thing is number one, it should be the site or the blog should be relevant to yours. And I think even if it’s common sense already, I think there are a lot of SEOs and link builders even marketers who (are) still trying to get links from irrelevant sites. And the key is that it’s not – again, the quantity of links that you’re after or looking for, but you’re also trying to you know, make sure that the site or blog is relevant to your search. that’s the first factor.

And the second one, I would say it’s the type of links that you’re getting because this type of link is something that people can click on and so they will be able to jump to your website and probably either you know, follow you or get to know more about your brand and hopefully buy your product or service. So, the thing the type of link is very crucial if you’re actually executing link building campaigns.

In terms of metrics, I think it really depends. I think there are companies who are very keen into you know DA, Ahrefs DA or you know Moz, but I think one thing that’s not been discussed over and over is the SEM Rush organic traffic.

So, the thing is when you’re trying to get a link from a website or blog, you want to know if that site is getting is ranking for multiple keywords and it has had it happen is it will drive you consistently traffic over and over once you get a link from that.

So, I think traffic, conversions, relevance and if you can actually get a link from brand to brand, you know context, I think those things will really matter if you do you want to you know, make sure that you maximize that your efforts in linkbuilding.

ARLENE

Yeah, you’re totally right. The key thing I think is the fact that it number one thing you should look at is if the site is relevant because I think really kind of on the early days of the internet and before Google was just as sophisticated as it is now as, SEOs I think we’re in agencies were out there just trying to get as many links as possible on sites that weren’t even relevant and that may have worked 10-15 years ago something like that. But these days the Google algorithm is really advanced. So, you know, I think back in those days, it was probably at in its infancy right now. I think Google is probably at the genius level that’s already a cruise through her college.

And so, it’s a big difference right now. So, you do have to be smart about what it is that you’re doing and just the main thing I think to think about is – is this something that is going to is this link that I’m going to put on this site first if it was irrelevant and does it add value to the context of the actual content.

So, you want to make sure that – that is always the case and that it makes sense for the reader because you know, that’s ultimately what Google says and I think that’s what they really stand behind is ultimately they just want to make sure that things that are indexed give people a great experience a user – a great user experience.

And so, if you’re searching for some particular keyword, whatever is returned, their whole bottom line, is that really what the person was looking for and is a good experience once they get there. So, that’s the key thing there.

Now, we’ve talked a lot about the link building and I know that process and it’s just something that I know you’re doing on an ongoing basis for those businesses that are let’s say they just getting started with it. Is there a rule of thumb when it comes to the amount of links that let’s say a business should strive to get let’s say on a monthly basis and how do you determine this?

VENCHITO

The answer is again, it depends, because we have experiences with clients were in you know, one client will – would like to you know, build 20 or 30 links at the maximum level. Some just wanting to you know, 4 to 6 links, but there are things that I really recommend for especially inaudible your end. So, if for example you ensure a coupon space, there are a lot of sites there are a lot of sites are actually engaging in the link building. So, they’re trying to you know, get 50-60 even more links per month.

So, in that case you got to keep up with the pace of the – of the link acquisition they’re doing so that would probably be your mark in a sense. But not just about the quantity, but make sure you know, you’re trying to achieve a higher quality level in terms of links.

Next is the only thing at the vertical but also checking your competitors. So, you can use link analysis tools like, you know Ahrefs or even SEM Rush just to see what they’re getting. There’s one – there’s one term and that is the link velocity. Basically, link velocity is the speed – the number of referring domains a site gets every month or week, whether it’s organic inaudible to outreach. There’s no really good number for every site, you really have to do your own research.

Either looking at the vertical or either looking at the order of the competitors that you’re trying to you know, dominate over and so yeah from those things you can actually estimate the number of ranges, let’s say 10 to 20 links from one.

ARLENE

Okay, great. Yeah, that is a great advice there and I’d appreciate your honesty and that it’s really hard to tell, but yeah, I think every business or industry is going to be a little bit different and it does really depend on the particular vertical a year in and what your end goal is with its link building. And so, that totally makes sense.

Well then, Venchito, I really appreciate you coming on here today for this episode of the e-commerce marketing podcast. You’ve definitely been very insightful with regards to the link building on that you’re doing day in and day out as well as you know content marketing.

And at this point, I like to always close things out with just one other quick question that I kind of switch gears. It’s my closing fun fact, so we learn a little bit more about you. What is one fun fact that our audience would be surprised to know about you?

VENCHITO

Fun fact, I think I don’t know how to ride a bicycle or motorcycle.

ARLENE

Okay. Okay. That is an interesting fact. Okay, so you don’t – don’t know how to ride a bicycle. Well, I don’t know how to ride a motorcycle myself. So, I think I can join you on that one. But do know how to ride a bike ride a bicycle and you guessed it really is never too late to learn. So yeah, definitely something I encourage you to do. I do hope I can occasionally here in the Orlando Florida area where I live in yeah, it’s a great – great exercise and it’s good to get to get out on a bike.

VENCHITO

Yeah.

ARLENE

Okay, great. Venchito, well finally, if our listeners would like to pick your brains anymore regarding link building a content marketing, what is the best way for them to get in touch with you?

VENCHITO

Sure, they can visit my website at www.sharprocket.com.ph that is S-H-A-R-P-R-O-C-K-E-T.com.ph or you can send me an email at [email protected] that is [email protected]. And send any questions if you really want to, you know learn about linkbuilding, (or) if you want to invite me to speak at your event or even in your podcast. But I want to make sure – I really want to make sure we’ll give you some more value to your listeners margins. Yeah, that’s it.

ARLENE

Okay, great, Venchito. We appreciate that and I know our listeners will take advantage of that and reach out to you as well. And once again, thank you for joining us today on the e-commerce marketing podcast.

VENCHITO

Sure, thanks for having me, Arlene.