The 6 Questions That Kill Weak Link Building Ideas

Let's go to phase two, validation of our linkable assets ideas. So, of course, you never know beforehand which idea is going to work or not, and that's why you have to have an experimental mindset. Some of this stuff can fail and some of this stuff can work way better than you thought year after year. There are ways to filter out ideas that don't really align with your goals or with your brand or you simply don't have the resources for them. So these are questions that you can ask when you're going through your list of linkable asset ideas. For instance, what would the idea look like fully formed?

Is it something that you can visualize or is it just something very vague and you really don't know how you can make the idea into reality? Is there some concrete indication that this could work? So here I look for some sort of proof that similar ideas have worked in the past. It doesn't mean that they have to be the exact same ideas can also be a type of content or something else, but I have to see some sort of indication. So, for instance, is it getting a lot of links, a lot of social shares, a lot of YouTube views, all those kind of things can show that this could work.

Of course, sometimes you have an idea where you really feel in your gut that it's a great idea and there's no proof that it will work because there's nothing similar out there. Also you need to have enough resources and skills to make the type of content. Do you have enough money to do a survey or do you actually know how to make a calculator? The other thing that you might want to consider is if it attracts the right audience. So you're catering to a specific audience. For a link building asset, this can mean that you maybe don't cater directly to your customers, but you cater to companies that sell to your customers that are not competing with you.

So in those cases, those prospects are your audience, not necessarily your customers. The other thing that can also help is if your linkable asset can directly or indirectly contribute to any conversions. This is not something that you absolutely need because a linkable asset isn't there to convert to more sales or rankings or traffic, it's just there to get links. So this is something that wouldn't be the biggest thing to consider. What is important though is if the idea aligns with your brand. So maybe something very controversial could be interesting, but you might not want to take the risk with your brand reputation to create it.

So let's take a look at the list of ideas and keep these questions and other ones in mind while we go through them. So in the brainstorm session, I don't really judge any ideas, but I just note them all down. And now is the phase where I do look at them a little bit more from a realistic perspective. But it's really nice to have such a big list of ideas to go through. Some of these might not work for a linkable asset, but they might still be good ideas for your blog because it can help your audience. So let's see. I'm just going to go through some of them.

So here is the piece that I found on the DIY solar oven. So what I'm looking for is, is it relevant for the audience? Yes, it's about solar power. This can be a little bit difficult for link building because it's very related to the product. So if you do outreach to the link prospects, they might not want to link to it because it's clearly relevant to solar power, but it's still a cute idea. So you might want to go ahead with it, especially when you see that something on YouTube that there was similar got six million views, which means that you could make an article based on all those things and it could potentially get links either passively, you know, if your domain is strong enough, or you could do outreach for it.

So if I put this article into Ahrefs here, yeah, I can see that it's getting some traffic. So backlinks, I would have to check the backlinks themselves. So this is 184. And then if I filter this on really rough quality measures, which you don't always need, it's 63. So that's, that's pretty good. Now what I would do is I would create an article that's more broad than this. So you could create a big article about all these different DIY things you can make for solar. So you can make a solar oven or other things you can make around solar. So for instance, I think here this person is showing you how to make a solar panel at home.

This one shows you how to make it from CDs and DVDs. But I think if you choose the kid angle or whatever the family household angle, there are a lot of more playful ideas you could put in here. It's just a matter of compiling them into a big article or a big guide. And you could also make it into a very educational article. So there could be these science projects that kids could do when they're at the house, you know, in the summer holiday or whatever. So this could, yeah, what format will it exactly take? I don't know. But I would try to not make the exact same thing.

So the solar s'mores, but make it bigger. So one way you can go is go to the science and educational stuff. And that allows you to get links from anybody talking about renewable energy or parenting or education and stuff like that. The other way you can go is the food way. So you could make a big list with instructions or recipes of all these different foods you can make with solar energy. So for instance, this brought me to another idea, and I don't think I saw this online. So this is a solar cooking recipe book. So you could with maybe a solar oven or some other solar power application, you could make a lot of recipes, right?

And that could be interesting. So for this one, I would, I think this has a pretty good indication that it could be good for link building. So if you do outreach, people are happy to relate to it because it has a lot of views on YouTube and because that one article seemed to be doing well, we could find more others. But this one, the e-book or the recipe book or a list of recipes is a little bit of a gamble because I don't think stuff like that exists yet. So I would put that here. But it could be interesting. You could even include it maybe in the other bigger article.

Okay, so there are, this is great. So there are cookbooks with solar cooking recipes. So what I would do probably to see if this works, to validate it, is to see if these are getting links or traffic. So yeah, in that case, if it doesn't seem to get any traction, then I probably would not do this idea. But let's go on because I wanted to show a couple of more. Now here's another idea. This is about greenwashing and I could see that this article about greenwashing is getting quite a bit of traction. So let me put it here into Ahrefs, 301 backlinks.

I would have to look at, you know, how good these backlinks are and quite a bit of traffic. So this is something that could be easy to build links to. It opens up the prospects in the sustainability, in news, maybe even politics, in business. It opens up a lot of different marketing, even a lot of different outreach lists that you could get into. Of course, when you do outreach, you do have to make the connection so that it's relevant where your link ends up. But yeah, that's something that I can see could have potential. Now there are a lot of ideas in here that I didn't really work out.

So for instance, small RV, best small RV, I'm not sure, you know, how that would work because it's a review article, so that could be hard to link to. But along those lines, I found this other one and that was more about smallest RV, biggest RV, most expensive RV. And that was because I saw this video that got 21 million views and it's an extreme video. So it does seem like this kind of content could work for people. I wouldn't do something similar, but something that's along the line of the smallest, the biggest, the most expensive, the cheapest, the oldest, you know, so you could do videos or you could just do a listicle or stats or something like that.

And again, that's something you can try out and it might work, it might not work, but it could be something that's more easier to build links to because it's not self-serving. It's not that self-serving as writing something about solar panels. And you could get links from relevant sites. So from traveling or van life sites or RV sites and things like that. As you can see, how I validate is that I look at all these different questions. And it's not always about is this going to get a ton of links because that's not always easy to reverse engineer.

Sometimes you have an idea and it just makes sense for the audience or it ties into something that's going to be trending. And then I would definitely try it if the costs are not too high because you need to experiment with these things and see what works. So one thing that's really low cost and almost always works is a stats piece. So here, for instance, there, you could write an article that just compiles everything you can find online about your industry. So in this case, solar panel industry. And you don't have to do your own research. Of course, your own research is great, but you don't have to do that.

The only thing you do is that you get all this information from reputable sources and you put it in one article and you keep that article as dry and neutral as possible. Then what happens is that if somebody like a journalist or publisher writes about something in your industry, they don't have to do their homework necessarily because they can just see your article and use stats from that. And you would think that you wouldn't get a link back because the stats you are using are not your own. If you use them from all the sources, but very often the publisher or journalist, they link back to you as if you are the direct source of information.

But in this case, what I would probably do is I would have maybe a piece like this that's specifically about your industry. But I would also go a little bit wider because in this case, a wider net is probably able to get more links. So I would do stats and trends piece as well for renewable energy, so the broader industry. And something like this, you renew every year in the same article, so the same page and it can get you links. You can also think about stats about seasonal things and it can also around a specific time of year can get more links.

If your domain isn't strong enough yet to pop up in the search results when somebody researches, for instance, solar energy stats or something, you can run ads for this and that's a way to beat position one and get into position zero. And some of these keywords like solar energy statistics, solar energy statistics, they don't have a lot of competition in the ads, right? So it wouldn't cost you a lot of money. So I would always try some of these stats pieces and then see how they go. So right, so let me see, yeah, so this is another example of something where you can get, it's easy to build links to usually and you can get passive links and that's just by explaining something.

And often it's something fairly simple that somebody wants to look up or somebody refers to from a bigger article. So I got this idea from this article, which simply explains the difference between these motorhomes, right? And as you can see, it's not a super strong domain, it had a drop, but you can see it gets some traffic, there are also some backlinks. And again, I'm going to do a quick, yeah, there are only 12 backlinks, but it could be a good thing to try. I also have to filter it further, yeah, it seems like there are only nine left, but it could still be worth a try because it's such an easy piece to make, you know, you just explain the difference and you're done, it has some videos, but you can just, you can use those videos as well or not, you don't always have to put in videos, it can help.

But it's pretty easy to make, right? And it would be something that could be easy to build links to as well, because it's just a simple explanation of the difference. It's not a very commercial or self-serving page. So I would probably research if there are other articles that talk about the same topic and see what kind of links they're getting or what kind of traffic. But as it's a very low-cost article to create, I would just create it and start a campaign around it. There are some ideas that I had that didn't seem to have that much potential once I looked into it.

So for instance, warmest states in US in winter for the snowbirds. I had some other ideas that I liked better and we'll probably go ahead with them first. For me, it's not really a cut and clear process. I just see if there are enough arrows that indicate that this could work well for link building. On the one hand, for active link building, for doing outreach to something as useful for their audience or to write a guest post and then in the guest post link to that piece. And on the other hand, for passive links, with somebody who's writing an article, link out to one of these pieces.

So in conclusion, it's all about being open to experimentation while at the same time not going for the most expensive ideas right away until you have a really good grasp of what works well in your niche.