Passive link building: How to publish statistics that attract links naturally
Our team at Digital Leverage recently completed a data study that brought in some solid results.
We got backlinks, mentions in a podcast, and even landed a quality sales lead.
The process took a lot of trial and error though.
To figure out a better approach, I reached out to Alex Horsman, who specializes in passive link building. He shared his process and pointed out common pitfalls to avoid. Here we go!
Data studies: How to earn backlinks in your sleep
Our goal is simple - create content that pulls in backlinks on its own. We're not talking about getting links from random sites either, but links from the world’s largest publications such as WSJ, NY Times, and Harvard.
From my experience, data studies are the best way to earn these links without actively chasing them. Alex confirmed this.
Here's why: Millions of news stories are published every single day. The Washington Post alone publishes approximately 1,200 stories, graphics, and videos per day, with about 500 of those produced by their editorial staff.
The New York Times publishes around 230 pieces of content daily, including articles, graphics, and blog posts.
Mail Online, the UK's most prolific news website, publishes an average of 1,490 stories each day, with up to 1,640 stories on weekdays.
And guess what? They all need data and sources to back up their claims and arguments made within their stories (just as I did above with that external link).
This right here is your opportunity. Most of the time, journalists will just Google what they need and grab the first good source they find.
But how do you become that source?
Give journalists exactly what they’re looking for
One of Alex’s favorite examples: An article about cybercrime statistics that gained 65 referring domains within the last 30 days. With no manual outreach being done!
Hold on a second, though. Before you rush off to start working on your next statistics page, let us share something important.
Most people fail at these data studies because the keywords they want to rank for are too vague:
Cybercrime statistics
Cybersecurity statistics
And other general statistic-related terms
Journalists, however, aren’t interested in general statistics. They are looking for one or two main data points to support the article they are writing.
Offering the right data points
You find the right data point by looking at a page’s anchor text. What data point did the journalist quote when they linked back to the article?
Looking at the article above, we see the main data point journalists are interested in is “10.5 trillion”. Over 300 websites have quoted this specific statistic when linking to this article.
If we take a look at the article by Cybersecurity Ventures, we see this data point is related to the global cost of cybercrime.
Cybersecurity Ventures expects global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025.
Based on this information, you want to write an article dedicated to these keywords:
how much does cybercrime cost the global economy each year
how much money is lost to cybercrime every year
how much has cybercrime increased
We do NOT want to write an article around “cybercrime statistics”.
Those keywords are too hard to rank for and too vague to bring in backlinks.
Find out what data journalists want and give it to them.
Once you have the data points in mind, you create very direct question to answer articles.
Typically the keywords are:
"How" - how much does cybercrime cost the global economic
"Average" - average student loan debt
"Cost" - cost of gas overtime
"Number of" - number of active users on Telegram
"Demographic" - demographics of remote workers
"Median" - median price of home in Missouri
Addressing specific questions around data is easier to rank for and has a higher link intent than generic statistic content.
Also, you don’t always need to rank number one to get links. Journalists are grabbing multiple sources to again, enhance their argument/claim.
How I’d replicate this
Stop wasting money on sketchy link building services or extensive outreach.
Conduct data studies yourself or summarize existing statistical data related to your business.
Write and optimize one or multiple articles in a way that they naturally attract high-authority backlinks by focussing on a specific number, cost, etc. that journalists might be interested in.
Want to learn the entire strategy?
Check out Alex’s put together a free 5-day email course going over all the details.
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