6 Content Assets You Can Leverage For Link Building

Content marketing is one of the most effective marketing tactics available to marketers and, particularly, to SEOs.

It’s so valuable due to the evergreen value the content assets can provide, along with the fact they can become linkable assets that generate multiple backlinks over time.

“Content” is a nebulous term, though, so we’ve produced this breakdown of 6 amazing content asset types that you can leverage for your link building.

What Are Content Assets?

Content assets are pieces of content designed to be used and distributed to attract new customers and traffic to your website.

So, before you attack next week or months’ link building strategy for your clients, ask yourself the question. ‘Why would someone (a blogger or another website) link to one of my client’s web pages?’.

In this post, we are going to give you content asset ideas to give you opportunities to yield a more natural link building profile for your client. This approach essentially makes up the ingredients that form the top-ranking signals Google uses in its search algorithm, as mentioned above.

6 Content Assets and How To Use Them to Leverage Links

#1 Infographics

Infographics are nothing new, but they are one of the easiest content assets to leverage.

Coming up with a concept and gathering the research, facts, and stats to back it up can take as little as 1 hour. We did the exact same with this infographic and still to this day this content asset generates us links, shares, and social engagement from all over the world.

How To Leverage For Links:
The idea of infographics is quite simple. Come up with an engaging, interesting, and maybe even timely topic for your client’s industry, do some basic research in the public domain to find interesting facts and stats to back up your concept, and then produce a graphic that is visually pleasing. To get links, you’ll need to publish that infographic on your client’s website, either as part of an existing page or even just a new post in their blog section, and then use this as part of an outreach campaign to encourage bloggers to share and link to you and even push it out to your client’s social media channels to gain some traction. If your client is in a typically boring niche and you’re struggling with ideas, then go a little broader with your concept so it appeals to a wider audience.

Need an Infographic Designer? FATJOE offers an Infographic Design Service from start to finish in less than 10 days (and we’ll even do the research)!

#2 eBooks

An Ebook is ‘an electronic version of a printed book that can be read on a computer or handheld device designed specifically for this purpose.’ Now, in the online world and for the purpose of branding and marketing, most websites today will create an E-book without ever having a printed version. When you’re using an E-book to gain online exposure and brand awareness, and as a by-product, in most cases, gains ‘links and mentions’, then there’s really no need for a printed version.

How To Leverage For Links:
Derek Halpern of SocialTriggers.com uses Ebooks cleverly to continually build his email subscription lists. In the same way, he uses ebooks to gain email subscribers, you could leverage the power of Ebooks to generate links and mentions for your client’s website. You can even gain some traction by advertising the free ebook on social platforms in exchange for an email address or some other information that will be useful for your client.

#3 Free Tools

Creating free tools for your target audience is a great way to not only generate links and mentions on the web but also to build email subscriber lists or capture other information about your users. We created FATRANK as a free Chrome Extension for SEOs to quickly check ranking positions in Google of the website they are viewing. To date, this tool has more than 15,000 daily users and has generated links and mentions from a number of authoritative websites and brands in the industry.

How To Leverage For Links:
Creating a tool like this and uploading it to app stores like the Chrome Store gives you the opportunity to piggyback off the traffic these platforms generate. Depending on whether your tool is useful, this then gives you an opportunity to get mentioned in one of the many round up blog posts that get written about useful SEO tools. If you offer your tool for free you then open up opportunities to be listed in the ‘FREE’ useful SEO tools! As well as this, these tool platforms usually link back to the creator of the tool.

#4 Surveys Or Studies

Conducting Surveys and Studies is one of the most neglected opportunities for links we see in industries and niches other than SEO and Marketing. Whilst the process of creating a survey and then gathering and collecting responses is difficult and often time-consuming, it can be a very powerful opportunity for a business to put itself at the forefront of being an authoritative source and benefiting from links and mentions for years to come.

How To Leverage For Links:
In the SEO industry, we often see surveys like this one by Moz being conducted amongst industry professionals to gather their insight into the future of SEO. Not only do these surveys tend to gather traction across social platforms, but when results are published on a web page or in a blog post, you often see these pages being linked to other websites covering topics surrounding search ranking factors. These surveys tend to be timely, so you’d expect a rush of links during that time period, and then this will fall off as the results get old. To increase your opportunity for links and mentions, think about doing something like this yearly for your clients.

You can also pair these surveys and stats with the infographic suggestion above to create a unique angle for your infographics.

#5 Videos

Video content is a fantastic way of increasing your brand awareness, and given the ongoing upward trend in consumption stats for all forms of video and video marketing, it’s certainly a marketing method you cannot ignore. Before video becomes the norm, adopting video marketing methods now will give you the opportunity to benchmark yourself or your business at the forefront of your industry and create more linkable assets not only on your website but across your social media platforms.

Video content can be tricky to produce in-house as it’s often costly and time-consuming. If this is the case for you and your clients, why not consider outsourcing your video production? Check out our guide to outsourcing video production to learn everything you need to know to get started!

How To Leverage For Links:
Publishing vlogs, as opposed to just written blogs, is a great way to connect with your audience and attract more links and mentions from other websites. You can also benefit from publishing vlogs by uploading these to video hosting sites such as YouTube and Vimeo and piggyback from the search traffic that exists on those platforms. You can even create video channels such as this one for users to subscribe to so that they get notifications every time you publish a new video. Another great advantage these platforms have is that you can easily embed videos into blog posts. This increases your chances of being referred to or mentioned in blog posts.

 

#6 Resource Pages

A resource page is a page on a website that lists helpful links, resources, and information about a specific topic. It should be easy to navigate, clear, and concise and simply give users bitesize information about the source or web page you are referring them to.

How To Leverage For Links:
What’s good about these resource pages is that they are seen as a credible source of information and this in itself can create lots of link opportunities in the future. You could use this to your advantage when reaching out to bloggers, and once this page becomes a ‘Ranking Asset’ (ranks highly within Google for its subject), then this evergreen piece of content will gain links and mentions from websites for years to come. This tactic is so effective we even included it in our roundup of creative strategies for acquiring backlinks!

Use Content Assets To Supercharge Your Link Building

Content assets like the ones we’ve suggested here are valuable not only because they help build your topical authority and wider brand identity but also because they can help you generate links.

This can come both actively with outreach campaigns, and also passively with users finding and resharing your helpful content.

Passive link acquisition is fantastic as it lets you focus your efforts elsewhere and will naturally help you become an authoritative resource in your space as users see more and more of your content and, ultimately, are helped by it.

Focus on producing great quality content writing and content designs to accelerate link acquisition for both you and your clients.