Hi my friends, welcome to What More Trailer Day. I'm Paddy Mugan on the CEO of Aera. Today we're going to talk about link building and we're going to talk through five tactics to get more from less with your link building. Before we go into those I'm going to set some context about what we mean by more from less. So at the moment in the world in the UK and the US lots of businesses are being squeezed because of rising costs. Customers are struggling to cope with their living costs as well which is affecting companies and what products I can sell. So what happens as a result is agencies and in-house teams come under more pressure to get more results but maybe from less budget or they won't get the budgets increased because of companies that worry about rising costs. So what we need to try and do is agencies in-house teams is think of tactics to get more from less. And what we mean by that is inputs are normally around time resources budget. Those are the things that drive the work that we do and the outputs normally links traffic revenue conversions those kinds of things. What we need to try and do is not need more and more of this to get more and more of that. So we can actually use the same amount of inputs or lesser inputs to drive the same outputs in terms of the links traffic and revenue. That's really really good for our stakeholders. If you work in-house your bosses will be really happy about that. If you're an agency your clients will be really happy about that as well. So here's five ways to think about doing those things all folks around digital PR, link building and content marketing. So number one, try to favor repeatable content ideas. So when you're coming up with ideas in the ideation process try and look for ones that you can repeat over and over again. So for example can you plug in some new data for 2022 then for 2023? Can you put some new information in there some new facts rather than having a campaign that has a fixed start and end point. If you have a fixed start and end point once an end point comes you can't keep out reaching it so the results you're going to get from that content are quite limited by time. Whereas if you can keep that content going over and over again and keep refreshing it with new ideas, new data and new data points you can keep refreshing it, keep getting links and keep getting more from that content rather than relying upon building new content every single time. Number two, don't stop out reaching content. We see this quite a lot. So 25% of SEO's outreach content over and over again leaving 75% that just leave content behind once I've gotten a few links to it. What normally happens is you launch a campaign, get some links, do you move on to the next one? These campaigns that you've already reached if you can keep going with them, if they're working just keep doing the outreach because while you're building new content and launching more campaigns you can keep getting links to the older content and keep getting results for that content as well which again means you're getting more from less from the same inputs, you're getting more and more outputs. Number three, look for existing link worthy content. So when you start working on link building and launching content it's really tempting just to launch brand new content, launch brand new campaigns whereas sometimes this content sat right there on the website that is already link worthy and may already have some links going to it. So rather than diving off and creating new content take a quick look at the website itself, see which pages have got lots of links to them, see why they've got links and see if you can pick them back up again. If you can the nice thing about this is you can keep building links to the old content whilst you're launching brand new campaigns. So you don't need to not launch brand new campaigns but try not to default to launching new ones and forget about what could be right in front of you with the existing content. Number four, I'm a big finance simplifying execution. Again it's really tempting to think for an idea and think of the most complex, the most shiny interactive way to launch that content and sometimes that's fine, that's the right thing to do but don't let your mind just default to that because that is expensive in terms of time, resources and budget. To try and simplify as much as you can, if you've got a good idea it can be launched inside a blog post or just a very very simple graphic or even a short few lines of text with some data, just focus on that rather than worrying about design and development resources because if the angle is good enough it will still get links and you don't need to worry about going viral. If you spend just a couple of hours launching a blog post it gets a handful of links that's still a good result compared to spending six or eight weeks on a big shiny interactive piece to get maybe 10 or 15 links. So don't worry too much about going viral, focus on the angles, focus on keeping things simple. Number five, this is a really overlooked area in our experience. So look for internal linking opportunities. If you have pages that have got lots of external links pointing to them you need to try and filter the equity from those pages through to your commercial pages because usually the home page gets the most links but then you've got categories and products which aren't normally that link worthy for most websites so don't get a lot of links pointing directly to them but they're the ones we want to rank, right they're the ones that drive revenue. So if you have links going to your content your campaigns, maybe your blog, maybe some guides, try and filter that link equity from those pages to your most important commercial pages to your products and your categories then track the results, track the rankings, track the traffic and you'll see that that's filtering that link equity makes those pages rank a bit better and again you're getting more from less because that's just internal linking you don't need more design, more development and you can still drive more outputs with pretty minimal inputs. So that's it that's five ways to get more from less with link building as we move into this area of business being a bit more picky with their budgets and we squeeze a little bit more. These are going to be really really important to think about and even when we come out of recessions and things are going well again these are still good things to be thinking about, no stakeholders will be unhappy if you're trying to get more from less when it comes to budget. So I'm Paddy Mugan, if you want to follow it on Twitter I'm at Paddy Mugan, I really hope that was useful and thank you for watching.