Earning links from your content can be a time-consuming and difficult process. Because of that, a number of content marketing/link building tactics have popped up over the years (such as guest blogging, broken link building, etc.) to help link builders and content marketers acquire editorial links at a higher rate.
Today, let’s discuss my current favorite content marketing/link building tool — one that has led to 50-plus domains linking to our content in just the last two months: embeddable content.
Embeddable content is a visual piece of content that we can get posted on publishers’ websites by giving them an embed code. This is not a groundbreaking idea, considering most of us have lived through the “infographics are the new link building” craze. The problem is that most companies made the mistake of stopping at the infographic, and that was their only form of embeddable content. What we have done is take advantage of all different types of embeddable content. A few examples:
There are also a few other content types that can be used to best match the topic. To pull off this content marketing technique and maximize efficiency, you must match your content type to your topic. Don’t default to infographics just because you have seen them before.
Getting Embeddable Pieces Placed
Now that you have this embeddable piece of content, how can you become more efficient in your link building/placement efforts? This asset gives you something you can deliver to publishers that they can place on their websites immediately. We have done a lot of this with our studies on lead validation. We publish a blog to the site, and then create a slide deck that shows off all of the stats/findings in a visual format. Now, when we show that study to publishers, we can provide the slide deck instead of having them wait while a story about the topic is written. They write a short introduction (or we will, if needed), and our embeddable piece is published on their site within a few days.
Since we don’t have to come up with a new idea (such as a blog topic), and since we are giving them something they can post immediately, the timeline for the link going live is shortened considerably. We then can devote much more time to pitching than doing research or writing copy.
Where the link building piece comes into play is with the embed code. When we send that embeddable piece over to the publisher, we can include some html that includes a link back to the article on our site. Now we have a way to get our content on other websites quickly — content that includes links back to our site. It’s a win-win in the world of a link builder.