In this article, I’m going to be sharing with you whether or not resource backlink building is worth it. I’m going to be winding back the clock and going to some early efforts that I did in 2020 to show you the results of two months’ worth of doing this for one of my sites, as well as what happens six months later.
At the end of this article, you’re going to have a clear understanding of whether or not resource backlink building is a worthy cause and use of your time.
What is resource backlink building?
The first thing we need to do is we need to go over exactly what is resource backlink building. Resource backlink building is where you’re going to start out by taking a look at all these different pages on the internet that have talked about things related to the topics that you’re trying to get backlinks for.
And what they’ve hopefully done is put together a resources page or a helpful link section in which you can reach out to that person that created that page, and then have them add a link back to your website.
The reason why backlinks are so important is because they are votes of confidence to Google that this is a really helpful page on X, Y, Z topic.
What was my process for backlink building
What exactly was my process here for resource backlink building and did it work?
Well, the first thing that I did was I essentially staffed a team of virtual assistants to search through the internet for all the different variations of resources and the particular niche that I was in. I had these in-depth resource guides that broke down different tips and tricks around different topics.
And essentially I was asking my virtual assistants to go onto Google and use a combination of search operators in order to find pages that were really interesting. But essentially what I was doing with my virtual assistants was I was having them go onto Google and search for things like inurl: resources, and then the niche that I had in mind, or what I would do is I would have them look for something like inurl: favorite resources, and then the niche that I was looking for. But pretty much I was using different variants of search operators in order to identify which of these pages were potentially interesting to me.
Taking a look at some resources of a car niche
Let’s take a look at how that might’ve looked if I were, for example, working in the car niche. All right. So in the case where I were operating in the car niche, what I would do is I would have my virtual assistant search for inurl: resources car advice. So maybe I wrote some sort of content marketing piece on cars, and I pretty much just wanted to get a link back to these sites. What I could do here is you could see that now in these search results, these are outputting for me, sites that have some sort of reference to resources in the URL slug itself.
And you can see as I open up some of these sites, that these are car resources, resources for car buyers, resources for buying a car, car maintenance tips, as well as ways to learn how to fix cars. So, what I would do is I would essentially have my virtual assistant research each of these websites for whether or not they were healthy websites that didn’t necessarily have spammy backlinks or backlink profiles.
And then from here, what I would do is I would have them collect the contact information of these people so that I could then send them an email to share my resources that they could potentially add to these pages. This is a super well-known backlink building technique. It’s not rocket science. And so you can definitely check it out and just go on Google and search resource backlink building to see whether or not you want to take a stab at doing this too.
Digging into the result of a backlinking campaign
In order to answer the question of whether or not resource backlink building was worth it, we first have to take a look at where our site was at the beginning of the time period before we begin our outreach campaigns, then take a look after 60 days and then followed up by taking a look at it after 180 days past.
So let’s go ahead and take a look. When we first started out in this backlink building campaign, we had no prior real work around backlink building. Aside from an occasional reach out here and there, we didn’t really see all that much traction in terms of our backlinks going up, because we weren’t doing a lot of outreach, but what you can see here on the screen here is that in March 2020, we had about 314 referring domains to this particular site.
And what ended up happening was within two months of us starting to reach out for just resources backlink building, what we found was that this number went up to 363. I was doing no other backlink building efforts at this time. So I know that this is the closest thing to being able to get a clear understanding of the impact of resource backlink building.
What happened after six months?
But what happened a few months later? Well, when we look at that, what you would see is that at the six month mark of our resource backlink building campaign, which is also around the time when I started wrapping up this particular campaign, we were at a 501 referring domains.
So that had a huge impact overall, almost a 200 referring domain impact just by being consistent in our resource backlink building. Most of these efforts honestly, were done through the months of March through June. And then I had my team kind of take a step back because there was a lot going on in the world at that time if you recall.
But this had a huge impact on this particular domain. And we take a look at the backlink side of things, you can see that we actually started close to 2200 backlinks. And within the two month time period, we were already up to close to 2,600 backlinks. And then if we were to go ahead and extend that time period to six months, we had reached 3,200 backlinks give or take.
Now, obviously, there’s a lot of potentially spammy backlinks here and there that just get picked up by different crawlers and whatnot but what they should tell you is that just a few months of meaningful, consistent effort of resource backlink building can have a big impact on your website.
Is resource backlink building worth it?
But just to really prove this point, I’ve summarized everything in this sort of table so that you can take a look at what the impact was in the before and after.
So in the first situation, you can see on the table that I have the start time period, which was around March of 2020, two months was by May 2020. And then the six month mark was by September 2020. And what you can see is that within two months on both referring domains, as well as backlinks, we had seen an increase of 16 and 19% respectively.
And then what you can see is that by the six month time period, we had a 60% increase in referring domains, followed by a 46% increase in the actual backlinks itself for the website.
So this goes to show you that resource backlink building absolutely does work. If you haven’t already created a team to start reaching out and building out the outreach list for your resource backlinks, I highly recommend you do so because it’s going to be so much more affordable than any other respective way that you can build backlinks.
These are the same tactics that if you were to hire a backlink building agency that they’re going to do first in their strategies. And the reason why is because they are the lowest hanging fruit.\
My recommendation
So ultimately, here’s what I recommend for you. Take a look at your own niche and look at what sort of pieces of content you’ve created that are around how-to’s, advice guides, or just general tips and tricks of the trade in whatever niche that you are covering.
From there, prioritize the three to five pages that you really want to start building backlinks for. And then go on Upwork, create a listing for a virtual assistant to start researching this sort of information by using a combination of Google search operators. Again, you can check out this article here where I teach you some more advanced tips and tricks around Google search operators so you can learn how to do this effectively.
Once you have your RFP in place, you want to make sure that you start to create your own standard operating procedures and documentation that you can use to then train your virtual assistant. And then it’s all about just outreaching. Our goal at that point in time from March to May and then from May to September was to pretty much be looking for several hundred new resource pages to add from all the different content that we were releasing on our site.
It was a super effective strategy, and if I were to have paid for those backlinks, it would have cost so much money as opposed to the couple of cents that it was taking pursed scraped contact from a virtual assistant. So check it out for yourself, give it a try and tell me what you end up seeing in terms of the results.
If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how to build backlinks and if it’s worth doing.