The document discusses content-driven link building strategies and how to measure their effectiveness. It describes analyzing over 4,500 content pieces, 3,500 links, and 170 client campaigns to identify trends. The analysis found that data visualization, full page takeovers, and thought leadership performed best on average. It also found that nofollow links have remained stable while mentions have increased. The document advocates using a data-led system to inform strategies, manage client expectations, and determine what approaches work best for specific clients and industries.

1. Content-Driven Link Building:
What Does Good Look Like?

2. My dream job, discovered in Dublin

3. How do you get links?

4. It’s easy…

5. Create an interactive piece of
content...

6. …using data visualization…

7. …in map format…

8. …published as a full page
takeover…

9. …and pitch into B2C press.

10. These trends are accurate for
Aira clients

11. They are going to be different
for your own clients

12. You have different strengths,
clients and processes

13. I’ll show you the system we’re
using to determine these
trends

14. What does good link building
look like?

15. 70 links – is this good?

16. 90 links – is this good?

17. 1,000 links – this kicks both their asses

18. 70 links doesn’t look as good now

19. It’s not just about links though,
right? We’re trying to send
more traffic and revenue

20. Source – Aira Client – low traffic, high LTV
65% organic traffic growth – B2B space

21. How many links does 65%
traffic growth need?

22. 50 links…

23. …to 9 content pieces…

24. ...over 12 months

25. The client are happy – they
have some great links and
organic traffic growth

26. 70 links – this was just to one piece

27. Is going “viral” good? Is this
what clients actually want?

28. We often get caught up with
the “viral” campaigns which
people like me talk about on
stage and in blog posts

29. Little secret – viral link
campaigns are not the norm

30. We (rightly) look for things we
can learn from these big hits

31. What about all the other
campaigns that do well, but
don’t go viral?

32. It’s not about going viral, it’s
about sustainable link building

33. I’ll take consistency over going
viral every single time

34. We have over 170 client
campaigns and thousands of
links

35. What can we learn from those?

36. How do we set expectations
with stakeholders on what we
can do?

37. We explain our strategy to
clients

38. True strategy is about placing
bets and making hard choices.
The objective is not to
eliminate risk but to increase
the odds of success.
Source

39. True strategy is about placing
bets and making hard choices.
The objective is not to
eliminate risk but to increase
the odds of success.
Source

40. We talk to clients about our
processes

41. We talk about our other client
case studies

42. We talk about the tactics that
are available to us

43. A few things that we do
Data Visualisation
• Static Graphics
• Interactive Content
• Animation
Thought leadership
• Guest posting
• Reactive commentary
• Interviews
Tactical
• Unlinked brand mentions
• Broken link building
• Citations

44. I’ve presented about all of
these at different events

45. It’s not good enough

46. Explaining processes, tactics &
case studies isn’t good enough

47. They don’t answer the
questions that clients ask most

48. “How many links will we get?”

49. ”How much traffic will we get?”

50. “How long will that take?”

51. “Which approach is best?”

52. “Will this work?”

53. They set client expectations for
how we do what we do

54. But doesn’t do a good job of
what could work for them

55. We need a data-led system to
better answer their questions

56. This is very important for
content-driven link builders to
get better at

57. Paid search and social is not
going away, it’s only getting
bigger

58. All clients need to have paid
traffic as part of their digital
marketing strategy

59. It’s much easier to predict ROI
and answer tricky client
questions when it comes to
paid search and social

60. We need to get better at it to
measure the impact of
content-driven link building

61. I’ll show you our system for
starting to do this and the
trends it’s shown so far

62. Where all of this started

63. Started with this guy

64. Me, Mark and Phil after a few whiskeys

65. markjohnstone.co
@epicgraphic

66. Mark helped us map out all of
our content pieces against two
attributes – how difficult a
piece was to create, and how
successful it was

67. We could easily see which
content pieces were easy to
create and successful – then
patterns started to emerge

68. This is what it looked like – each dot is a content piece

69. What this has developed into

70. We’ve analyzed…

71. 2.5 years of work

72. 4,500 pieces of coverage

73. 3,500 links

74. 170 client campaigns

75. 20 clients

76. 1 bloody big Google Sheet

77. We’ve added attributes to every
single link and campaign

78. Launch date
Industry
Nofollow
Mention
Format User input
Type of story
Type of data viz
Full page takeover
B2B v B2C

79. What we’re doing with it

80. Learn what works across
industries and clients

81. Feed this back into strategy

82. Set expectations with clients

83. The trends

84. Caveat – this is what our data
is telling us. Your trends are
very likely to be different

85. Which content formats
perform best?

86. Average
Total
Coverage

87. Does data visualization work?

88. We use a David McCandless cheatsheet

89. An example of our own data visualization

90. An example of non-data viz content

91. Average
Total
Coverage

92. What type of visualiztion works
best?

93. Does a particular graph work better?

94. This?

95. Or this?

96. Or this?

97. Or this?

98. This is just as much about the
content and story

99. Average
Total
Coverage

100. Do full page takeovers work
better than templated pages?

101. This is a full-page takeover

102. This is content within a blog template

103. Average
Total
Coverage

104. Is B2B harder than B2C?

105. Average
Total
Coverage

106. Average
Total
Coverage
But B2B is more likely to get followed links

107. Are nofollow links becoming
more common?

108. Source

109. % of overall
coverage

110. Nofollow links have stayed pretty stable
% of overall
coverage

111. It’s mentions that are more popular over time
% of overall
coverage

112. How do industries compare?

113. Average
Total
Coverage

114. We don’t think certain industries
are necessarily harder than
others

115. We think that it just takes time to
become effective and efficient
across industries

116. In summary

117. I don’t actually care if you use
this system

118. But you should be using some
kind of system

119. Analyze your results across
these metrics (or others)

120. Use this to spot what works for
you and your clients

121. Share with clients to manage
expectations (and your own)

122. Don’t get fooled into following
the latest content trends

123. Use processes, tactics, case
studies and data to inform
strategy & set expectations

124. Thank you!
paddy@aira.net