The debate about promotion and link building will rage on forever probably.
One idea that is very powerful though is that you should build your website one single page at a time as if link building did not even exist. What does this mean? It means that you should make each page for your readers, for your audience, as though being genuinely useful to them was the only objective here.
Another idea is that, say that you had to create your website and promote it without ever building any links yourself, without even manufacturing any links, and without ever guest posting on another site to get links. In other words, you would have to build your website with the idea that link building is completely off limits to you. Your only chance to get links is to create content that is so good, so link-worthy, that people would naturally link to it.
Sounds like a hokey idea, I know, and it is easy to pay lip service to the idea. “Oh sure,” you might say, “I will write really good content and blah blah blah.” But no, really stop and consider the idea that you cannot manufacture ANY links for your site, ever. They must all come to you organically.
This is the true mindset that you need in order to create outstanding content. Consider the mini-course that you are reading now. It is an entire course with a full syllabus and the entire thing is given away freely. This is designed that way for a reason. The entire course, taken as a whole, is hopefully a valuable enough resource that people will eventually share it with others. This is real world link building in action.
Create valuable resources on your website. Create stuff that people will naturally want to share with others. Very easy to pay lip service to the idea, but very difficult to implement. You should be focusing on problems and providing solutions with your site. If your content does not solve a problem, then who is going to share it with others? Nobody will care unless you offer real value. This is the challenge of creating link-worthy content.
Every time that you go to publish an article on your website, stop and ask yourself: “Is this the best resource on the entire internet about this particular topic or keyword?” If it’s not, then what are you really doing? Your content may be “decent,” or it might be “good enough,” but ultimately if you want it to promote itself then it has to be the best.
Do a search for your keyword and look at the top 10 results. Evaluate each result in terms of quality and usefulness to the searcher. Then, create a page that is better than all of those results. If you do this over and over again then you will be successful in the long run.
The flip side of this is to say “OK, I just can’t do it. I cannot create the best resource online for my topic. My content is, therefore, just good enough. Barely.”
At that point you are creating spam, no? Wouldn’t the searcher want to find the better resource anyway, rather than your “good enough content?”
No, it has to be the best.
Aim for it.
Make it happen.
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