This year, MBE Group received an Automotive Communications Award, presented by Women in Auto Care at the 2020 Virtual AAPEX (Automotive Aftermarket Product Expo) Experience.

This prestigious award was given to client ADVICS for “Best B2B Website” and designed and built by MBE Group.

The website development project started with a comprehensive discovery and audit of the previous ADVICS website and marketing materials to understand what was working well and what needed improvement. Based on this research, MBE Group developed a strategic UX and content plan to address three primary goals:

  1. Help users find parts via the custom parts lookup tool
  2. Increase brand awareness by conveying the brand story
  3. Increase average time spent on the website and average pages viewed per session

By setting out these three goals, MBE Group was able to successfully implement the necessary changes to deliver impactful results for the client with a complete and custom design of the website.

Custom Built Parts Lookup Tool

In order to help users locate the right parts, MBE Group designed a custom parts lookup tool, which features an intuitive year-make-model lookup, part number or cross reference (XREF#) search functions.

This parts lookup tool is now a highly performing page with greatly increased page visits and session times. It also provides data to the ADVICS team to see which part numbers and models receive the most amount of searches.

Brand Awareness

The custom design of the site focused on updating the previous look-and-feel with a modern, bold aesthetic. The entire website is optimized for both desktop and mobile viewing, providing an intuitive user experience from any device.

A light and bright color palette is used throughout the website, echoing the ADVICS branding while tying to visuals from the current print and digital ad campaigns.

This cohesion across multiple channels creates strong brand recognition and awareness for viewers.

Analytics

The new website is delivering a high-level user experience and applicable technical content that the audience was requesting. Based on the most recent analytical data, users are much more engaged with the content and are spending more time on the site. Page views increased significantly, as well as pages viewed per session.

The website sees impressive statistics, including the following:

  • 191% increase in pages per session
  • 96% decrease in bounce rate
  • 67% increase in average time spent per session

Truly unique to this website and a direct response to the client’s goal is the 3% bounce rate. This is a remarkable figure where on most “healthy” sites, a bounce rate is expected between 30%-50%. Any bounce rate below 30% is excellent. MBE Group was able to create a successful user experience as users are able to navigate the site easily and find relevant content.

 

Building an audience is not the same as building an online community. Read that sentence again.

When growing an audience — particularly one that lives on social media — you can easily lose yourself in the algorithm game, or get distracted by your follower count, rather than engagement. But building a community means creating a space where real people can discover answers to real problems.

On an episode of the MBE Group Marketing Podcast, we spoke to Tim Stoddart about the key differences between building a community versus building a following. Tim — writer and partner of Copyblogger and founder of Sober Nation, the leading global community for drug and alcohol recovery — always sought to create community first, and a following second.

Below, we explain how to build an online community, where a community takes place, and how to monetize your community (if that’s your goal).

What Is an Online Community?

Before we talk about the mechanics of community building, let’s revisit what an online community is.

An online community is no different than a “real life” social community away from your phone or computer. It’s a shared space where a group of people come together to share common interests, learn from one another, and find a sense of belonging. You may take part in a fitness community (group workouts or a running club), a work community (co-working space), or a hobby community (a writers’ meetup).

In each of these communities, every person who takes part gets something out of it. If 15 people join together every Tuesday night for a local running group, every runner reaps the benefits of jogging five miles.

This is what separates building an online community from simply playing the algorithm game.

When you focus too much on the metrics alone, like social media likes and follows (and how to capitalize on these KPIs), the benefits of participating in the channel can become too one-sided. If a social media influencer is compensated for posting, that compensation benefits the influencer alone, not the entire group.

Tim noted this difference when he first started blogging in 2010. Ten years ago, many bloggers grew blogs to attract advertisers. The main key performance indicator (KPI) was ad money. Very few bloggers (and fewer companies) blogged simply to build quality content to answer questions from potential customers, thereby building an authentic audience. So, when Tim began writing about his sobriety, he created a space for like-minded people to share their experiences — and in doing so, he laid the foundation for a new online community.

How to Build an Online Community

Building a community is nothing more than creating a space where community members can discuss their shared interests. So when you set out to build your own community, keep the following objectives in mind.

1. Find Your Purpose

When building your online community, your focus should be on finding ways to provide a benefit to community members — not to yourself.

When Tim built Sober Nation, he wanted to create a place where people could recover from addiction. He wrote about his experiences with drugs and alcohol and invited others to share their own. They shared a clear purpose — to get sober.

To find your purpose, brainstorm the different types of online communities you’re a part of — what’s your reason for being there? Maybe you enjoy having a free community to swap investing tips so you can retire early. Perhaps you’re an active member of your neighborhood’s Buy Nothing group so you can reduce your carbon footprint and decrease your spending. Or maybe you catch every webinar hosted by your favorite Instagram coach to empower you to grow your own business.

Now: What do you care about enough to build and maintain your own online community? What is your key differentiator? The best communities are led by moderators who have a strong sense of purpose, and therefore attract an engaged community with that same purpose.

2. Strive for Conversations Over Competition

The internet is filled with fierce competition. Successful online communities understand that there’s a serious benefit to engaging (or even partnering) with their competition.

Tim learned this lesson when building Sober Nation. As a player in the healthcare field, Tim was quick to realize that healthcare was one of the single most competitive spaces online. Rather than trying to exclude or avoid his competition, he chose to lean into it. He realized that these conversations would take place regardless — it was just a question of whether they would take part on his platform.

Case in point: Tim is a content marketer (and partner) at Copyblogger. At MBE Group, we could think of him as a competitor, but we see Tim as an ally. Tim interviewed our then-Head of Marketing, Amanda, on his show, the Tim Stodz Podcast, and we returned the favor by interviewing him here at MBE Group. In both instances, we each benefited from the conversation and published episodes that helped our respective communities learn.

3. Stay Intentional Through Every Point of Contact

Customer communities are built on real conversations and authentic community engagement. Carry those genuine conversations through every point of contact on your online community platforms.

Here are a few suggestions for how to build an online community through every channel:

  • Podcasts: If you host a podcast, spend 30 minutes researching a potential guest before sending a cold email or messaging them through social media platforms. Understand what makes them tick, and open with a personal statement about the individual.
  • Facebook groups: ​​​​Facebook groups can easily become saturated with large memberships whose posts feel a bit like spam or lazy template posts. Assign community managers to moderate discussions, encourage user-generated posts, and invite new members to write one or two sentences about themselves as an introduction.
  • Email newsletters: Too often, we get too caught up in metrics like the number of subscribers, and disregard engagement. Send out a quarterly customer experience survey to your email list to ensure their pain points are being addressed and their community needs are being met.
  • Social networks: Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the most obvious examples of online communities — but they can’t be a one-sided conversation. Respond to every (serious) question in your comments to add value and foster a sense of community and brand loyalty.
  • Community forums: When building a brand community for the first time, you’ll be starting from scratch with minimal brand awareness in your target audience. So look for conversations already happening — such as Reddit, Quora, or other online forums — and take part.

Can You Monetize an Online Community?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Yes, but it shouldn’t be your sole focus or goal — especially when building a brand-new community.

Community members are smart. They can sense when a conversation is inauthentic or becoming too one-sided. They can tell when an influencer or thought leader is a genuine brand advocate or just collecting a paycheck.

Once your community and respective value is established, monetization and attracting customers can be a business goal. Tim, for example, monetized Copyblogger’s community by launching Copyblogger Pro: a new membership service that offers a monthly masterclass and an exclusive support community of content marketers.

Here’s another example: Christina Pashialis, founder of ContentUK, started her community in a pub with a small group, transferred it to Slack, and now runs a dynamic ecosystem of workshops, job boards, and more. She eventually made her community her full-time job. She’s figured out how to keep an online community engaged and active while still generating income.

Building an Online Community Starts With Authentic Conversations

Online communities offer a space where like-minded people can come together to learn, share, and grow in real time.

You can create an internet community by launching a podcast, writing SEO-focused content every week, or establishing a community forum. Whichever online space you choose, all conversations should remain intentional and authentic — thereby adding value within your industry.

Building a community establishes you as a trusted thought leader within the industry, which can then lead sales or get you more referrals. Or, you can choose to directly monetize your community by offering a paid membership tier.

Don’t do content marketing alone — get the MBE Group newsletter in your inbox. We love helping business owners who are trying to level up their content marketing strategy and see their traffic skyrocket.

Every piece of content you create needs to be recycled into at least one other medium — and that’s just the bare minimum.

Here’s why: Executing a content strategy takes time, money, and manpower. Recycling content — or repurposing content — into a different format or platform allows you to reach new audiences and present your ideas in a fresh way without having to start from scratch.

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day tasks of growing a business. But when you take a step back every so often to ask yourself, “What story do we want to tell?” and then reverse-engineer that answer into a series of blog posts, webinars, and social media posts, you get the best chance to connect with your customers and — hopefully — convert to sales.

Below, we dive into how to recycle your content without sounding redundant. We explain why content recycling serves not only your audience but also your bottom line, and how to use data to determine which channels are most effective.

If you want to learn this in a visual format, check out our YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y-foSkLQQSY

5 Reasons Why You Should Recycle Existing Content

If you read the above paragraphs and thought, “But… wouldn’t recycled content be annoying? Wouldn’t I sound repetitive?” think again.

With the way today’s search engines and social media platforms operate, it’s likely that a good portion of your audience isn’t even seeing your digital content. Just let that sink in.

Take Instagram, for example. Back in 2016, it is estimated that people were missing as much as 70% of all posts in their feeds, including almost half of the posts from their close connections. While Instagram has made changes to its ranking algorithms in response to that issue, the fact remains that many of your followers may not see your social media content when you post it.

The same goes for SEO. If your web traffic has been on the decline lately, it could be because you’re not sharing content strategically to target different keywords and topics. And unfortunately, that means your target audience isn’t seeing your content.

With so much content out there, your best shot at getting seen online is to show up consistently with high-value content. Recycling content helps you do exactly that — you can produce more content and repurpose it into formats that are targeted to your audience’s interests (more on this below!).

Here are more reasons why content recycling is critical to the success of your digital marketing strategy:

1. Recycling Content Allows You to Better Serve Your Target Audience

The best way to approach content creation is to let psychology inform your content strategy. As a content marketer, your number one job is to get into the minds of your consumer base and speak directly to them. When you understand how your audience thinks and behaves, one thing will become abundantly clear:

No one consumes content exactly the same way.

Your audience is segmented by how they consume information. Some people like reading meaty blog posts, while others enjoy scrolling through tweets. Some enjoy skimming email snippets, and others prefer listening to podcasts. Your job is to meet each consumer where they’re at and speak to them through their preferred medium.

Just published a new article on your company blog? Great — see if you can pull four shareable social media posts from that single piece of content. Or hand the blog post off to your sales team, and see if they can wordsmith it into a new pitch deck. If the new slide deck resonates with potential clients, see if one of your executives wants to host a breakout session on the same topic at an upcoming conference.

Suddenly, your single blog post multiplies into seven pieces of content. It’s a strategy we follow here at MBE Group and one we advise our clients to use, as well.

2. Recycling Content Can Boost Your Search Rankings

Search engines favor content based on two important factors:

  • the relevance of the content
  • the domain authority, or credibility, of a webpage

Recycling content into different formats and platforms, as well as updating and republishing existing web pages or blog posts, can help to attract more traffic and backlinks — important factors in building credibility or trust with search engines. It also allows you to target different keywords and topics, which can improve your overall relevance to search queries.

Case in point: Recycling your content allows you to generate more website traffic without constantly putting time and effort into creating new content.

3. Recycling Content Helps Support Your Brand’s Overall Narrative

An effective content strategy should convert more leads to sales, making your marketing campaigns more effective.

Content is about sharing a story — the narrative you want your company to communicate. By breaking apart one idea and presenting that idea in images, charts, social media posts, and white papers, you are able to support that narrative from an all-encompassing view.

One of our favorite ways to transform recycled materials into great content is to see where you can make old blog posts more interactive. Rather than present a laundry list of paragraphs and bullet points, strive for interactive blog posts complete with slide shows, images, infographics, recordings, and written content.

Putting these different formats together in new ways will generate a 360-degree, multi-level experience of a blog post that’s sure to leave an impression on your customers.

4. Recycling Content Cuts Down on Budget

Repurposing existing content helps preserve your bottom line. Period.

Does recycling a single blog post into infographics, social posts, and webinars sound like a lot of work? Absolutely. This strategy means that when you finish a piece of content, the work is just beginning — you then need to think of new, inventive ways to get your point across.

At the same time, what sounds easier: optimizing and reposting one original article seven different ways or writing seven completely new posts? We’ll take the former every time.

If you’re looking to trim extra costs and scale faster, recycling content is the answer. By reducing the need to create new content from scratch (which is time consuming and expensive), you can funnel your financial resources into other areas of your business.

5. Recycling Content Expands Your Content’s Longevity

Let’s talk about creating successful content for a second. Any experienced writer or marketer can produce good content, but what takes it from good to great is an effective distribution strategy.

A solid content distribution strategy includes repurposing and recycling your brand’s best content so it can be seen by the widest audience possible. By repacking the same information in new ways, such as infographics, videos, or social media posts, you can attract a wider range of viewers and increase a single piece of content’s reach for years to come.

Additionally, it’s far easier to reuse existing content than to exhaust creative resources by coming up with new ideas every time, especially if you have a small team or limited resources. Putting that time and energy into refurbishing your best content helps your content stay relevant and fresh, and ensures that your online audience hears your brand’s message, even if they missed your original piece of content.

How to Recycle Content in a Way That Resonates With Your Audience

There are seemingly countless ways to reuse popular content in various mediums. Below, we dive into several tactics to do that.

  • Create sound bites for social media: These days, there are lots of free tools that allow you to splice and dice audio into bite-sized audiograms. We like using Wavve.co to take interesting quotes or sound bites from podcast episodes and post them on Twitter. This helps each insight stand out on its own, and it nudges users to download the episode.
  • Tease content on other publishing platforms: If your blog holds the answers to peoples’ burning questions, see if someone posted about it on Quora. Respond to the original question, then link to your blog post. You can also take an insight from your blog post and use it in a LinkedIn post, or truncate the blog post and tease it in a LinkedIn article. Long-form content plays well on LinkedIn.
  • Create original infographics: Original research translates into highly shareable content (HubSpot and Mailchimp are experts at this). If you publish a numbers-heavy research post, make it more digestible through visual content — such as infographics created in Photoshop or Canva — then share it across social media.
  • Expand on content in ebooks and online courses: If you stick to a consistent content marketing strategy, you will have an entire library of content by the year’s end. Weave relevant pieces into a cohesive ebook or free course, which readers can download in exchange for their email address.
  • Put your best blog posts into a drip campaign: When people join your email list, demonstrate your content’s value by starting them in a Welcome sequence that showcases your best content.
  • Transform testimonials into blog posts: No one is better suited to sell your services than your happiest clients. Take a two-sentence testimonial and flesh it out into a case study. Then, elaborate on the case study to create new blog content. Or, even have your client do a guest post!
  • Package your new content into your newsletter: You may already have a weekly email newsletter. Consider adding a monthly roundup to the mix to make sure your subscribers see the content. While you won’t forget about that blog post you wrote three weeks ago, there’s a good chance the majority of your audience will, or that they won’t see it otherwise.

Use Data to Understand Which Recycled Content Best Converts

We stated above that content marketing is human psychology. But psychology is based on science and data — not just theories.

Use Google Analytics and other tools to understand how your audience consumes content. There won’t always be metrics to understand exactly which types of content your audience prefers, but certain facts and figures can help you arrive at an educated guess.

To do this effectively, examine how much time your audience is spending on each piece of recycled content. This will help you gauge whether people are scanning a few paragraphs or taking the time to really digest the information in a blog post. You can also use heat maps to understand which particular landing pages a new audience member arrived on and how that individual traveled throughout your website.

The same goes for social media. Check out performance metrics like views, reach, shares, and saves to see what posts are truly resonating with your audience.

At MBE Group, we extract insights from the data points across Google Analytics, social media, and Kit (formerly ConvertKit). We look at which blog posts are driving users to additional pages or to our Contact Us page, then flag those content ideas for future social media or email campaigns.

Ultimately, making data-driven decisions about which types of content to recycle will do wonders for your online engagement and conversions in the long run.

Recycling Content Isn’t Redundant — It’s a Way to Better Serve Your Audience

Many companies make the mistake of following the “one and done” approach to content marketing. They invest precious time, money, and energy into crafting original content, then become disappointed when it doesn’t convert.

To better connect with your audience, every piece of content you write should be refurbished for multiple mediums, including social posts, slide decks, YouTube videos, and webinars. This allows you to create an all-encompassing view of your argument and connect with your audience across different platforms.

And if you need help with invigorating your content marketing strategy, contact us so we can get started right away!

Great content deserves backlinks. But unless you’re already ranking for a number of keywords or own a high-authority site, it’s difficult to simply earn links without making a concerted effort.

That’s where link building comes in. It’s your opportunity to find spots on other websites for your fantastic content. These backlinks provide you with borrowed authority and in turn, increase your rankings. Then it’ll be easy to earn even more high-quality links — it’s a circular process.

Here you’ll learn the link building fundamentals, how to prepare for a link building campaign, and how to implement the best link building strategies.

If you want to learn this in a visual format, check out our YouTube video below:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/PHI2VN2RhUg

What Is SEO Link Building?

Link building, a key component of search engine optimization, is the process of getting other people’s websites to link to yours. Coupled with great content, it helps your web pages rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Manual link building involves finding opportunities using techniques such as competitor research, broken link building, blogger outreach, and digital PR.

Why Is Link Building Important?

Good content doesn’t necessarily rank on its own even when you’ve optimized every inch of it. Search engine algorithms use multiple factors to assess content and backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors.

Google says it still uses PageRank, an algorithm based on the idea that a link from a high-authority site is a trust signal passing authority to your site. The higher the domain authority, the more authority it sends to you. And the more of these signals you receive, the more authoritative your site looks in the eyes of Google.

In our experience, the links you earn on external websites aren’t the absolute biggest drivers of traffic. But they can make a big difference when paired with regularly producing optimized content, especially when your site is new.

How Link Building Works

To understand how link building works, you first need to grasp these terms and concepts:

  • Internal links vs. external links: Internal links point from one page of your website to another. They’re an integral part of your SEO strategy because they indicate a good navigational site structure and help authority flow around your website. External links come from outside websites and point to pages on your site.
  • Dofollow links vs. nofollow links: Links contain a piece of code telling Google whether to use the link as a ranking signal (dofollow) or not (nofollow). Your backlink profile (collection of links) should contain a healthy distribution of both types of links, otherwise, it seems unnatural to the search engines.
  • Natural vs. unnatural links: Natural links appear earned and unnatural links appear placed through paid or disreputable means purely for the purpose of increasing rankings. To ensure links appear natural, only build links on relevant pages and with natural anchor text (the word or phrase that contains the link).
  • High-quality links vs. low-quality links: High-quality links come from high-authority, relevant sources. Low-quality links are the opposite.
  • Black hat vs. white hat link building: Black hat link building techniques use shady means to build lots of links in a short period of time, breaking Google’s rules. White hat link building uses techniques to help you earn links organically and won’t be penalized by the search engines.

To succeed at link building, you must build up a good backlink profile using white hat link building techniques. Great content is the foundation that helps you earn those links. Link building campaigns and techniques then help you find link placements from websites looking for high-value resources.

But remember, it’s not enough for people to simply link to you. Backlinks need to be natural and editorially relevant — as in, the content that links out to yours needs to relate to your industry.

Let’s say your website has an article about if dogs can eat kale and the American Kennel Club links to it in their article about making your own dog food. That would be an awesome backlink to have, because the topics are relevant to each other and because as a pet site, the American Kennel Club has a high domain authority.

Those are the high-quality links you want. Not links from random directories that have a ton of outgoing links. Not from paid placements, either. If you buy links, they’ll probably be from a shady website or service, and Google might notice and blacklist you from its search results. Other spammy links or toxic links include links in blog comments, link schemes, and unnatural links in forums like Reddit. These are the low-quality links to be avoided at all costs and manually removed if they appear in your backlink profile.

4 Signs You’re Ready to Start Link Building

The best way to get backlinks is to create the best, most valuable content on any given subject — to create content so good that people will want to link to you.

But as you think about your website’s growth, you’ll need to first focus on the quality of your content before diving into link building tactics. Here’s how you’ll know when you’re ready for link building:

  • When you have something worth linking to
  • When you’ve optimized content production
  • When you change your URL or rebrand
  • When you’re in a competitive niche or need faster SEO results

Let’s dig into each reason.

1. When You Have Something Worth Linking to

You don’t need to have a blog with hundreds of thousand-word articles. You don’t need to have a product or service you’ve sold hundreds of times.

You need something valuable.

There might be value in one thoroughly researched blog post you wrote, an infographic you put together with great data, or an online tool or calculator you built. Consider how and why someone with no vested interest in your website would care to link to it.

Ultimately, when you start to reach out to websites asking them to link to you, you need to offer content that benefits them. You need to have a link that’s relevant to their content and that addresses the point they’re trying to make in a given blog post. Once you have a linkable asset, you can start to reach out.

2. When You’ve Optimized Content Production

If you’re a one-to-two-person show, you’re wearing many hats. You’re maintaining your website, writing content, sourcing images, and publishing. Get those processes under your belt first. Think about the link building later.

When your site is still new, you may want to consider how others may perceive it. Since link building requires reaching out to people, then those people will look at your website before they decide whether or not to link to it. Ask yourself:

  • Is it clear what your site is about?
  • Does your site have a good user experience?
  • Is your content readable?

If it’s unclear what your website is about, or if there’s a poor user experience — like if you have too many widgets, the site doesn’t load correctly on mobile, or the text layout is hard to read — it will probably look off-putting to a newcomer to your site.

Fortunately, a content management system (CMS) like WordPress offers nice out-of-the-box templates that require little to no design savvy. If you’re not confident in web design, don’t mess with the customization too much.

3. When You Change Your URL or Rebrand

Particularly if you have an older site with lots of content, if you change your URL or rebrand your site, you may need to revisit your existing backlinks. Be sure to do a backlinks audit through a link building tool from Semrush, Ahrefs, or Moz so you have a list of all affected links. Using one of these tools will also help you prioritize which links to rebuild because you’ll see your most popular links and the most influential sites that link to yours.

As you start to do outreach to have your links updated, consider asking sites to update the anchor text. If the other person’s site specifically mentions a product name that you’re rebranding, ask if they would be open to updating the language.

Of course, redirects will help, but it’s common to run into issues with those. Doing the outreach to replace your links is a good way to support your new URL and preserve your link equity.

4. When You’re in a Competitive Niche or Need Faster Results

Whether you are new to a competitive niche or an existing player, link building will benefit you. The same applies if you need faster SEO results.

Getting more backlinks to your site will increase your website authority and increase your chances of beating out the content competition. It can even drive incremental referral traffic, especially if the referring site is a popular one.

Backlinks will increase your authority faster than if you were to simply wait for Google to notice your fantastic content. Intuitively, this makes sense: The more people you pitch your website to, the more people will see your website, and the more likely they will link to you if they like your content.

But before you start link building, set your expectations and align them with your overall goals. When it comes to SEO, your competitors are going after the same keywords as you. These aren’t always the people who are selling the same product as you.

Let’s look at Fitbit’s competitors: Apple Watch, Garmin, or Samsung probably spring to mind. But a quick peek in Ahrefs shows that from a keyword and content perspective, their top competitors are nutrition and food tracking companies, Nutritionix and CalorieKing.

keyword and competition chart in Ahrefs

In the above blue, green, and yellow intersection graph, blue represents the keywords unique to Fitbit, and yellow represents keywords unique to the competitors. The green bar represents the intersection of keywords, which is where Fitbit (or the competitors) may want to close the gap.

Two ways for Fitbit to close that gap and increase ownership of those shared keywords would be to improve their content that ranks for those shared keywords and then do some link building.

But let’s go back to overall goals: Does Fitbit even care about taking more keywords from nutrition companies?

Probably not. Not all brands make it their goal for their content to rank number one in search. They may put more of their resources into other marketing areas like brand recognition, paid advertising, PR, and sales.

As you evaluate your keyword competitors, think about how your content drives your business goals. If you need to take traffic from your competitors in order to increase sales, you may want to be aggressive with your content and link building strategies.

SEO Link Building Strategies

The best link building strategies require in-depth research and a carefully considered approach. To save time, it’s tempting to use a cookie-cutter email outreach template to send out link requests in bulk. But bloggers and website owners are wise to these types of emails nowadays. The response will be radio silence and zero links.

If you are serious about link building, you can learn from how we do link building for our clients:

Outreach to Relevant Websites

When we do link building for our clients, we reach out only to websites whose content is relevant to the client. If you plan to do your own link building outreach, consider starting with your own short list of relevant websites that you believe would most benefit from linking to your content. (Note: A relevant website doesn’t mean a competitor.)

Find bloggers, influencers, and website owners in your niche through a Google search, using terms such as “best [niche] blogs”. Check each site’s domain authority with a tool such as MozBar. Warm up these link prospects with an initial interaction, such as sharing their content or commenting on social media. They’ll be more likely to link to your content if you’re already on their radar.

Use an email outreach tool such as Hunter or BuzzStream to find prospects’ contact details and send outreach emails at scale. Try to personalize outreach emails as much as possible by, for instance, mentioning mutual connections, previous interactions, or information you find researching link prospects.

The Skyscraper Technique

We use Backlinko’s famous content marketing technique as well. It refers to the process of finding link-worthy content, creating something better, and then reaching out to the site owners who have already linked to similar content.

Find your competitors’ top pages that attract the largest number of backlinks using your preferred SEO tool. Improve upon the content by making it more relevant and up-to-date. Add any current, fresh information that’s come to light since the original post was published.

Further improve content by adding up-to-date case studies and data. Do thorough research and make the post more comprehensive by adding new, relevant sections. Improve upon the design and layout of the content to create a better user experience, like adding helpful graphics or jump-links between sections.

Guest Posts

We frequently find guest post opportunities for our clients, and we even write the articles. You can do this for yourself too: Identify sites whose content is relevant to yours, think critically about the value you uniquely can offer, and pitch them on a guest post. If you’re thoughtful about your topic and pitch, most sites are happy for the free, good-quality content.

Find guest posting opportunities using search terms such as “topic” + “write for us.” Or find the sites your competitors have placed guest posts on.

Read and follow any editorial guidelines before making your pitch. Brands ignore pitches that don’t meet their basic criteria. Plus, failing to do this proves you don’t care about the site you’re pitching, you’re just looking to make a quick backlink.

Broken Link Building

In this technique, we look for broken links that could be replaced with links to your site, find the sites that are using that link, and reach out to ask them to replace it with your link. If you plan on doing this, you can start searching for broken links with a tool like Dead Link Checker or Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker.

Alternatively, use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer to find broken pages based on a topic search. Select the broken links with the most referring domains plus a steady stream of traffic. Organic traffic indicates high-quality links pointing to the page are helping to boost its rankings. This means they’d be good links for you to go after.

A simple outreach email asking to replace the broken link with yours suffices here. Emphasize the value of your piece of content in one or two sentences.

Resource Pages, Best-of Lists, and Other Roundup Content

We compile databases of relevant pages for our clients, then we hunt down the contact information for each site. We reach out on your behalf for your site’s inclusion if we think there’s a fit. The best way for you to try this tactic is to keep up with editorial content related to your niche and not be shy about reaching out whenever you find a relevant opportunity. Let’s say you have a food site. It would be wise to keep an eye on sites like Buzzfeed Food and Foodbeast that create a lot of roundups and listicle content.

Find opportunities in your niche by searching Google or social media sites like LinkedIn using terms such as “best [topic] posts this week” or “[topic] monthly roundup.” Find further link opportunities by checking your competitors’ backlink profiles with your chosen SEO tool. If competitors have won links previously, you stand a chance. Check the relevancy and domain authority of the site before reaching out.

Pitching to Reporters

Using platforms like Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is still a solid way to pitch to reporters at scale, and it’s a tactic we use for our clients. The good thing about HARO is that reporters are actively seeking quotes, case studies, and stories for their content. You receive such opportunities three times a day via email and then must respond in a timely manner to be in with a chance of winning a feature. In our experience, personal insights and unique standpoints are most likely to get chosen.

Other ways to reach reporters are to keep up with the ones who are relevant to your niche and send a personal note when you feel you have useful content for them. Reporters are always looking for credible sources to cite, so if you’ve created factual, original content, you’ll be likely to get that link placement.

Build Links the Right Way

Remember that link building will eventually become a positive feedback loop: The more links you have, the more you’ll continue to get. And the better quality backlinks you get, the more you’ll build momentum for your site.

The link building process requires not only the consistent production of great content and ongoing outreach efforts but also continued maintenance of existing content and your backlink profile. We know it’s time-consuming and complex — so outsource it to people who live and breathe link building. Contact us to see how we can scale your link building efforts and get you more high-quality backlinks from relevant, high-authority websites.

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. – Nov. 18, 2019 – Marx Buscemi Eisbrenner Group (MBE Group), a full-service marketing communications agency highly focused in the automotive, mobility, trucking, tech and consumer goods industries, received three Automotive Communications Awards, presented by Women in Auto Care at the 2019 Automotive Aftermarket Products Expo (AAPEX) in Las Vegas.

The prestigious awards, announced on Nov. 4, 2019, recognize companies and agencies for their outstanding advertising, marketing and public relations efforts in the automotive aftermarket.

MBE Group earned awards for Best Ad Campaign to Technician/Repair Audience and Best Use of Graphics, on behalf of Cloyes, a well-known manufacturer of timing system components. The campaign called, “Perfect Timing for 98 Years,” captured the company’s 98-year history with the use of authentic factory images and archival photography. The campaign was part of a full Cloyes rebranding effort carried out this year.

“We used actual historic images to tie directly into Cloyes’ heritage and brand position in the aftermarket,” said Steffanie Savine, vice president, sales and accounts, MBE Group. “This added credibility to the campaign and helped it resonate deeply with technicians, enthusiasts, distributors and the industry at-large.”

Savine also stated,“We had a clear understanding of the audience and built the campaign strategy and messaging to speak directly to it. Receiving two awards for the same campaign demonstrates our expertise and shows that the strategy was effective.”

MBE Group also earned an award in the business-to-consumer category for Print Ad – Best Use of Copy, on behalf of Lumileds for the Canadian launch of Philips X-tremeUltinon LED headlights.

Due to Canada’s diverse weather and terrain, MBE Group focused the messaging on both safety and style, to target drivers across all provinces. The campaign expertly communicated that neither style nor visibility are compromised with Philips X-tremeUltinon LED headlights.

The award-winning campaign was part of a larger advertising initiative that included high-impact creative on digital platforms, resulting in performance that exceeded the program’s goals and industry benchmarks in six categories, including unique engagements, in-store visits and total ad interactions. The click-through rate achieved was two-and-a-half times greater than the industry standard for digital display ads, resulting in a high-performing integrated marketing initiative across all platforms, that directly increased product sales.

“Being recognized for a highly targeted international-based consumer program further demonstrates our ability to support clients globally through our automotive industry expertise,” said Frank Buscemi, CEO and chief creative officer of MBE Group.