#347 – How We Built 1,664 Quality Links for $8

What if I told you that we built over 1,600 high-quality backlinks for just $8 each on average?

I’m not talking about backlinks from spamming sites that you could buy on Fiverr, but rather seeing links
from industry giants like entrepreneur.com, that is a DR-91 site, or slate.com, that is a DR-90 site.

You think that’s impossible?

Well, we’re about
to prove you wrong in this episode.

Hey, Authority Hackers, I’m Gael Breton,
and we are about to share a link building

strategy that is going
to revolutionise your SEO game.

In this link building masterclass,
we are not just sharing theory.

We’re giving you the exact blueprint that
we have used on our site to outrank sites

like Forbes before they got killed
by Google recently and earn hundreds

of high quality backlinks on autopilot.

And even with the recent Google updates,
links remain a critical ranking factor.

These strategies are more relevant than
ever, allowing SEO to maintain a high ROI

by generating more high quality backlinks
for less money, effectively

addressing many of the challenges
posed by the recent algorithm changes.

Now, before we diving, I want to give you
the opportunity to grab our free swipe

file, which includes 50 linkable
asset examples to supercharge your SEO.

This is the perfect companion
for this episode, and it’s going

to give you many ideas on how
to create your own linkable assets.

And if you don’t have the time
or resources to do your link building

yourself, this episode is brought
to you by Search Intelligence.

Check them out if you need some help
with high-quality digital PR campaigns

on search-intelligence.co.uk.
More about them later.

For now, let’s get
started with the episode.

I think the problem is that if you’re
looking at Google right now,

you type most queries,
what you’ll figure out is while they’ve

introduced a lot of new AI factors,
et cetera, with all these updates and so

on, and intent is very important and all
of that,

you still find that most sites that rank
well on average have a pretty high

domain rating, domain authority.

The one consistent thing
through every single Google update

for the last 16 years has been
people complaining about big sites,

about Google favouring big sites.

Maybe with the exception
of this last August core update,

but that was really a slight correction.

You search for most queries,
even with the recent core update.

You still find most
sites are like DR50 plus.

Exactly.

It’s like, otherwise,
you’re not going to make.

If you want to still get traffic from SEO,
which is still a very good traffic source,

so it targeted people are searching
for something, you’re here at the moment

where they’re looking for a solution,
it’s a good traffic source still,

even though it’s less good than it was,
to be honest,

you need to build links at scale.

The problem is that to build all these
links, even getting the R50, you need a

few thousand links usually to get there.

If you outsource that, it’s going
to cost you a tonne of money.

You look at a link building
agency, probably the average price

for the non-city ones would be $200,
$300 per link or something.

At least, and it’s going up.

If you’re looking for that,
you need, let’s say,

a thousand links to make it simple.

It costs $200.

I’m taking the low-end.

You’re looking at $200,000.

Which is crazy.

The math, the economics,
it doesn’t work for most businesses.

The thing is, you will rank and you will
make money spending 200 grands, but how

long is that going to take for you on top
of the cost of whatever you’re selling

or however you’re monetizing, the content
you need to create, all of that, etc.

How long is that going to take
until you get your money back

and you’re actually profitable with
this business, especially considering

the turbulence of Google and all of that.

I think there’s a place
for outsourcing some of link,

especially link building capabilities
that you don’t have in-house.

But I think you cannot be
competitive today in SEO.

If you don’t build some of your links
or most of your links in-house, to be

honest, because it’s just too expensive.

It’s very hard to get a good out of it.
Exactly.

Gone are the days when a business…

Seo was the business model.

Seo is the marketing
channel for a business.

You can’t just outsource all your content
and all links indefinitely and think,

Well, they’ll just do all the marketing
work and I’ll just reap the reward.

It doesn’t work like that.

It’s a core competency of a business.

You have to do some
of it yourself, at least.

Yeah, the margins get eaten completely.

It’s not like it costs you nothing
to deliver the business.

You’d be looking at like, Okay, I need
a million revenue at least to start being

in the green, basically, and maybe that.

We’re talking about just a thousand, which
sounds like a lot, but it’s actually not

that much in a grand scheme of things.

We’re talking $200 a links
also, which is the low, right?

You might be well into half a million
dollars if you wanted to build

a high DR site from scratch,
which actually questions also the value

of expired domains and everything.

But Google has been
killing a lot of these.

You may buy a DR50 domain, but
there’s a lower chance today that it’s

going to work than it was in the past.

Anyway, all of that saying that’s
the problem that you have right now

if you want to do SEO.

We wanted to talk about something
we’ve done with our site where we built,

and that’s the headline of the podcast.

It’s a It’s a little bit
click-based, but it’s actually true.

We’ve built 1,664 quality links
for an average of $8 each.

This is not a Fiverr ad.
This is true.

I wanted to jump in.

I want you to show us some of the links
because it would be too easy

to say, Well, okay, you built
a bunch of shitty spamming links.

Okay, that costs $8, but
that’s probably not going to work.

I want you to show me some links.

I’ll show you three links right now.

Did you cherry-pick, by the way?
Did you like…

Of course, I did.

But I am going to reveal all of the links
we built, all 1,664, and I’ll reveal

how we built them, the URLs, everything.

So you can all go and check them out.

Everyone can go and check them
out themselves afterwards

and verify that this is legit.

So it’s not going to be your spreadsheet?

Well, no, you could just
put the URLs in Ahrefs or Samrush

or whatever you’re using.

But we’ll reveal them
later in this episode.

So first link, number one, entrepreneur.

Com, DR-91.

So they referenced us
here in this section.

It says, Recent data shows 81% of brands
are now using affiliate marketing

as part of their strategy.
And it links to Authority Hacker.

Link number 2, slate.

Com, DR-90.

And they referenced us here,
In an independent study, SEO Consultant.

You’re actually named yourself.
You did none of this work, by the way.

I don’t know why you’re
taking the credit for this.

But Gail Breton found that AI writing did
not automatically reduce Google traffic.

I found out, apparently.

Then we have link number 3,
which is only, and I say only,

DR74, but it’s a highly relevant site.

It’s GMass, which is a tool
we used to use 10 plus years ago.

It’s a barebone outreach tool
within Gmail, basically.

They linked to us.

The interesting thing here is
all of this was done without us actually

outreaching to any of these sites.
We sat back and they just built links to

us naturally because of something we did.

How much did you cherry-pick
on these, though?

What’s a bad link?

I absolutely cherry-picked on it.

I’ll put the URLs in and people
can go through them themselves.

But if you go, there’s obviously loads
of scraper sites and DR 0.

1 sites and things like that.

That’s the thought of it, I guess.

Yeah, but it’s the same
with any page you build.

It picks up these types
of links like this.

But essentially what we’re talking
about here is linkable assets, right?

And the The specific way we’ve done it
is through statistics pages and surveys.

We’ll get into the specifics about that.

So it’s really the only
thing we did for this.

Only two things.

We only did three campaigns
to generate 1,664 links.

I think that’s
what leads to the lowest cost

because there’s only three campaigns.

It’s not like we produce lots
of content or do a lot of work.

It’s just like each one
was actually pretty successful.

Just to be clear, this cost,
zero of it is paying for links.

We didn’t pay anyone for the placement.

It’s all the cost of the content
the full-time labour of people

doing a little bit of outreach
to get the campaigns going.

Yeah, I can imagine $8 payment
for a link is a bit insulting anyway.

Exactly.
Who is going to take that?

Even by the lowest of the low
standards, I don’t think that would work.

Okay, so what I think we should do now
is we’ve teased people enough

on what the result is.

How does this work exactly?

Okay, so imagine this.

You’re writing an article about,
let’s say, affiliate marketing.

Okay.

The way people create content
and come to ideas when they’re

writing things is we’re all human, right?

We have existing biases
and preconceptions, and we want to get

the point that we think is right across.

People will go to the internet
and they will try and find data

or statistics to back up a point
that they already think or believe,

in effect, backwards rationalising
the thing that emotionally they feel.

This is the way writers create content.
We all do it.

We’ll see in the UK, actually.
I don’t want to go into it.

All right.

People will go to Google
and they’ll look for…

Writers, journalists, they’ll go
to Google, they’ll look for statistics

about the thing they’re writing
about, and they’ll use one

of those statistics to back up a point
to strengthen one of their arguments.

And then they will often link to
the source of that statistic.

And if it happens, if you happen to be
the statistics page ranking at the top of

Google for one of statistics terms, then
you get an absolute boatload of links.

Tonnes and tonnes and tonnes
and tonnes, 1,664, to be precise.

I think also what’s interesting is you
could make the argument as like, probably

the statistics could be given
by AI overviews or fitted snippets.

But if you want to make a credible
argument when you write an article,

you need to give a source anyway.

Who are you going to link to?
Exactly.

You need to give a source
to be credible anyway.

Yeah.

I remember back in the day at university,
if you reference Wikipedia as a source.

You got chewed out by your professor.

It’s just that you can’t reference AI
overviews, especially with the amount of

lies that they’ve been caught spying out.

Yeah, but it’s interesting
because you could argue that probably

some of these stats are going
to show up in the AI overview.

But even though if you’re
a writer and making a point,

it makes your point stronger
if you link out to a credible source.

Exactly.

It’s actually AI feature proof, almost,
this tactic, which is interesting to me.

Exactly.

The The whole thing we’re trying
to do here is rank for a statistics

keyword, and our article is literally
going to be a list of statistics.

The problem with that is that anybody
can create a big list of statistics.

It’s really easy.

What is going to
determine who ranks first?

Well, to an extent, domain
rating, domain authority, big sites.

That’s why you see big sites doing that.

A common argument I get is, Well,
this tactic is only going to work for

sites that are large already.
I’m a small site.

How do I become a large site?

Well, the way to do it is to stand out
by creating better content.

Okay, Mr. Google.

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.

But the way you can do that with
the statistics is to have your own data.

You have something that nobody else has,
and that will allow you to out-competit

with sites much bigger with you.

As we have done against DR…
I mean, we’re DR78.

We were ranking above Forbes,
it was in the DR, was it 94 or something?

For a long, long period
of time for AI statistics.

The thing is, do you think
it’s due to information gain?

Or is it because Google
thinks it’s a better page?

Or is there some underneath tactic for…

Is there some value?

I mean, this is like,
why do sites rank the debate?

We could do a whole podcast on that.

But I think largely, yes,
it’s the information gain

and the unique data that does it.

Now, is that directly because Google
is measuring that or is it

measuring the user signals
and secondary effects of that?

I don’t know, but it works.

We’ve demonstrated it and it gets results.

Now, the obvious question then is,
well, how do I get this unique data?

How do you run a survey?

Isn’t that quite expensive
or quite complex to do?

And honestly, it’s not.

There is certainly a process to it, which
I’m going to go through right now for how

we did it, but it’s certainly achievable.

I’ll show you three examples later
in this episode and the progression we

made from doing mediocre surveys to doing
something actually quite interesting.

Could you just make everything up
with that work?

We don’t recommend that.

Honestly, It’s theoretical thinking.

Honestly, you probably could.

I mean, we didn’t.

We’ve got all the data to back it up.
Happy to share that.

I feel like nobody checks, right?

No one’s ever checked.

No one’s I’ve never asked for anything.

So it wouldn’t surprise
me if people did that.

But it’s not something I want to do.
I agree.

We don’t recommend it.

But I think it’s interesting
because the follow-up question

would be how well managed
does the survey need to be and how clean

does the data need to be, et cetera?
But if you could mix things up, I guess.

If you argue, it can be a bit dirty.

Every survey that’s ever
been done has problems with bias.

A lot of the way professional
surveys professional survey designers

create surveys done specifically
to eliminate bias and things like that.

If you’re doing for some medical trial
or some scientific thing,

absolutely, you need to do that.

If it’s a marketing thing
about AI statistics, there’s not

the same level of rigour that’s needed.

There are actually some tactics
which we’ve used, which I’ll share,

where we try and get to get people
to take a more extreme position to show-I

was going to say, if it’s sensational,
you’re more likely to get links, right?

Exactly.

Okay.
All right.

Let’s go through the way you do this.
Okay.

Step one is we need
a topic for our survey.

Authority We’re a security hacker.

We’re in the, broadly speaking,
digital marketing niche, but there’s lots

of little subniches around here.

The very first one we
picked was link building.

We did a link building survey,
not because we did some amazing analysis

and looked at all the potential.

We just thought we just…

We understood that really well,
and we just thought it would work.

I’ll be honest with you.

Since then, though, we’ve learned
that the best way to measure, to validate

a topic idea is to look for…

If you Google the topic plus statistics
and you look at how many links

the statistics pages there are getting,
if you exclude government sites and things

like that, look at how many
links the statistics statistics posts are

getting, that gives you a rough idea
of the number of people

that are likely to link to it.

If you’re seeing multiple pages
with 50 plus referring domains,

you’re good to go.
Yeah, it’s probably worth it.

Essentially, you have
your high-level topic.

Think of it like a pyramid,
your topic at the top.

Then you have an angle.

We picked link building for our first one.

It’s like, how do you want
to position that survey?

What direction do you want to go in?

Again, the first time we did it,
it was based purely on curiosity.

We genuinely wanted to know
how many people are paying for links.

We wanted to know how many
links are people building?

What are the people
who are building the most links

doing differently from the people
who are not building so many links?

We built the survey out from there.

So getting the data or getting
people to respond to your survey,

getting respondents, is super important.

A A lot of people will not do a survey
because they don’t have an audience.

We’re fortunate enough to have a
big email list, big community.

We sent an email out and we got, I think
it was like 700 or something responses,

800 responses for the link building one.

We did get more for others.

I’ll talk about the differences
in a little bit.

But there’s actually tools out there
that you can use to survey people.

So Polefish is a good example of one.

It costs about a dollar per respondent.

And generally speaking, with these
surveys, you need 1,000 plus respondents.

So you be paying one to $2,
000 to get your survey out there.

Again, it depends how
many questions you ask.

It’s not cheap, but Compared to,
again, outsourcing me, well-being.

It’s not cheap, but most of the cost
of these tactics are creating the initial

content piece, like the survey
and the stats page in the beginning.

And then all the links that come in
after are really, really cheap because,

as I said, you’re not doing anything.

Most of them are coming in on autopilot.

But what we also did was we
looked at other people who had

ran surveys in this space before.

There hadn’t really been
one in a couple of years.

I think there was one company
that was doing an annual one.

I think Maddie Mugen, UK SEO that used to
offer this tilt had one, if I remember.

So honestly, our opinion, they were okay,
what some of them were doing,

and there were some interesting
data, but a lot of it was outdated.

It was two, three years old.

If you see that, it’s a good opportunity
to refresh that existing data

because it’s already validated
that it’s going to work, right?

Or you can come up with the new
angles like we did.

So one of the most important things,
I would say, is to design the survey

well, the questions
and answers you put in there.

Big mistake a lot of people
make is they’ll ask open-ended questions

like, What do What do you
think of link building?

Or something.

And they’ll get 2,000 people
respond saying 2000 different things.

What do I do with this?

So surveys are multiple
choice for a reason.

It allows you to compare the data at scale
and really pull insights from that.

Across the data, right?

We could see, I think we
had experienced link builders.

We asked them.

This is one thing that I think helped
our survey stand out significantly.

We asked all these positioning questions
in the beginning.

It was, I think, how many links
per month do you build?

How many years of experience
do you have in link building?

These types of things.

What it allowed us to do was all
the other questions we would ask later.

For example, if we asked,
how much do you pay for links?

We could We can say, Well, how much
do people who are building lots

of links pay for links versus
how much do people who are not

building many links pay for links?

You could cross all those questions with
those positioning questions at the start.

The same way you would for
demographic graphics if you wanted to

compare people in different countries.

We didn’t ask that in there,
but it’s the same idea what a lot

of people do with their service.

I remember an insight from this, actually,
where we saw that the cost

per link from advanced link builders was
actually lower than the cost per link

from beginner link builders,
even though their salary was much lower

because they were so
much more inefficient.

Yeah.
That was interesting insight.

This was actually a secondary
thing that we did.

We looked at how many links
How many links experience link builders

were building, and it was a lot more.

And we looked at how many links
beginners were link building,

and it was a lot less.

But then we got external data
on link builder salaries, and then we

compared the two, and then we were able
to see the cost per link, as you got more

experience, actually went down.

It was still crazy, 200 and something.
It was so expensive.

Yeah.

So they should probably
use this tactic here instead, what

those link builders what they were doing.

But it was an interesting insight, and
that got quoted quite a lot, that little

trajectory graph in other spaces as well,
like in recruitment and things like that.

It was cool.
This is how you design your survey.

What happens when you design
your server, I guess you can either use

your audience or something
like Polefish to get the answers.

In this case, we had the audience.

Did we do one with Polefish at all?

No, not for Authority Acre.

We’ve done it for another company.

I’m not going to talk about that now,
but I spent, I think it

was like 1,500 bucks or something.

Okay, I need to do just as well.

It’s roughly a dollar,
I think it’s 95 cents per user.

The thing with Polefish is
you’re essentially going out to Imagine

you go out to the street in a big city,
you’re getting complete cross-section

of the population there.

You can’t do that to get
a thousand link builders, right?

Because we’re all hiding in
our parents’ basements or whatever.

It’s It’s difficult to get those people.

You can, however,
ask a screening question.

Let’s say you wanted to do a survey
on coffee drinkers, right?

You could ask a screening question,
which was, Do you drink coffee?

Yes or no?

Anyone who clicked no wouldn’t
get to enter the survey in Polefish

and you wouldn’t be charged for it.
You’re going to pay for it, okay.

But the downside of that is it increases
the price of the survey by about 50%.

You have to balance those things.

Do the people who answer yes,
Do they get paid to answer the survey?

Yes.
Would they be biassed to say yes?

There’s always bias in surveys,
even with our own list.

There’s many different ways
that that is biassed because

our audience isn’t typical link builders.

The thing is, when you have a
large enough amount of people, a lot of

these small issues iron themselves out.

Nobody It verifies.

It’s also an opportunity, actually, in
your survey to talk about the potential

biases and the potential issues.

When we did our affiliate marketing
survey, there was a lot

of people who had taken TAS,
our old beginner’s course, in in there.

So that was a beginner.

And so it skewed a bit
more towards beginners.

And there was one niche that a lot
of people ended up being in,

which was the case study site.

So there’s issues there.

But we talked about it, right?

And that also adds more transparency if
you’re open about these potential issues.

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Okay, so let’s say I’ve collected
my answers either through

my audience or through Bothish.
What happens next?

Then it comes down to analysing
the data and looking It’s

a super interesting thing.

So simply going through all the questions
and saying, what are the results?

What’s cool about this?

Is there any other data I can
cross this with, either from your survey

or outside, like we talked about before?

Then you have to essentially write this up
into a report, an article for your site.

Get some graphics, simple pie charts
showing percentage saying yes and no.

It really helps to visualise this.

Writing it up is not difficult either.

You literally have just a section
which is the finding and then a couple

of paragraphs about it, two, three
sentences, the image, and then the next

finding, and then you repeat that format.

I have a feeling it could
be quite good at it.

It is, yeah.

We’ve been using it a lot in our recent
surveys, and in the the course,

that is something which we show as well.

Yeah, because it has
this data analyzer stuff.

You can upload CSVs
and so on with all the answers.

I think if you prompt it to be a
little bit critical, think of interesting

simulations that I think it’s not
perfect, but I think it could help a lot.

All you have to do is if you train it,

you give it some existing survey post
that someone else has written.

It has a framework to go on,
so it’s That’s really good.

Okay, that’s nice because
I remember doing the first one.

It was a bit painful, actually.
It was.

It took ages because we went through
so many different writers

and people trying to do this,
trying to get a data expert in.

In the end, we just did it all ourselves.

Yeah, because the data expert didn’t
know how to write, and then the writer

didn’t know how to analyse, right?
Exactly.

Yeah.
And honestly, it’s not difficult.

In fact, if you use Polefish
for your survey, and you can use Polefish

for free if you’re bringing
your own audience to it.

So you can use your tool, which is great
because you can do all the data analysis

inside Polefish, which is really good
because it makes it so much easier

to get all the charts and the things
you need and to do the cross analysis.

You do the post, you analyse
the data, you put basically

it’s a WordPress post, right?

Yeah, just a post on your site.

Authorityhacker.com/link-building-survey.

Here’s the first URL.

Okay, so that’s it.

My post is like, Where are the links?
Yeah.

I know we said this is mostly passive,
but this is the only active outreach bit

you do, but it’s very important.

When your survey is ready, it’s time
to do a bit of marketing for it.

You can do an outreach campaign
to your survey post.

So that’s where we are basically
taking each finding that we have.

One of the questions we asked in the
link building realm was, do you believe

no nofollow links past link juice.
The vast majority of people did.

So we would go around looking prospecting
for sites which mentioned nofollow links.

And there’s a lot of them, a lot
of SEO sites, a lot of marketing blogs

talking about nofollow links.

And then we would reach out to them
and we created a template that said, Hey,

I noticed you mentioned this, and then we
would pull in something they specifically

mentioned, which is true.

But did you know that X percentage
of SEOs believe that nofollow links

do pass link juice?

Include the pie chart in the email
because it really captures the attention.

And not even really asking very hard like,
Hey, give us a link, but just

feel free to include this if you think it
would be valuable to your audience.

So very, very light touch.

And that did really well.

I mean, that page now has
265 referring domains.

From this outreach mostly, because
it doesn’t rank for a keyword, right?

It does rank for link building
survey, but not many people linked to it.

Not many people search for that and
not many people build links to that way.

These are not 265 people
who have responded to us saying,

yes, I’ll give you a link.

There’s maybe 50 or something did that.

Some of them, I don’t know where
all of them came from,

if I’m perfectly honest with you.

But over time, if you look at
the link trajectory over time, it

kept growing despite us doing no outreach
after the first four to six weeks.

I think they discovered it
from the places that mention it.

They probably do that.
Did we do any social promotion on that?

Yeah.

We did a podcast about that when it first
came out, and a little bit…

We’re not really big on social
media, so it’s not like we can really

move the needle very much with that.

But yeah, we promoted it a little bit.

Do you think it would be worth
to advertise it, to spend money?

I feel like rising awareness about some…

Actually, it needs to be interesting.

I think the reason it works is
because it’s not boring, it’s not shit.

It’s interesting.

It’s new data that people
were curious If it’s boring,

then I don’t think it would work.

But I feel like something interesting
like that, even Facebook ads

or something like that, I’m not sure
it would be a complete waste of money.

This outreach campaign, what we did,
it’s really just this initial burst

of marketing, attention.

Anything you can do to
help get more attention on it

seems to help it do better.

When we outreach to people,
we had some people responding saying,

Oh, yeah, I saw this.

They didn’t say where, but maybe
they watched the podcast, maybe

they saw us post it on LinkedIn
or you on Twitter or something.

And that helped us.
Did other people share it?

Yeah, absolutely.

So it was featured in…

Matt Diggity in his monthly roundup
featured it, and a few other people

have mentioned it.
Mentries, letters, things like that.

Yeah, they’ve tweaked
about it and things like that.

Yeah, it’s like we built a little bit
of buzz around it, but it’s true,

we’re not amazing at social media.

It’s something we need to be better at.

Okay, so you finished the survey,
you promoted the post.

What was next?
So next, we built the statistics post.

And all we did for that was we
took all of our statistics

and we took all of the other statistics
of people we could find who had

interesting link building statistics.

We made the best list of
link building statistics.

So including all new stuff
together with the old stuff

that you could find on group.
Absolutely.

Of course, we put all of our own
statistics towards the top of that page.

Now, what was interesting about the way
we referenced the sources here

is we actually put the link
next to every single statistic.

And that was something
we played around with later,

and it had some interesting results.

So we’ll share more about that.

It does make it look a little bit busy
on the page with all of these links.

But you can see in every section we have,
we broke it down into our top link

building statistics, who builds links,
link building and impact on search

rankings, link building tactics,
social media and link building,

link building cost.
You get the picture.

At the top of every section
is several authority hacker statistics.

The point is to try to get people to
quote this one because it gets us a link.

Exactly.

Something we did in this one,
which we didn’t repeat in future was we

had quite a deep analysis of what
these link building statistics mean,

and we had a few different takeaways and
turned into a little bit of a blog post.

So that actually took
a little bit longer to create.

But I don’t really think
it It added too much value.

People coming for statistics, they just
want the big list of statistics.

You can see from later examples
that that did better for us.

So we got 220 linking root domains
to our link building statistics page

since we built it.

I want to say, when we launched this page,
I remember advertising it

on AdWords as well.
Yeah.

One thing, when we first
launched it, day one, it didn’t rank.

It actually ranked really, really
quickly, within a week or something.

But if you don’t have the authority
to rank a brand new site,

then you can pay for Google AdWords.

Do you remember what the cost was?

It’s not that it’s cheap.

It’s that there’s just not that much
volume for these queries.

And no competition either.

Because there’s not really
much monetary value.

You will spend money.

If you advertise and you try to be at
the top of a query that has

100 search per month or something
on HS, you spend $200, $300.

But You’re very likely
to get a link from that.

So it’s like, compare that to the cost
of an agency, for example.

Well, it’s like, if you get even just one
link from that spend, it’s okay.

Yeah.
You can just cheat.

Even if you’re a DR0 site.

Honestly, if I had a DR0 I
was on your site today and I wanted

to build up authority, I might do that.

I might just brainstorm all the
statistics pages I could put together.

If you don’t have the time
or resources, you could even

skip the survey and just do that.

Do you want to know
a not so secret secret?

What’s a secret secret?

There are multiple very large businesses
that have built basically their entire

SEO authority by doing exactly just this.
You mean Exploding Topics?

Exploding Topics is a great example.

Brian Dean did-Also Backlin Co, actually.

In Backlin Co, so don’t get me
wrong, he started off creating

loads of super deep guides.
They’re excellent.

Then he found this the format

of doing statistics, and then he just

kept repeating that and repeating that,
and it became his template,

his templated piece of content, and it
did really well, got loads of links.

He went so far from his niche as well.

I remember doing the interview with him
and like, billing him on that so we I’m

like, I’m not going to check the episode.
I’m like, you have Roblox statistics.

Roblox is like a video
game for kids, right?

I was like, how is
that related to Backlinker?

And are you not afraid of Google?

This is the beauty
of his next business Exploding Topics.

Because that’s statistics.

The subject, his niche is stuff, right?
It’s just like…

Yeah, it works for-It’s
stuff that’s growing.

It’s interesting things.

He can literally talk about anything in
He can talk about statistics of anything.

You saw that’s literally
all he did to build.

He didn’t do any outreach.

I think that’s also why
he started this business.

I think he knew how he
would grow it organically.

Which is super smart.

Take something you know
that works and then figure out

the perfect business to run it.

I think he figured it out on Backlinko
and he was like, Well, I really shouldn’t

push it too hard on Backlinco,
and sold it and did that.

Now he just sold Exploiting Topics
to SMR actually.

Yeah.

So SMR owns a lot
of statistics pages, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So basically, you could say, Brandy, made,
I don’t know how much money he made,

maybe high seven, low eight figures
from statistics pages.

Probably, yeah.

I mean, there’s more to it than that,
but yeah, this certainly…

If you really boil it down,
you could say that.

Okay.
You make the statistics page.

Yeah, advertising is a really cool hack.

It’s not very expensive
because these queries are small,

not because the clicks are cheap.

You will still sometimes pay $5
per click or whatever, but it doesn’t

matter because there’s just not that
a lot of people searching for that stuff.

It’s funny as well.

I remember, was it
Cyrous Sheppard did a talk?

No, it was Cal roof, I think.
Cal roof, was it?

He was looking at when you advertise,

when you run Google Ads to a new post,

It ranks better organically.

He couldn’t really figure out
the causation reason for that.

But yeah, that seemed
to be the case, at least.

To me, it’s like, also,
spammers don’t advertise.

I feel like it’s one more thing that
separates you from a shitty, shady site.

You’re actually advertising.

Only real businesses would pay AdWords.

It’s expensive.

It’s like, yeah, you’re different.

I like that, actually.

Essentially, this is a way sites
which don’t have much domain authority

to buy their way to the top.

You could literally just
stay there for a year.

It’s going to cost some money, but it’s
much cheaper than what you pay for

an agency to do it for you.

Okay, so we’ve done this once
with this link building survey.

You’ve mentioned other ones.

Can you walk us through
the other examples?

Yeah, absolutely.

The next one we did was an AI
survey, an AI statistics post.

Which is competitive.

Well, we caught it at the right time.

This was early 2023, so about six weeks
after ChatGPT came out.

No, ChatGPT came out end of 2021, no?
End of 2022.

Okay.
Yeah.

We went all in on this.

We saw the hype going on around AI.

It’s like, Let’s just repeat it
and see if we can do it for that.

It was a little bit outside
of our niche at the time.

We talk about AI a bit more now,
but at the time-It was outside of

everyone’s niche, to be honest.
Yeah, for sure.

I think that was a fresh market.

The fact that there was
no authority on AI, pretty much.

Now, it would be maybe more difficult.

But at the time, it was like
we’re going to jump on a train.

This is what made it a little bit
more difficult to plan is Normally you

would look at the other statistics posts
and how many links are they getting, but

there weren’t really many, at least not
in the direction we wanted to take this.

We ran a survey on AI and we
did a few things differently, but It

resulted in us getting 3,812 people
to respond, which is about four times

more than the first survey.

It was to our same audience, right?

Just same email list, same promotion.

The thing that we did differently
was in the first one, the link building

one, we offered a prize for one person.

I think it was like a swag bag,
some Authority Hacker T-shirts

and things like that.

So one person would get that.

For some reason, for For some reason, that
wasn’t really super appealing to people.

I don’t know why, but…

Really?

Yeah.

So what we did this time around
is we were like, let’s get

a bit more serious about this.
So we still had a prize.

We made it more relevant to the topic.

I think we gave a one-year
ChatGPT plus account.

It was like $260 value.

That was the grand prize.

But we gave every single person that
completed the survey something as well.

That was It was like a
lead magnet type thing with

AI prompts that we had created.

At the time, it was popular.

This was early 2023, so AI prompts
were all the rage at the time.

They were pretty bad as well,
let’s be honest.

I mean, everyone was
about prompting back then.

I think now when I look at what I’m doing
versus what I did back then.

But it was popular.

I think the fact that you
were guaranteed to get something,

I think that’s what worked.

Exactly.

I think that is the difference
when surveying your own audiences,

give something to everyone.

But it doesn’t have
to be your own audience.

I mean, Paul Fish, yeah, you’re not going
to put a lead magazine on Paul Fish.

You can’t.

I could imagine you could almost
have affiliates for surveys or something

like someone else’s audience
or something like this.

Yeah, it’s possible you could do that.

We did have some arrangements
where we would ask people if we could

post the survey in their Facebook group.

I would buy sponsorship
on newsletters too, for example.

If you find a relevant newsletter,
you’re in a crypto space,

you want to make a crypto survey.
I don’t know.

Do you think the economics
of that would work?

It’s not that bad.
The sponsorship on newsletters is not…

It’s going to be cheaper than Paul Fish.
That’s the thing.

It’s like, if you have that plus
the incentive, then a lot of people are

going to take it because it’s appealing.

Yeah, I could see that working
if it was right at the top

of a newsletter or something.

Find some new shitcoin coming out
and then just give tokens to people

for the launch or something.
It’s like everyone’s winning.

It’s like, yeah, I could see that
it would be a pretty good take rate

and that would make it…

You go on Porfish, you won’t
find lots of crypto investors, but you

go on a crypto newsletter, they’re here.

You probably get a better
survey for less money.

I think you can be a bit
creative with your marketing.

That’s where I think
SEOs are a bit shitty.

They tend to want the exact formula.

But if you use real marketing jobs for
that, you’ll get better data, basically.

We got the survey to our audience.

We offered the lead magnets.

We got four times more responses
than the link building one.

Then after that, did anything else
change in the method?

Yeah.

The way we approach the statistics post
that followed was a little bit different.

Just for comparison of numbers,
the link building survey

got 265 referring domains.

The AI survey got 287.

It’s about the same, right?

However, the link building statistics post
got 220 linking route domains.

The AI statistics got 430.

So what do we do different that resulted
in twice as many links this time?

Well, we cheated a little bit.

We actually got this idea from Brian Dean
because this is how he does his pages.

So if we take a look
at the AI statistics post here,

what you’ll notice is we still have
the same sections, the top statistics

and then AI adoption and implementation.

We’ve impact of AI and jobs
and employment, the thing you don’t

see is a source next to each statistics.

Instead, if you scroll down to the bottom
of a section, we have a list

of sources with the links to them.

Now, Now, it’s subtle, but
by disconnecting the source to where

the statistic appears on the page,
it makes it much harder for

a journalist or someone to go and find,
Okay, what is the source of that?

Of course, they can
just copy and paste it.

It reminds me of AI Overviews.

That’s how Google has done it initially.
Yeah, exactly.

It’s literally the exact same thing.

It works, right?
Yeah, because it’s more hard.

It’s more difficult.

You’re putting a barrier
between what is the source of

that one statistic I’m looking at?

I need to click on all the links to find
which one has it and search on the page.

Or you could just link to
the Authority Hacker AI statistics

page, and that’s what worked.

I think there’s also the fact
that AI was was a booming industry.

Some of the links we got,
it was bigger than link building.

For sure.

But why then is the AI survey only
get a little bit more links

than the link building survey?

Because the survey, we did the same
promotion as the link building survey,

whereas the AI statistics, when it
ended up ranking, got more rich through

the fact that more people search for it.
That’s true.

But then in the third example,
which we’ll get onto in a minute,

the same dynamic played out.

I think that proves my point, really.
Okay.

Unless We’ll jump onto
that one now, actually.

The third survey we did was
on affiliate marketing.

Okay.

So this time, we tried to do it
as quickly as possible, so really

to minimise the amount of time
we were spending on running the survey.

We didn’t have a grand prize.

We just had a lead magnet.

I think it was actually AI prompts
for affiliate marketers.

It was different ones.

These were specific
for affiliate marketing because,

again, AI prompts were all the rage.
They loved them.

We only got, I say, but we got 2,
270 affiliate marketers

respond to that survey.

And by the way, just for context,
our surveys are relatively long.

I think they’re reading 20
and 30 questions, which is pretty long.

Sometimes you can have people drop out.

So to have 2,270 people
complete it is still pretty good.

Given affiliate marketing,
it’s not as hypey as AI has been

over the last couple of years.
Fairly.

Yeah.

So That survey actually only
got us 87 linking root domains.

I say only, that’s still amazing.
Still very good.

Some of these are super high.
That’s the thing as well.

It’s like people imagine that
you run a digital PR campaign

and you get 500 links or something.

Most digital PR campaigns,
we’ll talk about that in another episode,

but they get 8-20 links
or something, and that’s the average.

Some of them take off and get 100 links,
but that’s the exception, not the rule.

The 87 links is better than
most digital PR campaigns, for example.

Absolutely, yeah.

The other thing about this is they’re all
very relevant links to us because they’re

all talking about affiliate marketing.

So these are affiliate
marketing type sites.

For so many, I think it’s probably
because of this marketing.

This is a big help for sure.

One thing we did differently
in this one as well is we broke down

the audience by their niche.

So we asked this question,
What niche are you in?

And we had this big list of
20 or 30 different niches,

and we tried to break everything down.

And what that allowed us to do is every
other question we asked in the survey, we

could compare how different niches fared.

So we could see which niches are people
making the most amount of money in.

So education, eLearning,
or travel, beauty, and skincare were

much higher than arts and crafts
or sustainability and environment.

And it allowed us to create
some really nice charts.

Yeah, which was nobody Nobody else
had anything like this.

I think that really helped us to get
a bunch of-Yeah, revenue for a thousand

visitors by niche, for example, is cool.

The thing is always, again, because…

I mean, we can say the case study site
was in pets and animals.

Yeah.

And so we had all these beginners who
copied the case study site in our course,

and it was the lowest revenue
when I knew for a fact, I know

really big athlete owners
in this market that make good money.

Yeah, exactly.
It was a bit scary.

But we mentioned that
literally right below the graph,

there’s a survey limitation box
that explains that, that dynamic.

Okay, so we got a fair amount
of responses, the same as what we

did before, pretty much the same,
but we maintained the lead magnet

and that worked again, which was good.

It’s quite a bit more- Although we didn’t
have the grand price,

I’m not sure if that negatively affected
it or it’s maybe just the less hypey topic

that got us less respondents,
or maybe just people had filled in two

of our surveys and like, Oh, another one.

That could have had
something to do with it.

Okay, so what next?

Did anything go differently for this one?

No, it’s exactly the same.

We did a podcast on it, did a little bit
of marketing, did an outreach campaign,

and then built the statistics post.

Which we advertised as well.
I remember that.

We do this by default now.

When we make a statistics page,
we advertise until it ranks decently,

and then we stop.

But it’s really a good
way to kickstart it.

But yeah, so it has 373 linking root
domains, the statistics page,

which is not as much as the AI
one, which was 432, but…

It’s also newer, right?

It’s been out there for nine months
less than the statistics one.

Yeah.

It makes your point that basically putting
the sources at the end of the section

generates more links than…

100%, 100%, yeah.

That’s the way to do it.

It’s so funny because we
criticise Google so much for doing this.

Essentially, it’s the best tactic
for getting links.

Yeah, that’s why they do it, right?
Yeah.

It’s interesting to be on the other side.

It gives you interest.

That’s pretty much three for three.

Did we run any campaign
like this that didn’t work?

No.
Okay.

Would you say it would work
every time if you run it?

No, absolutely not.

It’s dependent on you being able
to rank your statistics page.

You can manually outreach your survey.

If you do everything correct
for that, you’re going to get links.

But if you don’t
rank your statistics post, then

how are people going to find you?
You can pay for ads.

That’s one solution for that.
Which is easy.

It’s just super low DR.

But if you’re a DR10 site
trying to rank for AI statistics.

We don’t even have it anymore.

We’ve had it for two years, I think.

Yeah, it goes up and down a little bit,
but we need to update the data, I think.

It’s a bit out of date,
so we might get around to doing that.

Yeah, I think it needs
a bit of a refresh now.

But I mean, it’s done its job, honestly.

The thing as well that is interesting is,
let’s say, I mean, AI statistics, I’m not

sure we can We’ve sold this forever.

It’s competitive as hell now.

Obviously, it’s the hottest
niche in the world.

It’s pretty impressive that we’ve held
these rankings for so long.

But let’s say we never get it back.

I still have a URL
with 432 linking root domains.

There’s something that we call
link profile redeployment, which

is essentially the fact that I could
make any page about AI on the site

and redirect that URL to that new page.

It’s due for refresh.

I’m not going to do it, but we have this
I have the STI writing tools page,

which rank still okay, but honestly,
the content needs to be refreshed.

But I know if I redirect this URL
there, we instantly take back the

number one spot and make money from that.

These assets are especially useful later
on, even if you can’t

maintain the rankings.
I think that’s quite important.

It’s not a failure if it stops working
because you have these links that they

will drop a little bit over time.

If you redirect, some people will get the
links, people update their sites, etc.

But I’m imagining 300 links
that I can point to any page that’s

semi-related, so about AI, I would say.

We could make a lot of money because
you almost get an unfair advantage.

How do you build 300 backlinks
to a best AI writing tool page?

It’s legitimately without
paying a lot of money.

One of the things we actually
did to help us rank that page,

the statistics page, was we redirected
another page we had about AI to it.

We ranked initially, and then we went down
after a year or something, and so

we redirected the other one to there.
It went back up.

It’s practical.

I wrote about Cinec using AI
that got, I don’t know, like 80 links

or something, and we redirected that.

Then that just got us
number one back for a year.

That got us another 100 links,
is what I’m saying.

It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yeah, but it’s quite interesting
because I think people will imagine,

Oh, if it’s not ranking after two
years, then you felt like…

No.

Your site authority still benefits that
through your internal linking.

But also you can redirect these pages
to what makes sense for you today,

provided it’s semi-related.

I would not redirect that to a link
building page, for example.

Sure.
I think that would lose a lot of value.

But if you do it in a relevant
way, that’s super useful.

We’ve done that on a DR78 site.

Let’s say 75 when we started
or something like that.

Do you think small sites
can do this as well?

Yeah, absolutely.

As I said, the survey, if you just do
the a survey, and you just reach to that,

you can get 50 to 100 links to that.
Which is good for small sites.

Which is amazing on its own.

The ROI is already there
just for the survey.

Ranking for statistics,
it depends on the angle you take.

The topic you take.

Obviously, if you go for something
super high level and there’s all DR 90

sites and the CDC ranking, then no.
Yeah, it’s complicated.

But if you go for a really small
subsection of that, then you’ll get

less links from it, but you can still
rank and make make it work over time.

I think long-tail statistics pages
would make sense as well.

I would not be afraid to go for
a 20 or 30 search per month.

This is the bit that we didn’t do,
and I wish we did.

You can take, let’s say,
the link building survey.

You could take that data about nofollow
links, and you could create

an article about how many people
pay for nofollow links, or just

an article, just nofollow links.
A question, basically.

What are nofollow links?

Because you have this original
data, which I guarantee you nobody else

who’s writing these articles
has, you get such an advantage

when it comes to ranking for those, and
those can rank as well and get you links.

I think my problem with that
is it’s more likely to have an

AI overview answer, for example.
Sure.

I would say it’s like…

I think it can get you links.

Again, where are AI overviews
going to go to get the source for that?

You with your original data?

Yeah, if you have…

But the thing is, the power
of the statistics page is people

want to quote the data.

Whereas if you answer a question,
the desire to quote and

give a source is probably lower.

I mean, it’s okay.

It’s probably still what I
was doing, but I think you

lose a little bit of efficiency there.
You do.

There’s diminishing returns,
but you get more mileage

out of your campaign by doing this.

When everyone starts doing
this, what do you think happens?

It’s the same as when everyone
starts trying to rank for keywords,

like what happens.

Google has 10 results
at the moment on page one.

If you’re not one of those 10,
you’re not getting links.

You’re not going to be
successful with this.

Start now maybe is the approach.

But for sure, lots of people
will start doing this and it

will become less effective over time.

Yeah, I think it’s-as
every other link building tactic

in the history of the world has.

There’s an early adopter advantage.

The thing is, it’s not like running
a survey and creating original data is

not something you just do or you give to
a low-end VA or something It’s like that.

It takes people with some skills,
especially analysing the data,

putting a decent post together, etc.

Most people don’t do it well.
You have to make it interesting.

If you just ask some random,
Do you like links?

It’s bullshit.

But we know because we’re in that niche,
what is the interesting thing?

How much are people
really paying for links?

Because nobody really knows at scale
what that number is, but we found it.

I do feel, though, it’s like
there’s the problem for me,

But the opportunity for others is that
there’s really nobody checking the data.

Everyone just eat it up.

You could say anything.

You could put none of the work.

That’s true about
anything on the internet.

It’s not specific to service.
I know.

It means that you can be
quite biassed in this as well.

It means you can be sloppy
and still get results, I guess.

That’s what it tells you.
Potentially, yeah.

But I think if people start
calling you out for your fake data

or something, your reputation
or credibility is ruined, right?

I don’t think it’s ruined.

I don’t think people
research when the people…

Do you research the reputation
of the side of the company.

Sure.

I know.
I know.

I know.
I know.

I know.

I know some people want to run
their businesses and lives that way.

I don’t want.
That’s not how we work.

It’s interesting to push it, basically.

Okay, that’s pretty much all I have.

Is there anything else
you want to add on this?

Yes, we’ve actually systematised this
in this process in a lot more detail.

We’ve gone through every aspect of
planning, research, validation, designing

your survey, analysing the data, doing
the outreach, getting the links, building

the statistics base, all of that.

We’ve put it into a step-by-step
system, which took ages, by the way.

And we incorporated a tonne
of AI into that as well

to help speed up the process.

We’re putting into a course which is going
to be released in a few weeks time.

So people should definitely
make sure they’re subscribed

to our email list, authorityhacker.com/subscribe, or tune in to our next
podcast as well, where we’re going to be

talking about digital PR, really, because
we’ve had some good success with digital

PR now, and we have-In-house, yeah.

Some stuff to share.

I also want to say that this new course
is going to be available for free

to Authority Hacker Pro members.

If you’re a pro member, you can expect
that to drop for you at the same time,

free of charge, basically.

Okay, well, we’ll talk about
digital PR in the next episode.

Let us know what you think
about the in-person episode as well,

because we didn’t mention that.

But we actually tried.
We went to the studio.

We’ll see how it goes.

Yeah, that was fun.

And in the next episode,
we’ll talk about digital PR,

how we also build things that way.

That’s a teaser
for the upcoming course, really.

Hope you enjoyed it, and
we’ll see you in the next episode.

Bye-bye.

Thank you for joining us for today’s
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