This post was inspired by David Farkas’ post over at Upper Ranks related to the idea that “Link Earning” still requires great efforts in securing the actual link. The post works to educate people that it does not work if you do not put in the work to persuade people to link to your wonderful “Linkable Asset.”

You can’t just expect people to link to your linkable asset because its awesome. You have to find a targeted list of people and figure out how to best approach them and expose your content to them.

And while I agree with this take, that is not what I’m here to write about.

The post got me thinking. So many people are on the “natural” link building high these days. That truly “earned” links are the holy grail that are completely safe and will get you all the results and rankings you ever dreamed of, and will at the same time never get you penalized by Google.

The Truth About Link Earning and Linkable Assets

Let me tell you the cold hard truth about link building.

Link earning does work, and it is a great tactic.

But… it is…..

Costly

Most companies do not have the time, money, or resources to launch a decent link earning campaign. It can run upwards of $500 – $10,000+ just to create a linkable asset. Then you need to dedicate hours to promoting the content doing things like research, outreach, follow up, and meetings. Chances are you are using a paid software to help with this process, and that may run you $30 (on the super cheap; Google docs/Gmail) to $200+ (Pitchbox/Ninja Outreach/Buzzstream)

Highly Unsuccessful

The large majority of linkable asset campaigns earn zero to very few actual links. There are a minority of very successful link bait/link earning campaigns. Think about it, there is no guarantee that people will want to link to whatever it is you create.

People may like it and read it and may even share it via social media. But the odds are extremely low that they will:

(A) Have the ability to post to a relevant or authoritative site and…

(B) Be actually inspired to write something and link to you.

Not Targeted

You are not building links to product/service pages with a linkable asset, you are building links to a separate brand new blog post or page.

It is great and fantastic to build links to many pages deep and wide throughout your site. The same can be said of capturing additional long tail keywords. You have to employ a content marketing strategy that fills the top of the funnel, it is a critical component of any ongoing SEO strategy.

But at the end of the day, you need to drive revenue. And nothing drives revenues like ranking a product or service page. And let me tell you that it is almost never the case that your linkable asset is on a product or service page.

So guess what, the links you “earn” are not even targeting money keywords most of the time.

The Benefits of Link Earning

Now that I’ve trashed link earning and linkable assets as an efficient SEO technique let me explain why and how they can be immensely powerful.

You can increase the odds of success through being very targeted with the topic and messaging of the linkable asset, and also through careful targeting and messaging for your outreach list. But these skills are often difficult to master and are the result of many failures, and hiring a consultant or agency that has this experience will add to the cost.

Creating linkable assets typically is an evergreen strategy, meaning that the content will continue to earn you additional traffic (and possibly even links) over time.

If executed well and successful, earned links through linkable assets are highly defensible. This means that it is difficult for competitors to mimick your efforts. It also means that your rankings and authority gained for your site are more difficult to beat out for competitors, because earned links are very difficult to gain.

How to Earn Links for Product and Service Pages

If using linkable assets to earn links is not going to work for our money pages then what does one do?

Think about it, what authoritative site is going to want to link to your product or service page? Publishers hate to link out to pages with commercial intent. Yet these are the pages that drive revenue for you.

The best answer is to use sponsored content opportunities. There are lots of blogs and sites in almost every niche that are willing to link to your product or service page for a fee.

Many of these sponsored content pieces will even drive traffic and sales, if placed on the right sites.

But at the very least, you are able to specifically target your money pages and can be completely strategic about what anchor text your links will have. Anchor text targeting is may be even more important than being able to target specific pages. Having the right ratio of anchor texts is a major ranking factor.

And with sponsored content you have total control. You are hyper targeted.

Utilizing sponsored content opportunities also is a sure thing! The success rate is 100%, always, at all times.

So what I would say to everyone out there, is to not be so against the idea of paying for a sponsored link. They work. They are targeted. And they are a more sure thing.