You're looking at $200,000 yeah of which is crazy it's a good traffic so still even though it's less good than it was they just built links to us naturally because of something we did 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 it's so funny CU we criticize Google so much for doing this and essentially it's the best tactic for Getting links yeah I mean that's why they do it right it's actually Fe AI feature proof for almost this tactic which
is kind of interesting to me then you get an absolute boatload of links what if I told you that we built over 1,600 highquality backlinks for just $8 each on average and I'm not talking about backlinks from spamy sites that you could buy on Fiverr but rather links from industry giants like entrepreneur.com that is a d91 site or Slate.com that is a dr90 site you think that's impossible well we're about to prove you wrong in this episode hey Ator hikers I'm G Breton and we are about to share a link building strategy that is going
to revolutionize your SEO game in this team building Master Class 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 SE 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 diveing 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 highquality digital PR campaigns on search- intelligence. co.uk more about them later for now let's get started
with the Episode so I think the problem is that if you're looking at Google right now like you type most queries what you'll figure out it's like while they've introduced a lot of like new AI factors Etc with all the 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 I me the one consistent thing through every single Google update for the last 16 Years has been people complaining about big sites Google favoring big
sites maybe with the exception of this last August core update but that was really a a slight a slight correction still you you search for like most queries even with the recent core update you'll still find most sites are like dr50 plus right it's like otherwise it's not uh it's like you're not going to so you kind of have to if you want to still get traffic from SE which is still a very good Traffic Source it's very targeted people are searching for something you're here at the moment they're looking for a solution so it's
it's a good traffic so still even though it's less good than it was let's be honest uh you need to build Links at scale the problem is that to build all these links like get even getting the R50 right you need a few thousand links usually to get there if you Outsource that it's going to cost you a ton of money right it's like you Know you look at a link building agency probably the average price for the non-shitty ones would be like 200 $300 per links or something at least at least and it's going
up so so if you're looking if you're looking to that you need let's say a thousand Lings to make it simple right it because $200 I'm taking the lower end theow you're looking at $200,000 yeah which is crazy I mean the the math the economics it doesn't work For most businesses and that's I mean the thing is like you will Rank and you will make money spending 200 Grands but like how long is that going to take for you on top of the cost of your 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 Right it's like it's it's I think like there's a place for like Outsourcing some of Link especially link building capabilities you don't have in house but there's 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 very
hard to get a good out exactly like gone are the days when uh a business like SEO was the business model SEO is like the the Marketing channel for a a business and you you can't just Outsource all your content and all your links in indefinitely and think well they'll just do all the marketing work and I'll just reap reap the reward it doesn't work like that it's a core competency of a of a business you have some of it yourself at least yeah the margins get eaten completely and it's like it's it's not like
it costs you nothing to deliver the business so you'd be looking at like Okay I need a million Revenue at least to like start being in the green basically and maybe that it's and we're not we're talking about just a th000 link which sounds like a lot but it's actually not that much in a grand scheme of and we're talking $200 links also which is the lower end like you might be well into like half a million dollars if you wanted to build like a high site from scratch which actually questions also the value of
expired domains and Everything but Google has been you know killing a lot of these like you know you you may buy a D50 domain but like there's a little chance today that it's going to work that was in the past so anyway all of that saying like that's the problem that you have right now if you want to do SEO and so we wanted to talk about something we've done with our site where we built and that's the headline of the podcast uh it's a little bit click ba but it's actually true we Built 1,664
quality links for an average of $8 each y uh and this is not a Fiverr ad like this is to say I wanted to jump in and I want you to show us some of the links because it's like it would be too easy to say well okay yeah you built a bunch of shitty spammy links and okay that cost $8 but that's probably not going to work right so it's like I want you to show me some links I'll show you Three Links right now this Did you Char by the way did you like
of course I did but but I am going to reveal all of the links we built all 1,664 and I'll reveal how we build 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 not going to be a spreadsheet going be like well no you can just put the URLs in uh in hraps or samur or whatever you're you're using but we'll reveal them later in the this Episode so first link number one entrepreneur.com d91 okay so they reference to
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 yeah link number two slate.com dr90 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 uh Gail Bretton found the AI writing did not automatically reduce Google traffic so I found out apparently yeah then we have link number which is only and I say
only Dr 74 but it's a highly relevant site right it's gmass which is a tool we used to use 10 plus years ago uh it's kind of so it's a it's a barebone Outreach tool with in Gmail basically kind of uh and they they link to us and 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 like like like what's what's I
absolutely Cherry Picked on I mean I mean I I'll 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 and things like that I Guess yeah but it's the same with any site you build any page you build it picks up these types of links um like this but essentially what we're talking about here is linkable assets right and the specific way we've done it is through statistics pages and surveys we'll get into the about that only two things
and we only did three campaigns to generate 1,664 I think that's what leads to the lowest cost because there's only Street Campaigns so it's not like we have proded lots of content or do a lot of work it's just like each one was actually pretty success and 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 and the full-time labor of people doing a little bit of Outreach to get the campaigns going yeah I can imagine $8 payment for
link is a bit insulting anyway so exactly who who who Is going to take that so it's like 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 like we've teased people in on like 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 uh and the way people create content and come to ideas when they're 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 so people will go to the internet and they will try and try and find data or statistics to back up a point that they already think or believe in effect backwards rationalizing the thing that emotionally they feel right and this is just the way right create content we all do it mostly in the UK actually I don't want to go into it all right all right all right People will go to Google and they'll look for writers journalists they go to Google they'll
look for uh 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 those statistics terms then you get an absolute boatload of Links like tons and tons and tons 1,664 to be precise I think also what's interesting is like you could make the argument as like probably the statistics could
be given by AI overviews or fed 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 yeah exactly you need to give a source to like be credible anyway right yeah that like I remember back in the day at University if if you if you reference Wikipedia as a source like you got chewed out by your professor it's the say you can't reference AI overviews especially with the amount of lies that they theyes because it's like you
know you could argue that probably some of these stats are going to show up in theie but even though if you're writer and making a point it makes your point stronger if you link out to a credible Source Exactly and so like e like it's actually Fe AI feature proof for this tactic which is kind of interesting to me exactly so 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 okay uh the problem with that is that anybody
can create a big list of Statistics right it's really really easy so what is going to determine who ranks first well you know to an extent domain Rating domain Authority that's why so so you know you a common argument I get is well this site is only going to be only this tactic is only going to work for 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 and the the way okay Mr Google yeah
no [ __ ] Sherlock but the the way you can do that with a statistics is to have your own data so you have something that nobody else has And that will allow you to out compete with sites much bigger with you as we have done against Dr I mean we're Dr 78 we were ranking above Forbes D which in the Dr was it 94 or something yeah uh for a long long period of time for ai ai statistics the thing is like do you think it's due to Information Gain or is that is there
like is it because Google thinks it's a better page or is there some kind of like under tactic for like 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 the unique data that does it now is that directly because Google's measuring that or is it measuring the users user signals and secondary effects of that I don't know but it works we've demonstrated it and uh 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 uh okay I mean there is certainly a process to it which I'm going to go through right now uh for for how we did it but it's uh it's certainly achievable uh and you know I'll show you three examples later in this this episode where we and the kind of progression we made um from from doing kind of mediocre servy to doing something actually quite interesting could you
just make everything up would that work I I we we Don't recommend that I'm just honestly it's theorical thinking yes like honestly you probably could yeah uh I I mean we didn't like we've got all the data to to back it up happy to share that but um like I feel like nobody checks right it's like no one's no one's ever checked no one's ever asked for for anything so it wouldn't surprise me if people did that but like it's it's not something I want to do I agree we don't recommend it but yeah I
I think it's Interesting because that also like you know the followup question would be like how well managed need does a survey need to be and like how clean does the data need to be ET but if you could make things up I argue it can be a bit dirty so every survey that's ever been done has problems with bias uh and like a lot of the way prent profal surveys designer professional survey designers uh create surveys is done specifically to eliminate bias and and and things like That so if you're doing a you know
for some medical trial or some scientific thing absolutely you need to do that if it's a marketing thing about you know a AI statistics like you there's not the same level of um rigor that's that's needed and there are actually some tactics we which we've used which I'll share uh where we try and kind of 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 exactly all right let's go through the the way you do this okay so Step One
is we need a topic for our survey uh Authority hacker we're in the broadly speaking digital marketing Niche but there's lots of like little sub niches around here MH the very first one we picked was link building we did a link building survey not because not because we did some amazing analysis and like looked at all the potential we just thought we just we understood that Really well and we we just thought it would work I'll be honest with you since then though we've learned that the best way to measure whe to validate a topic
idea is to look for if you Google the the topic plus statistics and you look at how many links the statistics Pages there are getting if you exclude like government sites and and things like look at how many links the statistics posts are getting that gives you a rough idea of the the number of people that Are likely to to to to link to it and if you're seeing you know multiple pages with 50 plus referring domains you're you're good to go yeah it's probably L it yeah okay so essentially you have your your kind
of high level topic think of it like a pyramid your your your topic at the top and then you have an angle and that's so we picked link building for our first one like how do you want to position that survey like what what direction you want to go in And again first time we did it it was based purely on curiosity so we genuinely wanted to know how many people are paying for links we wanted to know uh you 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 okay and we we kind of built the the survey out from from there so getting the data or getting people to respond to your survey Getting respondents is is super important and a lot of people will not do a survey because they they don't have an audience right we're fortunate enough to have a big email list big Community uh and you know we we sent an email out and we got uh I think it was like 700 or something responses 800 responses uh
for the the Ling building one uh we did get more for others I'll talk about the differences in in a little bit but there's actually Uh tools out there that you can use to survey people so pfish is a good example of one cost about a dollar per respondent and generally speaking with these surveys you need 1,000 plus respondents so uh you know you be be paying $1 to $2,000 to to get your your survey out there again depends how many questions you ask andap compared to again Outsourcing buing it's not cheap but the most
of the cost of these tactics are creating the Initial content piece like the survey and the stats uh uh page in the beginning and then 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 uh on autopilot but what we also did was we looked at other people who had ran surveys in the space before and there hadn't really been one in a couple of years I think there was one company that was doing like an an annual one I think
Pugan like a UK SEO that used to work for still had one if I remember yeah so honestly our opinion like they were okay uh what what some of them were doing and there was some interesting data but a lot of it was kind of outdated you know it was two three years old so there's an opport if you see that it's a good opportunity to refresh that ex existing data because it's kind of already validated that it's going to work right um uh or you can come up with the new Angles like like like
we did yeah so one of the most important things I would say is to design the survey well the the questions and answers you you put in there uh big mistake a lot of people make is they'll ask open-ended questions like what do you think of Link building or something uh and they'll get 2,000 people responds with two saying 2,000 different things like well what do I do with this so surveys are multiple choice for a reason it allows you to compare The data uh at scale and and really pull Insight the data right so
we could see like I think we had experience link Builders like we as yeah so this is this is one thing that I think helped our the survey Stand Out significantly that was we asked all these positioning questions in the beginning so it was I think like how many links per month do you build how many years of experience do you have in link building like these types of things and 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 then say well how much do people who are building lots of links pay for links versus how many how much do people who are not building many links pay for links and you know you could cross All Those Questions with those positioning questions at the start the same way you would would for you know demographics if you wanted to compare you know like People in different countries uh we didn't ask that in there but it's the same same kind of idea a lot of uh a lot of people do with their I
remember an inside from this actually where we saw that the cost per link from like advanc link Builders was actually lower than the cost per link from beginner link Builders even though their salary was like much lower because they were so much more inefficient yeah yeah so that was interesting this was this actually Secondary thing that we did so we we looked at how many links experienced link Builders were building and it was a lot more uh and we looked at how many 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 we were able to see like the cost per link for as you got more experience actually went down uh it was still crazy like 200 and something yeah So you know they should probably use this tactic here instead what those link Builders were doing but uh it was an interesting insight and it got that got quoted quite a lot that little uh trajectory graph in in other spaces as well like uh in Recruitment and and things like
that so so it's kind of cool this is how you design your survey what happens when You' designed your Ser I guess you can either use your audience or something like pfish to get the Answers in this case we had the audience did we have did we do one with pish at all uh uh no not for Authority hacker we've done it for another company um I'm I'm not going to talk about that now but uh yeah and you know spent I think it was like 1,500 bucks or something to just as well it's roughly
a dollar I think it's 95 per per user the thing with pfish 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 so we you can't do that to get a th000 link Builders right because they're we're all hiding in our our parents basement or whatever you know so it's it's difficult to to get those people you can however ask a screening question so let's say uh you wanted to do uh a survey on coffee drinkers right you could ask a
screen question uh which was do you drink coffee yes or no and anyone who click no wouldn't get to ENT the survey in pfish And you wouldn't be charged for it you pay for it okay yeah but the downside of that is it it increases the price of the survey by about 50% uh so you have to kind of balance those people who answer yes like do they get paid to answer the survey yes so would they be biased to say yes there's so there's always bias in in surveys um and that es even with
our own own list right there's many different ways that that is biased because our audience Isn't typical link Builders and you know so okay the the thing is when you have a bit a large enough amount of people a lot of these small issues kind of iron themselves out right no nobody verifies and and it's also an opportunity actually in your survey to to talk about the potential biases and the potential issues uh you know when we did our affiliate marketing survey uh there was a lot of people who had taken tasks our old beginners
course in there So lot of and so there's a lot it skewed a bit more towards beginners and there's one Niche that a lot of people ended up being in which you know the case study site so yeah so there's there's issues there but we talked about it right and and that that also adds more transparency if you're open about these these potential issues and now for a quick word from this episode sponsor search intelligence has created the world's first digital PR ideation tool To help you find that inspiration for your next campaign the initial
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sites main topics like SEO digital marketing strategies and affiliate marketing and there are dozens and dozens of suggestions for our next digital PR campaign it even broke down suggestions into helpful categories like saving and preventing warnings and dangers best Worst tools frequency why and why not and even Regional specific ones like UK tabloid media this is actually a huge timesaver because the story structures behind this have already been tried and tested and proven to work so even if you don't use the exact suggestions I'm sure it's going to spark some massive inspiration and remember you
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things so going simply going Through all the questions and seeing 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 like we talked about before uh then you have to essentially write this up into a a report an article for your your site get some graphics you know simple pie charts showing percentage saying yes and know it really helps to visualize this write writing it up is not difficult either you you you Literally have just a section which is the the
finding and then couple paragraphs about it you know two three sentences the image and then the next finding and then you repeat that format for I have a feeling a could be quite good at it actually it is yeah so we've been using it a lot in our our recent recent surveys and in the the course uh that is something which we we show as well yeah because it has it has this you know data analyze stuff like you can Upload csvs and so on with all the answers and I think if you like kind
of like prompt it to like be a little bit critical or think of like interesting correlations that I think it's like 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 dat some yeah examp existing survey post that someone else has written uh you know has a framework to go on so it's really good okay yeah that's kind of nice because I remember Doing the first ones it was a bit painful actually like it was it took it it took ages
cuz we went through like so many different writers and people trying to to do this trying to get a data expert in and 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 how to analyze right exactly yeah yeah uh and and honestly it's not difficult in fact if you use pfish for your your survey And you can use pish for free if you're bringing your own audience to it right so you can use your tool which is great because
you can do all the data analysis inside pfish which is really really good because it makes it so much easier to get all the the charts and the the things you need okay and to do the the cross analysis so you do the post you analyze the data you put basically it's a WordPress post right you just make just a post on your site Authority Hacker.com linkbuilding survey yeah so here's the first URL uh okay so that's it my post is live where are the links yeah so the and I know we said this is
like mostly passive uh but this is the the only active Outreach bit you do this but it's very important so when your survey is ready uh it's time to do a bit of marketing for it so you can do an Outreach campaign to your survey post okay so that's where we are basically taking each finding that we have uh one Of the questions we asked in the link building one was uh do you believe no follow links pass link juice and the vast majority of people did so we would go around looking prospecting for sites
which mentioned no follow links and there's a lot of them lot of SEO sites a lot of marketing blogs talking about no follow links and then we would reach out to them um and we created a template that said hey I noticed you mentioned this and then we would pull in something They specifically mentioned um which is true but did you know that uh X percentage of seos believe that no follow links do pass link juice include the pie chart in the email because it's like you know really captures the attention uh and not even
really asking very hard like hey give us a link but just like feel free to include this uh if if you think it would be valuable to your your audience so very very light touch uh and that did really well I mean That page now has 265 referring domains from this Outreach mostly because it doesn't really run for keyboard right it does rank for link building survey but not many people link to it yeah not 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 uh you know there's maybe 50 or something did that some of them I mean I don't know Where all of them came from if I'm I'm being perfectly honest with you but over over time uh if you look at the link trajectory over time it it kept growing uh despite us doing no Outreach after the first four to six I think they discovered from the places that mention it like they probably do that um did we do any social promotion on that yeah so we
also we did a podcast about that when it first came out uh and a little bit I mean we're not really big on social Media so like not like we can really move the needle very much with that but yeah we we promoted a little bit think it would be worse to like advertise it like to spend money like I feel like raising awareness about some kind of actually it needs to be interesting I think the reason it works is because it's not boring it's not it's interesting data that people were curious about if it's
boring then it's not I don't think it would work but like I feel like something interesting like that like if we even like Facebook ads or something like that I'm not sure it would be a complete waste m i mean it's so this Outreach campaign what we did it's it's really just this initial burst of marketing attention yeah so anything you can do to to to help get more attention on it seems to to help it do do better I mean when we outreached 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 uh and that helped us so did other people share it yeah absolutely uh so it was featured in like Matt Diggity and his monthly Roundup featured it and a few other people mentioned it twe tweeted about it and and things like that so yeah so 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 do better at
yeah okay so you finished the survey you promote the post what's next so next we built the statistics post uh and all we did for 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 okay and we made the best list of Link building statistics so including our new stuff together with the old stuff that you could find on go absolutely and and And of course we put all of our own statistics toward W 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 MH and that was something we played around with later and it had some interesting results so um we'll I'll share more about that okay it does make it look a little bit busy on the page you know with all of these links but you can see in every section Uh we have we broke it down into we got our top link building statistics who builds links link building and impact on rankings link
building tactics social media link building link building cost you get the picture at the top of every section is several Authority hacker statistics um so the point is to try to get people to quote this one because it gets us a link exactly exactly and something we did in this one which we didn't repeat in future was we had uh Quite a deep analysis of like what these link building statistics mean and we had a few different takeaways and kind of turned into a little bit of a blog post so that actually took a little
bit longer to create uh but I don't really think it added too much value people coming for statistics they just want the big list of statistics and uh yeah you can you can see from from later examples that that that did better for us so we got 220 uh Linking group domains to our link building statistics p uh page since we've uh since we' built it and I want to say when we launched this page I remember advertising it on AdWords as well yeah so one thing when we first launched it you know day one
it didn't rank it did actually ranked really really quickly like within a week or something uh but if you don't have the authority to rank you know a brand new site then you can pay for Google Google AdWords do you remember what the cost was per cheap is that there's just not that much volume for these queries and no competition either right CU there's no not really much monetary value you will spend money right it's like if you advertise and you try to be like at the top of a query that has like 100 search
per month or something on H like you spend like 200 $300 yeah but you you're very likely to get a link from that so it's like Compare that to like the cost of an agency for example like well it's like if you get even just one link from that spend it's okay yeah uh and so like yeah you can just cheat you can just even if you're DL zero honestly if I had a dzero site today and I wanted to build up Authority I might I might do that I might just like brainstorm all the
statistics pages I could put together uh if you don't have the time or like of all resources you could even skip the Survey and just do that sta do you want to know like a not so secret secret what's a secret secret is uh there are multiple very large businesses that have built basically their entire SEO uh Authority MH by doing exactly just this you mean exploding toies exploding topies is a great example so Brian Dean did backlinko actually in backlinko so don't get me wrong he started off creating like loads of super deep guides
they they're excellent then He found this P this format of doing statistics and then he just kept repeating that and repeating that and and it kind of 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 I remember doing the interview with him and and kind of a grilling him on that so we can check the episode but I'm like you have ROBLOX statistics Roblox is like a video game for kids right yeah I was like how Is that related to
backlink and are you not afraid of Google this this is the beauty of his next business exploding topics is that St the the the subject the his Niche is stuff right it's just like it's stuff that's that's growing it's it's interesting things and so he can literally talk about anything he talk about statistics of anything and you you saw that's that's literally all he did to build he didn't do any Outreach I I think that's also why he Started this business I think he knew how he would grow it organically which is it's super smart
right take take something you know that works and then figure out the perfect business to to run it I think he figured it out on back Linko and he was like well I really shouldn't push it too hard on back Linko and sold it and did that and now he just sold exploring topics to rush actually so SCM Rush owns a lot of Statistics pages right yeah absolutely absolutely So basically you could say Branden made like 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 more to it than that but yeah there certainly like if you're really boed yeah you could say that okay uh okay so you make the statistics page yeah advertising it is a is a really cool hack and it's not very expensive because these ques 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 many people searching for that stuff it's funny as well I remember uh was it cyber Shepard did a talk uh no it was
a c Ro I think C roof was it he was looking at uh when you advertise when when you run Google ads to a new post it ranks better organically and like he couldn't really figure out the causation reason for that but yeah that That seemed to be the case at least and to me it's like also spammers don't advertise yeah uh so I feel like it's like one more thing that you know separates you from a shitty Shady site like you're actually advertising like only real businesses would pay ATS is expensive mhm uh so
it's like yeah it's it's it's you you're different and and like that actually so essentially this is a way for sites which are don't have much domain authority to yeah buy their Way to the top and you could 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 uh for an agency to to do it do it for you okay so we've done this ones with distin building survey you've mentioned other ones like can you tell can you w us through the
other examples yeah absolutely so the next one we did was an AI survey an AI statistics post which is competitive well we kind of caught it at The right time and this this was early 2023 so about six weeks after chat GPT came out no chat GPT came out end of 2021 no end of 2022 okay yeah uh and and so we went all in on this uh you know we saw the hype going on around AI it's like let's let's just repeat repeat it and see if we can do it for that it was
a little bit outside of our Niche at the time and we talk about AI a bit more now yeah but at at the time yeah it was I mean it was outside of everyone's Niche To be honest yeah for sure uh so and I think that was a fresh market the fact that there wasn't not no Authority on AI pretty much like now it would be maybe more difficult but at the time it was like we kind of jump on and this and this is what made it a little bit more difficult to plan is
normally you would look at the other statistics post and how many links are they getting but there weren't really many at least not in the direction we wanted to take take This uh so we we ran a survey on on I 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 and it was to our same audience right we just same email list same promotion the the thing that we did differently was in the first one the link building
one we offered a prize for one person uh I think it was like a swag bag some Authority hacker t-shirts and And things like that uh so one person would get that so for some reason for some reason that wasn't really super appealing to people I I don't know why but uh yeah so what we did this time around is we like let's get a bit more serious about this so we we still had a prize we made it more relevant to the topic I think we gave like a one-year chat GPT Plus account it
was like6 value or something so that was the the the grand prize but we gave Every single person that completed the survey uh something as well and that was uh like a lead magnet type thing with AI yeah AI prompts that we had created and you know this at the time it was this was early 2023 so AI prompts were like all the rage uh at the time they were pretty bad as well let's be honest I mean everyone was about at prompting back then I think now when I look at what I'm doing versus
what I did back Then but it was it was popular and I think the fact that you were guaranteed to get something I think that's what worked exactly exactly and it's uh I think that is the difference when surveying your own audiences give something to but it doesn't have to be your own audience I mean po fish you're not going to put a lead mag on pish you can't yeah it's like if you were getting like I could imagine you could almost like have Affiliates for for surveys or Something like someone else's audience or something
like this yeah it's possible you could do that I mean we did have some arrangements where we would uh you know ask people we could post the the survey buy sponsorship on newsletters too for example like if you find a relevant newsletter like 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 work it's not that bad the Sponsorship on newsletters is not it's it's going to be cheaper than pfish 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 like it's aing yeah uh yeah I could see that working if it's like right at the top of a newsletter or something like you know find some kind of like new sheit coin coming out and then just give tokens to people like for the launch or something and it's like everyone's Winning uh and it's like yeah I could see that would be a pretty good take rate and that would make it like you know you go on porish you won't find like lots of
crypto investors but you go on a crypto newsletter they're here you know yeah and so you probably get a better survey for L money so it's like I think you can be a bit creative with your marketing and that's where I think seos are bit shitty you know like they tend to like want the exact formula but If you kind of like use real marketing trobs for that you will get you'll get better data basically so uh we got this survey to our audience we um we offered the lead magnets we got four times more
responses than the uh link building one and then after that did anything else change in the method yeah so the the way we approached the statistics post that followed was a little bit different just for comparison of of numbers the link building survey Got 265 referring domains yeah the AI survey got 287 so it's about the same right however ever the link building statistics post got 220 linking rout domains the AI statistics got 430 so what do we do different that resulted in twice as many links this time well we kind of cheated a little
bit and uh we actually got this uh idea from Brian Dean because this is how he does his his pages so if we take a look at the AI statistics post here it's a b Different what you'll notice is we still have the same sections you know the top statistics and then uh you know AI adoption and implementation we've got impact of AI on jobs and employment you don't see 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 uh with the links to them now it's subtle but by disconnecting the source to where the 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 know it reminds me reminds me of AI overviews That's How Google's done it initially exactly exctly it's literally the exact same thing uh and it works right yeah because it's more hard it's more difficult like you're putting a barrier between like oh like 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 this The Authority hacker AI statistics page and that's that's what worked I think there's also a fact the fact that AI was a was a booming industry like some of the links we got it's like it was bigger than for sure but why then is the AI survey you know only get a little bit more links than the link building survey um 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 searched for it that's true but then in the third example which we'll get on to in a minute the same Dynamic played out so I think that um kind of proves my my point really okay okay uh so let's 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 to Minimize the amount of time we were spending on on running the the survey we didn't have a grand prize we just had uh a lead magnet uh I think it was actually AI prompts for affiliate marketers it was different ones it was these were specific for affiliate marketing uh because again AI prompts they love them yeah uh we only got two only I say but we got 2,270 affiliate marketers respond to that that survey and by the way just for Context like our surveys are relatively long I think they're between 20 and 30
questions which is pretty long sometimes you can have people drop out so to have 2,270 people complete it is is still pretty good um given affiliate marketing you know it's not as hype as AI has been over the last last couple years cly yeah so so that that uh survey actually only got us 87 linking rout domains I say only that's still amazing still very good you know and some of these are like Super high that's the thing as well it's like people imagine that like you run a digital campaign and you get like 500
links or something like most digit PR campaigns I mean we'll talk about that in another episode but like you know they get 8 to 20 links or something and that's like the average like some of them take off and get 100 links but that's the exception not the rule like the 80 s is is better than most digital PR campaigns for example absolutely yeah Uh and and these are all the other thing about this is they're all very relevant links to us right because it's they're all talking about affiliate marketing so these are affiliate marketing
for so many a queries because probably because of this kind of marketing there a big help to for sure for sure yeah 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 like 20 or 30 different niches and we tried to 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
you know where which niches are people making the most amount of money in so you know education e-learning and 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 else had anything like this and and I think that that really helped us to get by n for example is kind of cool the thing as well is like again because I mean we can say the case that you was in pets and animals yeah and so like
we had all these beginners who copied the case studite in our in our course and then it was the lowest Revenue when I know for a fact I know like really big aite owners in in this market that make good money Yeah exactly so it was a bit scared yeah but you know we mentioned that literally right below the graph there's a survey limitation box that that explains that that that Dynamic so yeah okay so we got a fair amount of responses kind of the same as what we did before pretty much the same because
we but we maintain the lead magnet and that worked again which was good like it's quite a bit more than although we didn't have the grand priz so I'm not sure if that negatively Affected it or it's maybe just the less highp topic that that sort of got us less respondence or maybe just people had filled in two of our like another one so uh that could have had something to do with it but yeah okay so what next did anything go differently for this one no it's exactly the same we did a podcast on
it uh did a little bit of marketing did an Outreach campaign and then built the statistics post which we advertised as well I remember that like We kind of do this by default now when we make a statistics page we advertised and until it ranks decently and then we kind of stop but it's really a good way to Kickstart it but yeah so it has 3703 linking rout domains that static page which is not as much as the AI one which was 432 but it's also newer right it's it's been been out there for like
nine months less than the statistics one so yeah so it's like it kind of makes your point that basically putting the sources At the end of the section uh generates small links than 100% 100% yeah that's that's that's the way to do it's so funny because we criticize Google so much for doing this and essentially it's the best tactic for getting links yeah I mean that's why they do it right uh yeah yeah yeah I mean yeah it's interesting to be on the other side it gives you interest but like so that's pretty much 3
for3 did we run any any campaign like this that didn't work no okay so would You say it would work every time if you run it no absolutely not absolutely not so it's dependent on you being able to rank your statistics page right you can manually Outreach your survey if you do everything correct for that you're going to get links but if you if you don't rank your statistics post then how are people going to find you right you can pay for ads right that's one solution for that super low Dr um but if you're
a dr10 site trying to rank for AI Statistics like we don't even have it anymore right we've had it for like two years I think yeah it it kind of goes up and down a little bit but we need to update the data I think it's it's a bit out of date so we we might get rant to to doing that yeah I think it needs a bit of refresh now but I mean it's collect it's done its job honestly uh the thing as well that is interesting is like let's say I mean a marketing
sorry AI statistics I'm not sure we can hold This forever like it's it's competitive as hell now obviously it's like the hottest niche in the world uh and and it's pretty impressive that we've held these rankings for so long but let's say we never get it back like I still have a URL with 432 Link in rout domains uh it's like and so there's something that we call like 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 So
so like it's due for refresh I'm not going to do it but we have this like best AI writing tools page which rank still okay but honestly uh the content needs to be refreshed M um but if I know if I redirect this URL there like we instantly take back the number one spot and make money from that uh and so like these assets are like especially useful later on even if you can't maintain the rankings and 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 like you know if you redirect some people look at the links people update their sites Etc but I'm imagining like 300 links that I can point to any page that's semi- related so about AI I would say uh and and and we could make a lot of money because you almost get like an unfair Advantage like how do you build 300 backlinks to a best AI writing tool page like it's like legitimately without Paying a lot of money well you know one of the things we actually did
to help us rank that page the statistics page was we redirected another page we had about uh AI to it so we we ranked initially and then we went down uh after like a year or something and so we redirected the other one to there it went back up article I wrote about C using AI that got like I don't know like 80 links or something yeah and we redirected that and then that just got us number one Back for yeah that got us another 100 links or something it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy in yeah
it's like but it's quite interesting because it's like I think like people would imagine oh if it's not ranking after after two years then you fa no like your site Authority still benefits from that through your internal linking but also you can redirect these pages to what makes sense for you today provided it's semi related like I would not redirect That to a link building page for example sure uh I think that would lose a lot of value but if you do it in a relevant way that's super useful so I mean we've done that
on like a Dr 78 s let's say 75 when we started or something like that like do you think small size can do this as well yeah absolutely uh as I said the ser Sur uh you can if you just do the survey right and you just Outreach to to that you can get 50 to 100 links that which good which is amazing on its own So it's the ROI is already there just for the survey yeah ranking for statistics like it depends on the the the kind of angle you take the topic you take
uh obviously if you go for something super high level and there's all dr90 sites and the CDC ranking then no yeah it's complicated but if you go for like a really small subsection of that then you get less links from it but you can still Rank and you know make it work over time I think long tell Statistics Pages would make sense as well like I would not be afraid to go for like a 20 or 30 search per month so this is the bit that we didn't do right and I wish we did so
you can take uh let's say the link building uh survey you could take that data about no follow links and you could create an article about how many people pay for no follow links or just an article just no follow links what are no links and you could because you have this original data Which I guarantee you nobody else who's writing these articles has you you get such an advantage when it comes to to ranking for those and those can rank as well and get I think my problem is that is it's more likely to
have an AI overview answer for example sure so it's like I would say it's like I think it can get you links again where is where are AI overview is going to go to get the the source for that you with your original data yeah yeah if if you have Origal if people but the thing is like the power of the statistics page is people want to quote the original data whereas if you answer a question the the desire to quote and give a source is probably lower sure so I mean it's okay it's probably
still worth doing but I think it's you lose a little bit of efficienc you do there's diminishing returns but you get more mileage out of your campaign by by doing this okay when everyone starts doing this what do you Think happens it's the same as when everyone starts trying to rank on for keywords like what happens Google has 10 results at the moment on on page one if you're not one of those 10 you're you're not getting links you know you're you're not going to be successful with this so start now maybe as like the
the approach but yeah for sure lots of people will start doing this and it will become less effective uh over over time yeah I think it's as every other link building tactic In the history of the world has there's an early adopto advantage and the thing is like it's not like running a survey and creating original data is not something you just do or you give to a a lowend VA or something like that right so it's you know it takes people with some skills especially analyzing the data putting a decent post together Etc most
people don't do it well you have to make it interesting right if you just ask some random like do you like links Or you know like it's [ __ ] right but we we know because we're in that Niche like what is the interesting thing like how much are people really paying for links cuz nobody really knows at scale what that that number is but we found it yeah I do feel though it's like there's there the problem I mean the problem for me but the opportunity for others is that there's really nobody checking the
data everyone just eat it up uh and then you could say anything you could put None of the that's true about anything on the internet that's not specific to Sur I it's just I mean it's just I mean it means that you can be quite biased in this as well it means you can be sloppy and start still get results I guess that's what it tells you potentially yeah but I mean I think if people start calling you out for or your fake data or something like your reputation or credibility is is ruined right I
don't think it's ruined I don't think people Research when did people you research the reputation of sure sure sure but it's look yeah I know I know I know I I know some people want to run run their businesses and lives that way that's not I mean it's just uh it's like it's interesting to to push it basically uh okay I mean that's pretty much all I have is there anything else you want to add on this yeah yes we've actually well systematized this entire process in a lot more detail go we've Gone through every
aspect of planning research validation designing your survey analyzing the data doing the Outreach getting the links building the statistics B all of that uh we've put it into a step-by-step system which took ages by the way yeah um and and we incorporated a ton of of AI into that as well to to help speed up the the process uh and we're putting into a course which is going to be released in a few weeks time uh so yeah people should definitely Make sure they're subscribed to our email list Authority hacker.com subscribe uh or tune in
to the our next podcast as well where we're going to be talking about digital PR I because we've had some good success with digital PR now and we have in house yeah some stuff to share yeah yeah I I also want to say that this new course is going to be available for free to Auto hacker Pro members uh so if you're a pro member like you can expect that to drop for you At the same time uh free of charge basically so okay well we'll talk about digitalia in The Next Episode uh let's let
us know what you think about the inperson episode as well because we didn't mention that but yeah we actually tried We R to the studio we'll see how it goes yeah that was fun and in the next episode we'll talk about digitalia how we also buildings that way that's kind of a teaser for the upcoming course really I hope you enjoyed it and we'll See you in the next episode bye-bye thank you for joining us for today's episode of the aor hacker podcast if you enjoyed the content don't forget to subscribe to our show on
your favorite podcast platform now I have a quick question for you are you looking to learn how to build and monetize an audience if so we've got something special for you head over to Authority ha.com ssubscribe and join our email list by subscribing you'll get access to Exclusive content inside the tips and strategies that we don't share anywhere else you'll also be the first to know about our latest resources tools and techniques to build a success online business don't miss out on this opportunity to take your online presence to the next level remember that's .com/srobiyt
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