How To Get Backlinks in the Age of AI: A to Z Guide

#5. Website trust factors

Another important factor in whether a site is a good backlink source is how “legitimate” it is. Is it a real website with a cause or goal, or does it solely exist to sell backlinks? To evaluate a website’s trust factors, look at things like:

Now that we’ve explained how to evaluate backlinks let’s talk about the practice of link-building.

The Give And Take Of Link Building And How To Find Backlink Prospects

First things first, let’s talk about something a bit controversial:

“Is it OK to pay for backlinks?”

Yes, yes, it is. According to the Authority Hackers 2023 survey, 74.3% of link builders pay for links. In case you forgot — it’s 2023. Just about everyone with a blog knows about the importance of backlinks. This means that a simple “Hey! I made this cool article. Can you link to me for free?” email just doesn’t work anymore. When you reach out to someone with the intention of convincing them to link to you, the only thing they care about is: “What’s in it for me?”

So, what can you do instead? Ideally, you should offer something in exchange, such as:

Now, how do you find people to reach out to so they can link to you? This is where prospecting comes in.

How to Find Backlink Prospects

Prospecting is about 50% of a successful link-building campaign. Reach out to the wrong prospect, and they’ll never link to you. Here’s what a rock-solid prospecting process looks like:

#1. Make a list of keywords related to your adjacent niches. 

If you’re in the weight loss industry, for example, such niches would include: 

And so on.

#2. Ensure that the keywords are long-tail. 

If you’re going to pick a competitive keyword, it’ll mainly be larger websites that won’t link to you. For example, if you google something like “lose weight,” you’ll see sites like Healthline, CDC, Medical News Today, and other major publications coming up first.

These sites will likely not link to you. If you google “lose weight without cardio,” on the other hand, you’ll get a list of much better prospects:

#3. Split your campaigns by keywords. 

This allows you to personalize your outreach emails much better. For example, with "weight loss without cardio," you can send hundreds of personalized emails using a SINGLE template because the template will be accurate for each of those bloggers.

#4. Gather the prospects.

Once you've defined the keywords, you must gather prospects in a spreadsheet. There are two ways you can go about this. Ideally, you’ll want to use a link-building software like Pitchbox to do your prospecting for you.

This eliminates the need for VAs and manual prospecting. You simply input your keywords, and the tool automatically generates hundreds of prospects that fit your criteria:

You can then launch your link-building campaign straight out of Pitchbox, centralizing your link-building operations in one tool.

The other option is to prospect manually, which will be more labor-intensive. The process here is as follows:

Now that we’ve covered prospecting let’s talk about the other important part of a link-building campaign: email personalization and outreach copy.

How to Write Email Outreach Copy That Gets You Backlinks

You need to know that personalization doesn’t have to be hard. Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to mention something unique and ultra-specific in each and every blog post. The key here is solid campaign segmenting.

If all 150 of your prospects wrote about losing weight without cardio, it’s easy to personalize your campaign in bulk. This is where ChatGPT can give you a hand. And no — you shouldn’t use ChatGPT to write outreach emails for you. The output will not be very good. Instead, you can use AI to write niche-related puns, jokes, and other openers to come across as authentic.

For bloggers in the gardening industry, emails like this help you come across as someone passionate about the topic (and not a greedy SEO asking for a backlink). Once you’ve got the intro down, make sure to also include something worthwhile in your email. As in what you can offer in return.

Obviously, this will vary depending on the industry, how competitive it is, and so on. But typically, it’s as follows.

For B2B websites:

For B2C websites:

And finally, some offers that I’ve seen perform well include:

Key Takeaways

Remember, link-building is all about building long-term relationships. So, put anyone who replies to you in a spreadsheet of people you’ve collaborated with. Over time, this will allow you to build backlinks by brokering partnerships and exchanges.

The more relationships you build and the more give-and-takes you do, the more leverage you gain to build quality backlinks that deliver results.