Think about all of the hard work you put into creating your content. Don’t let all of that hard work go to waste.
Rather than just sitting back and hoping that it drives traffic to your website, you can use your best content to build backlinks via link roundups.
Link roundups need to be part of your overall link building strategy. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this tactic, we’ll explain why this will be so beneficial for your brand.
Let’s start with the basics. What’s a link roundup?
Simply put, these are weekly, daily, or monthly curated lists of the best content in a particular industry. The reason why this is a dream for anyone building links is because the sole purpose of these pages it to link out to other websites. This means those sites are more than willing to share links.
Here’s an example of what a link roundup looks like from Big Apple Media.
This particular roundup has three categories:
- Marketing
- Freelancing
- Design
Big Apple Media posted their favorite blogs and tutorials in each of those categories for the week. As you can see from what’s highlighted in the marketing section, Quick Sprout was one of those featured posts.
Since roundups typically contain high-quality content, you’ll likely see a spike in website traffic when your links get featured on one of these pages. That traffic is an added bonus to the SEO value of having backlinks on authority websites.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a novice or veteran with link building. This guide will tell you everything you need to know about using link roundups to get links and drive traffic to your website.
Create High-Quality Content
The first step of building links with roundups is often overlooked.
Other SEO experts will just dive right into finding link roundups and sending your pitch. But without high-quality content, you’re just going to be wasting your efforts.
Remember, link roundups are curated lists of the best content in your niche. Sites that have roundups aren’t going to link out to just anyone. The content that gets posted in these roundups is a direct reflection of the website sharing the outbound link.
Think about it. The blogger, webmaster, or site owner is basically telling their audience, “these are the best industry-related pages that I’ve come across this week.”
So if a visitor clicks a link and it turns out to be uninformative or poor quality, they are going to be unhappy with the roundup that referred them. On the flip side, if they land on a page that was extremely helpful and well-written, they’ll keep coming back to read future link roundups. People who run link roundups know this, so they always prioritize quality.
Here’s something else to keep in mind. You’re not going to be pitching your homepage to a link roundup. You’ll be pitching things like blog posts, case studies, infographics, or something else that’s high quality and highly relevant.
Be honest with yourself. How good is your content?
If your blog posts are just stuffed with keywords and made for bots as opposed to real people, your content could probably use some improvement.
You need to produce better content before you even think about contacting the host of a link roundup. Here’s why.
Let’s say you try to get away with submitting sub-par links to a webmaster that has weekly roundups in your niche. It gets rejected.
No big deal, right? You’ll just try again next week.
Well, this webmaster already associates your name, brand, and website with content that doesn’t fit their quality standards. You’ll have a higher chance of getting rejected again in the future even if you submit better content.
When you’re creating content for roundups, we highly recommend writing long-form content.
A recent study from Orbit Media shows that bloggers report stronger results when their content has a higher word count.
Publishing frequency is also a factor. To get featured in a weekly roundup, you’ll need to create high-quality content on a regular basis.
Research from that same study shows that 70% of bloggers get stronger results when they publish content more than once per day. This compares to just 32% and 17.5% of bloggers who distribute content on a weekly and monthly basis, respectively.
Plus, the more content you have, the easier it will be for you to be featured on multiple relevant link roundups in your industry.
Find Link Roundups
Now that you have content that’s worthy of being shared, it’s time to find websites in your niche that post link roundups.
This is going to to take a bit of manual effort on your end, so it’s important that you find a way to stay organized. We suggest using a spreadsheet to keep track of everything.
This is a very basic example of how you can start to set up your spreadsheet. You can make this as in-depth as you’d like by adding other columns for things like domain authority or page rank.
Without something like this for organizational purposes, it will be nearly impossible for you to keep track of your status and current communications with various websites.
When you find a new roundup that you want to pitch, simply add the URL to the document. Once you have your spreadsheet set up, these are the best ways to find relevant roundups on the web.
Google Advanced Search Operators
The first place to start your search should be Google. Just make sure you’re using advanced search operators to narrow the results.
Not every link roundup will have the same name. Instead of trying to find a needle in a haystack, stick to searches that will yield the most results. Here are some examples to get you started:
- “Keyword” + “link roundup”
- “Keyword” + “weekly roundup”
- “Keyword” + “weekly link”
- “Keyword” + inurl:roundup
- “Keyword” + intitle:roundup
- “Keyword” + best posts of the week
- “Keyword” + best blogs of the week
As you can see, all of these searches have slight variations that will end up giving you different results. Then you’ll just need to scan through Google to determine if the link roundups are worth pursuing.
When you’re doing this, you want to make sure that you’re finding link roundups that are active. Otherwise, you could be wasting your time pitching to sites that are no longer doing roundups.
So click on the Tools button and narrow the results to Past month. Here’s an example of what this looks like when searching for link roundups related to marketing.
Look at the dates of the top results. All of these are recent link roundups in the marketing industry.
Each one of these websites can be added to the spreadsheet.
Continue going through the results and changing the search variations for other advanced operators. You can also add words and phrases like:
- Monthly
- Daily
- Top posts
- Best of the week
- Friday
These are all commonly found in link roundups.
Search Your Favorite Websites
Here’s the thing. All websites have different names for their link roundups. It’s not always going to be as straightforward as “Marketing Weekly Link Roundup.”
It could be something like, “the daily buzz” or the “weekly review.” Here’s an example from Kikolani.
This portion of the site is no longer active, but for years, she referred to her link roundups as “Fetching Friday.”
A name like this makes it extremely difficult to find using the searches that we’ve already outlined.
That’s why we suggest making a list of some of your favorite and most popular websites within your niche. Ideally, all of the sites on your list will be highly authoritative.
Then you can go through each one individually to see if you can spot any link roundups.
You can also refer back to the advanced search operators, using the “site” search.
For example, you could search for things like:
- “weekly” + site:favoritesite.com
- “Friday” + site:authoritysite.com
- “Best posts” + site:industrysite.com
These types of searches can make it easier for finding link roundups that have unique or uncommon names.
Pitch Your Content
Once you have your list of websites that have active link roundups, it’s time for you to contact them and pitch your content.
It’s crucial that you document all of the communication to stay organized. The last thing you want to do is send duplicate messages to the same site or forget to reach out to someone altogether.
The best way to make sure your pitch is heard is by finding the appropriate contact information for the site.
All websites should have some type of general contact form. But that’s not always the best way to get your message across.
Depending on the size of the company, those inquiries aren’t always sent to the right department. In a perfect world, you want to find the email address for the person who is in charge of the roundup.
For example, we found a roundup on Robb Digital Marketing that’s run by Tamara Robb.
We weren’t able to find her email address listed anywhere on the website. All we saw was a general contact form. So we ran a search for her name on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Here is the contact information she has listed on her Facebook page. Tamara doesn’t have an email address listed, but there are still other ways to reach her.
In this case, it’s not the end of the world that her email address is unlisted. It’s clear that she is the owner of this website, so she’ll likely see your message even if it’s submitted through the general contact form.
Then you just need to fill in your spreadsheet.
Once contact has been made, you could add something like “Sent message via Skype” with the date to the status column.
It’s in your best interest to build a relationship with these people. Once they’re familiar with your brand and website, it increases your chances that they’ll keep posting you in their roundups moving forward.
Just don’t send them a pitch every time you publish a new blog.
Make sure your pitch is personalized and doesn’t appear to be spammy. Let the person know that you’re actually familiar with their link roundups. Here’s an example:
Hey [insert name]!
I really enjoy your weekly marketing roundups. I just published this piece of content that I think would be perfect for your “advanced tutorials” section. [link to content]
It’s a detailed guide that includes a step-by-step process on how to do XYZ.
Let me know what you think! I’d be happy to share your roundup on my social media platforms. Thanks for the consideration!
This is short, sweet, direct, and to the point. You can pitch and describe your content in just a couple of lines. The example we used even adds a little bit of incentive in terms of social sharing. Just tread carefully if you’re going to use that approach. You don’t want it to be perceived as a link scheme in the eyes of Google.
But a message like this is a great way to start the initial communication with a roundup blog. Once you’re featured, it’s going to be much easier to communicate with that person in the future.
Conclusion
Link roundups are a great way to drive traffic to your website while simultaneously building backlinks from authority websites.
In order to be successful with this strategy, you need to make sure that you prioritize high-quality content.
Use Google advanced search operators and Twitter’s advanced search query to find roundups in your niche. You can even manually search for roundups on your favorite websites, in case those pages have uncommon names that wouldn’t be found with other methods.
Keep an organized spreadsheet to track all of the sites you’re in communication with. Then send a quick content pitch, following a similar format to the example used above.
Quick Sprout has been featured in multiple link roundups. So we definitely practice what we preach. Your site can have the same success if you use this guide as a reference for your link building strategy.