Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is what is a linkable asset or a link magnet? I like to call it a linkable asset, but I think as some people do call it a link magnet, so that's what we're going to talk about today, and its importance in your overall SEO strategy.
But before we begin of course, this is Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea. I want to introduce a tea we had today. It is a recurring tea that we've had, although I'm a little nervous, because I'm running really low on it. It's from DAVIDsTEA [inaudible 00:00:35]. I actually first tried this tea on this YouTube series, and so it has kept coming back, which is a good sign. That means that I kind of like it. So thank you to my housemate who bought this, not technically for us; she bought too much and then decided to gift me some or the house some, because there was too much.
If you're curious about how it tastes, it tastes a little bit like toasted brown rice. I have the wrong teapot. It's actually this one. Sorry, there you go. That's the right one. It kind of tastes like toasted brown rice. It's kind of soothing in a sense. I know that might sound a little bit weird, but toasted brown rice in a green tea, you'd be surprised. It's pretty calming. On a cold day or a cloudy day, like this one, it can be a little nice.
But anyways, let's jump on into what is a linkable asset or link magnet. When it comes to link building, link building is inherently ... It requires a lot of labor in the sense that even in the different stages of link building, you might have to go to different directories and other websites to request a link to be added to your website, and you're not always successful. In addition, if you're doing [inaudible 00:01:46] or thought leadership, you have to go out there, pitch people and then write an article for them. So that tends to have a lot of labor involved as well.
In addition, if you're doing a lot of sponsorships or you're going out there and guest speaking in person, there's a lot of manual labor out there too, because you have to go in person to see these people, right? So link building in itself requires a lot of labor, but what a linkable asset as link magnet does, it does have labor still involved, but it does skew your link building so that it can almost be its own organic system. What that means is you have a linkable asset, and what we mean by linkable assets, you have something on your site or something in your company that people would be willing to link to.
That's why it's also called a link magnet, because magnets attract things of the same positive or negative side? I don't remember anymore. I'm not a science person. I think it's they attract the opposite side, and then they go away from the same side. Regardless, link magnet or linkable asset generally means that you have something on your website that people are willing to link to. And when they say willing, it's even to the point where you don't even need to ask.
Common examples of the past that were really popular in the late 2000s and early 2010s was web tools. A lot of companies would create these free tools on their website that you could use, and therefore people would be stoked about it because there's these free tools, and they would be willing to link to them in their own blog posts, or when they become guest posters, they would talk about these free tools so that the general audience could do these different things. That's an example of a linkable asset.
Other common linkable assets were quizzes, so this is very à la Buzzfeed back in the day, where Buzzfeed would have these quizzes like, "Oh, which Disney princess are you?" And people would be willing to link to that. And anything that I would say is relatively creative that really catches people's eye are generally linkable assets or very functional in the sense like it's a free tool.
There isn't exactly a specific rule that says, "This is a linkable asset." There is no academic SEO ruler. The best kind of measure if it's a linkable asset is its true performance. So there are many campaigns that people will have created for linkable assets that don't end up becoming linkable assets because it just didn't catch on. Others don't even know that they're creating one, and it becomes a linkable asset.
I'm going to do a quick shout out for a linkable asset that I generally like. I follow a website called Mei Leaf, and they have a YouTube series about tea, and they have really showed me how to enjoy my tea. One of the linkable assets that they've created is a Mei Leaf brewing guide. You'd be surprised how much I use it. It's that different teas require different temperatures and different brewing times, and they can be ... The tea leaves can be infused. That means hot water poured in a certain amount of times. It's hard to track every single tea leaf and the amount, so that brewing guide is something I save and I use. And though I have not linked to it yet in any of my work, if I were to become a tea enthusiast and write about it more, I would link to that brewing guide because obviously it's a great tool for me and I want to share it.
A linkable asset or link magnet is something that I would say you get into the higher echelon of link building. If you can do it, it will really pay off because it scales really well. The problem is it is difficult, because you need to be creative and vie for attention. A lot of times when you have linkable assets, you need to send cold emails out to let people know that it exists. You need to post on your social media, and there's just these different ways. You have to promote it to make sure people are aware of it, unless you already have the audience.
So generally how I treat a linkable asset or a link magnet is before I go into that kind of link building strategy, I build tiers into our clients. We do low-hanging link building, which is going to directories and just making sure that they're on there. And then the second layer is we build thought leadership, and then that way they continually can write for other publications. And then third is once we have those two machines going and they're self-sustaining based on those two, we can then build on top of that with a linkable asset.
Linkable assets can sometimes be all or nothing. I don't want to say all or nothing, but they require a lot of research time and development. And if it doesn't work, it's sometimes going to be two weeks to a month's worth of work that didn't go anywhere. That's why I like to have these lower tiers for it before we get there, so that even if they fail, we can fall back on the already link-building machine that we have.
So that's what a linkable asset and a link magnet is. I would encourage you when you're doing your link building to always be on the lookout for those opportunities. They can come up and in my experience, the most successful you will be is how in tune with the general market you are, and how creative you can be or how functional you can be with the tool. And in addition how high in quality can you execute on it. That's a really big deal for being able to create linkable assets that will automatically and organically drive links to your site without you doing too much labor.
That's a little on what a linkable asset or link magnet is. I hope that helped either open up a new world of link building for you or defined something that maybe you've seen before, but you just weren't sure what it was. I'm going to go ahead and enjoy my first cup of tea for the day. I'm starving for this. And here's my brown rice tea. If you guys liked the video, please like and subscribe, and I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks. Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's good.