How Many Natural Links Do You Earn?

[ChoChauRice]

Hello Mozzers,

This is a bit of an open ended question and I don't think any one person is going to be the same. I have recently seen the light in my link building practices and I am trying to get a feel for what to expect in terms of natural link acquisition in an effective content marketing strategy. My question is how many natural links do you generally find yourself earning after the first 12 months of content creation/placement with a new website/industry?

I know this is going to be a question with a multitude of different answers. I look forward to your valuable insight as always!

[SurgeStream]

It depends by what you mean by "natural links".  If by "natural links" you mean that you don't do anything else except create content and sit back and wait for the links given users that like your content on a brand new website, then you might be hard pressed to get any at all.  Now, if you created absolutely stellar content, and again, you just sit back and wait for links, you might get some over time.  It depends on how competitive the niche is and how easy it is to rank for the keywords you are targeting.

Now, if you do some link earning by performing outreach to your stellar content, then the sky is the limit in terms of link acquisition over the course of a year.

[ChoChauRice]

Hi Kevin and thanks for your reply,

I suppose a was a little vague in my question. In a fairly low-competition area, with outreach and manual acquisition being performed, how many links do you think are normally generated by users and interaction in around 12 months?

Thanks again for your insight!

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi there,

I hate to say this, because it's not a great answer, but it really does depend on a bunch of things.

Generating links naturally i.e. links as a result of someone linking to you without you asking, is generally quite difficult unless you have a very, very good piece of content. But when this does happen, I've seen content pieces get anything from 10 - 10,000 links with the majority of them being natural. On the other hand, I've worked on content pieces where I've had to work really hard to get 10 links using outreach.

Sometimes, you work really hard and get nothing!

If you're just starting out on this path, you're unlikely to get links naturally from day 1 and will need to work hard to get links via outreach. But you should find that over time, it becomes easier and eventually you get to a point where you're not having to scrap for every single link. It isn't easy, but certainly possible.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy