Wellness people will cringe at this...
But the first I do in the morning is squint into my phone and check my emails.
Sorry, but I'm not sorry - it's one of the only things that can drag my ass out of bed at 5am.
This morning I woke up to an email from ClickUp's (yes THAT ClickUp) Editorial Director saying they'd featured me on their blog🥳
That also means a backlink from a DA 60 site, my best backlink to date.
But let me back up a little...
What's a backlink?
What does DA mean?
And why am I so happy about this?
Wtf is link building for SEO?
First off, what's a backlink?
A backlink is simply one website linking "back" to your website.
Let's say you wrote a blog post for someone else and as part of that they included a little author bio about you and linked to your website.
That's a backlink.
Building links to your site is a very important part of SEO and to understand why we need to go back in the way-back machine to the days when Google was known as "Backrub".
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The nerds behind Backrub faced a problem: how were they going to ensure that users searching for information got the best information from all there was to choose from?
They decided to take an academia inspired approach.
Go back to university with me for a second.
When we wrote essays we would have to cite our sources, correct? But we wouldn't just cite any old nonsense, they had to be of real academic value, peer-reviewed studies and the like.
Google borrowed this approach when ranking pages on their search engine. If a page had more links pointing to it, it was as though the internet was giving it a vote of confidence as a trust-worthy source of information.
Thus, backlinks became a ranking factor.
This concept is still crucial to SEO today, because the more links pointing to your site = more authority and trustworthiness in the eyes of Google.
These links contribute to what's known as Domain Authority (DA), which is an unofficial metric used to determine how authoritative a site is.
It's based on a scale of 0-100 and the closer you are to 100, the better chance your site has of ranking for more competitive keywords.
But even a DA of around 30-40 is pretty damn respectable for the average site.
And getting links from sites with a high DA makes you look really, really good.
Think about it.
Imagine I land on a videographer's website and see that he has a testimonial from head of production at the BBC, I'd be pretty impressed.
Links are basically the equivalent to this, if a really trustworthy and authoritative site is linking to you, then damn - you must be good for it!
This concept is known as passing on link equity (or link juice if ya nasty) meaning you basically get some of that authority passed on to your site if they link to you.
You might be thinking great! Gimme some of them links!
But building those types of links takes a ton of effort, outreach and money (yes people sell links all the damn time - looking at you Forbes writers).
So how can you get these types of backlinks without doing endless outreach and emptying your bank account?
Enter my backlink from ClickUp
Now this is just one of many, many ways to get high DA backlinks, but I love it because it's super easy.
Software companies in particular are falling over themselves to promote their users and how much better off they are now that they use said software.
I struggle to find a software company who doesn't have a "user in the spotlight" type section of their blog.
But instead of sending a cold email to the editorial lead, I turned to Twitter because it's harder to ignore your users on a public social channel and I knew ClickUp were super engaged on Twitter.
I wrote a Twitter thread saying that when I first got ClickUp I couldn't find any use cases for copywriting, so I built my own workflow. I broke it down in a thread and ended by asking, "Hey ClickUp - who do I need to talk to to turn this into a guest blog post?"
And they actually replied and started following me!
But I was worried they might forget about little old me and my proposal...
So I sent an email to my list (YOU🖤) asking you to comment on the thread about whether or not you'd be interested in hearing about how I use ClickUp to help with my copywriting workflows.
And you followed-through😢we got quite a few responses from eager copywriters (thank you).
So it was no surprise that their editorial coordinator Leila actually did send me an email to get the ball rolling.
They sent me some questions about how I use ClickUp, we fleshed it out a little, I sent over some photos and done!
(Okay it literally took weeks but there wasn't much effort on my part - they were just super busy which is understandable).
Now I've got myself a great new backlink from a DA 60 site and I got to be featured by a software company that I genuinely love (seriously, if you're not on ClickUp what are you doing? It's like if Asana and Notion had a baby, except better).
Keep an eye out for me next week because we'll be chatting GA4 now that universal analytics is sunsetting - make sure you don't lose your data!
Thanks for being here,
Kerry
PS did you know ClickUp is way, way cheaper than Asana and Trello and has far more useful features? Give it a whirl today (affiliate link).