Neil Patel’s New Backlinking Strategy

Probably you already know how successful Neil Patel is, but if you haven’t heard of him, just by running a quick Google Search will reveal his notoriety.

If you ever downloaded anything from his site(s), neilpatel.com, you are probably receiving short email updates on his latest blogposts, podcasts or youtube interviews.

And he does write a lot – Neil Patel is a content creating killer machine who will
write a 2000+ data-driven-actionable blog post almost every day, attracting tens of thousands of visitors every month.

In March 2015, Neil started a venture in the nutrition niche and he shares his strategy on the quicksprout blog.
Starting from content creation and Facebook ads ending with SEO tips, all steps (well, most of them) were revealed almost every month -> here.

A Message From Neil Patel

I’m a long time subscriber to Neil’s blogs and the other day I received a nice “personalized” message from Neil himself .
(Personalized: the Autoresponder selects my first name from the list 😉 )

Subject line:

“Bela I need a favor… can you help? (plus some good news)”

Of course I want to help, everyone wants to help in a way or another… you feel good about yourself. Not to mention that Neil’s posts already helped a ton of people (including myself), so I want to give something back.

The first two sentences hit me in the head (you are being messaged by a pro copywriter):

“Hey Bela,
Pause for a second and imagine something…Imagine how incredible it would feel to have a blog that got over 1 million visitors a month. All without spending a dime on ads. What would that do for your life?”

Really?

With that kind of traffic anyone could quit their 9 to 5 job.

Obviously I read on.

And guess what?

Neil is asking for a blog article or youtube recording about how his articles and advice helped me or others.

As a reward for my efforts he is giving away a private webinar training as a free gift.

Of course I want the training!

Wouldn’t you want this: “1,000,000 Visitors a Month and Counting: How to Create a Blog That Doesn’t Suck!”?

Without actually cloning a website?
The webinar will have much more value if I make an effort in advance.

So I start thinking on the article even though I could get the webinar just by simply replying to his message.

and than it hit me…

What is Neil Patel Up To?

In Brian Dean’s Skyscaper Technique there are three basic steps:

Find linkable content

Create a better designed, more detailed, more readable and updated content
Reach out to the people who link to the original content

If you notice, it’s mainly about content.

Neil’s backlinking strategy involves content creation (obviously) and has 3 steps as well:

Build a list (Neil skipped this step as he already has one)
Create wow content (a highly valued webinar or a PDF)

Ask your list to link to your page(s) in exchange for your wow content. (or give it away for free to build more trust)

It’s like a content upgrade but in this case you are not getting an email address and build a list, instead you’re getting a backlink which is much more valuable SEO wise.

So let’s calculate how many backlinks Neil will get out of this campaign (it’s really a guess)

List Size	100,000
Open Rate	40% (40,000)
Response Rate (free giveaway)	20% (20,000)
Backlinks Generated, Success Rate:	2-3% (2,500)

Not too shabby if you ask me, but you have to take into consideration the money invested in the webinar.

For Neil to find out the worth of the backlink, he needs to divide the cost of the webinar with the total number of generated backlinks.

My educated guess is that it’ll be somewhere around $10.

This strategy is recommended if you already have an email list, making this pitch part of an Autoresponder sequence after you’ve built a relationship with your readers.

Without a doubt Neil will publish the case study about this link building strategy so if you want to be kept in the loop, sign up at neilpatel.com.