The Skyscraper Technique is the brainchild of Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko. The first time he used this technique, his website witnessed double the traffic in no more than two weeks. The technique is named Skyscraper as it has the potential to create 10x the value of competition.
What is the Skyscraper Technique?
Briefly, the technique is all about finding the right and popular content, creating a better copy of it, and getting backlinks naturally as well as after reaching out to a targeted audience. That is exactly how this technique is so popular. You are taking the tallest building that exists, adding a few more floors to it, and it is sorted.
Luckily, you need not hire too many engineers to build a new team merely for creating Skyscraper posts. Only a handful of people can do it if they know the technique well.
What makes the Skyscraper technique so popular?
Overall, this technique uses a proven and strategic content creation framework, which allows you to achieve higher Google rankings and get more number of blog readers. That is exactly what you need to build a profitable site and business.
How to Use the Skyscraper Technique to Build Quality Links
Following a step-by-step guide, you can build a Skyscraper technique to acquire quality backlinks and create exceptional content.
Step#1: List of High-Quality Sharable Content Ideas
The first and foremost Skyscraper technique is to ensure you find link-worthy content – that is content with a proven track record of excellent performance in a specific niche.
For instance, if an article, blog post, infographic or video in your niche is performing exceptionally well, it means that piece has great potential to attract more and more visitors, perhaps in millions. Shift your focus to “viral ideas.”
How would you find sharable content in your niche? What do you need for that?
You can use several blogging tools for Skyscraper technique such as Buzzsumo (for highly sharable topic ideas) and MoZ (for top pages with more links to the competitor sites).
There are some more handy tools to find brilliant content ideas in any niche, such as Twitter and Topsy. While Twitter is a powerful social platform for microblogging, Topsy is a free tool that shows you what is trending and the articles getting more comments and retweets.
Step#2: Create Exceptional Content Based on Your Ideas
Once you are ready with the list of most popular topic ideas, you have to create unique and attractive content for best results. The idea is to create exceptional and epic content in order to get exceptional results from this unique SEO technique. If your readers do not benefit from the content, or they do not find it useful, you cannot get good results with the Skyscraper Technique. Without quality content, your business won’t be noticed and link to your niche posts won’t be shared.
So, what to do to make sure your content performs better?
Step#3: Contact the Right People for Links
Are you ready with a brilliant post? Then, it’s time to out your Skyscraper tactic into action.
The right time to contact bloggers and webmasters might take interest in sharing your post. However, before going ahead, bear these things in mind:
You can communicate through emails or webmail, as you prefer.
Here, the key is to find out the right kind of people who would take interest in promoting or linking your content to get rewards from the same. Here, you can use tools like BuzzSumo, SEMRush or Ahrefsto spot websites having links to your competitor’s articles. In fact, you can have an entire directory of targeted people with email addresses for fast and effective communication.
Step#4: Pitch to your Influencers and Follow Up
For a guaranteed success rate, you have to send “personalized” emails and messages to your influencers. In this case, the one-size-fits-all pitch does not work; influencers can easily spot such mundane efforts. So, here’s what you should do:
Create personalized emails covering all the information on influencer’s content. Include the real value you are willing to provide them and to your audience linking to your blog. Your cold emails can do it right.
Follow up, always. As per the USC Viterbi School of Engineering study, 90% of relies are sent within one or two days of receiving email. Hence, if you don’t get a response within two days, you probably won’t receive it ever, unless of course, you follow up. The 3-3-7 formula works well here. You would be following up there in two weeks, twice in the first week and once in the second week. If done properly, chances are that you would get 10% to 20% positive response.