I’ve seen it happen plenty of times on the Brick Marketing website—one lowly link on a popular industry site or blog can drive hundreds of visitors in a few short hours…and deliver a steady trickle of traffic for months to come. The exact thing happened when we did an interview with link building guru Eric Ward, which he was kind enough to link to from the homepage of his website. That one link sent 800 visitors in a single day! When it comes to link building, that’s exactly the kind of links you want to build—those that can generate real traffic. In my experience, when you build links that drive visitors you typically are building/earning the kinds of links that Google is more apt to reward.

I especially love being able to pull out a great referral link from a client’s Google Analytics account and show them how having a consistent stream of content can lead to valuable citations and drive traffic. This happened with one client of ours when a post they had written months prior was picked up by the local Fox news channel in their hometown. That one referral link back to an evergreen blog post sent 335 visitors on one day. This is a perfect example of how your SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing work today can pay off 10 times over somewhere down the line. It’s important to remember that SEO is an incredibly long term marketing strategy so it can take a bit of time to really get the ball rolling and gain momentum. This particular client has been blogging consistently for about 2 years and in the last few months they’ve really seen the quality of their referral links pick up. There was even a link from a popular Forbes blog back to one of their posts! That referral link sent even more traffic than this Fox news link.

What’s important to remember is that great referral links don’t just come out of nowhere. In order to earn those “editorial” and “natural” links that Google is more likely to reward you have to make your brand as visible and as trusted as you can. People want to link to relevant and useful sources, not just some site that exists somewhere in the recesses of the Internet. This means investing strongly in your content marketing campaign, which is one of the best ways brands can build their reputation and authority over time. What information can you give to your target audience? What value do you add to your industry? The whole point of creating and promoting content is not just to build links, but connect your brand to your target audience at the moment when they need you the most.

Newer sites have an uphill battle ahead of them when it comes to content marketing, no doubt. A few big industry sites might claim the lion’s share of referral links from other sites in your niche simply because they have been around the longest and are the most trusted. But that doesn’t mean you can’t climb your way to the top given enough time and great content! Great referral links come in time as a side-effect of your SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing efforts.