9 Linkable Assets That Work

If you’re looking for a way to get more links for your site, try linkable assets. Linkable assets are something that someone could easily share on social media or their blog with the goal of getting more eyes on your content.

These are usually images, infographics, videos, gifs, slideshows, etc. but they can be just about anything that is easy to share on any popular platform – images being the most popular type of linkable asset by far.

In this article, we look at:

• What linkable assets are
• The benefits of creating linkable assets
• The different types of linkable assets
• How to create linkable assets

At the end of this article, you’ll be able to create a linkable asset that helps grow your backlink profile with backlinks from relevant, valuable websites in your niche.

What Are Linkable Assets?

Linkable assets are something that you can create to use as an asset or an addition to your blog post or article that can act as both a promotional resource (your own) AND as something that people could share on their social media, which will drive traffic to your content.

For example, let’s say you publish an article with some amazing data visualizations in it. You could make those visualizations into stand-alone images and create “infographic” versions of it (a series of graphics merged together).

You could also make a video version of the blog post for different platforms like YouTube and LinkedIn. Or you could just use gifs of charts combined with quotes from the blog post itself.

Then, when other people see this unique content, they will likely include it in their own articles and link back to you as the source. Linkable assets can be used in conjunction with outsourcing link building, or as a stand-alone strategy.

Benefits of Creating Linkable Content

The benefits of creating link-worthy linkable assets are clear when you look at some statistics for 2017. According to recent data from Unbounce, sites with images receive eight times more clicks than non-image sites. Adding video to this mix makes it ten times more effective.

Linkable content is powerful because it gives you the ability to build links and use social shares and social media channels like Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest to promote your content to generate links.

One advantage of linkable assets is that they can help increase your content’s exposure without any major modifications to your website or budget and secure a high number of links in a relatively short time frame.

Linkable assets are also important because they can be used as a creation that you could just share with others. Say you’re building an Instagram account, using Pinterest ads, or sharing content on Twitter. You could simply create a linkable asset and place it in the photo description together with a couple of hashtags.

Where the benefits of linkable assets really become apparent is the cost-effective nature of how they can secure you backlinks.

Backlink building with guest post outreach, editorial backlinks, press release backlinks, and other types of backlinks, such as contextual backlinks, is time and, in many cases, financially intensive. When you create linkable content, you’ve created an evergreen asset on your website that you own, and if people want to reference or use it, they must acknowledge your work and your website with a backlink.

This means you can get backlinks for as long as your linkable asset remains popular, relevant or trending.

9 Types of Linkable Assets

There are different types of linkable assets, each with target audiences and link relevance to different industries. Deciding which types of linkable asset to create will determine on who you’re targeting, what you want them to do, and what industry your brand or company is in.

Considering different link-building metrics and where linkable assets fit into your overall link-building plan will help you prioritize different strategies.

1. Case studies

Case studies are reports in which you analyze an example of something someone has already done, with the goal of achieving a desired outcome. They are designed to highlight a fact and demonstrate how one action or effort conducted by a third party had a certain outcome or effect.

When done correctly, case studies are amongst the most powerful linkable assets because they show clear examples that other can follow for best practices, or can also demonstrate the opposite of how not to do something.

2. Original research and studies

Amongst the most time-intensive linkable assets to create, original research and studies are probably where the most value can come from when done correctly.

Original research is based on the scientific protocol of testing to verify or reject a hypothesis, and if you’re conducting research on something people what to know, and come up with a new statistic, then you can receive hundreds if not thousands of new backlinks.

Original research can be done for any industry, but as an example, one great example of original research conducted in the digital and email marketing space involved signing up to thousands of website’s newsletters, seeing how many newsletters each website sent per month, then correlating that with monthly traffic to the website.

This process is time-intensive, but relatively simple, and provides actionable insight into how to run an effective email and newsletter marketing campaign.

3. Tools, calculators & lead magnets

Creating something people in your industry want to use and offer to their clients is another fantastic way of getting people to link to your site for free.

This method might be more of a financial investment if you’re not a coder, but getting someone to create and code a tool like a basic calculator from inches to centimeters or a tool such as our free domain authority checker can get people linking to your site.

4. List posts or listicles

A link post is a post that lists a bunch of different websites and the content on those websites. You don’t have to write much or anything at all. Usually, you just include a few sentences as a teaser for the content, but you could also be completely silent about it and just share a link with some sort of description to encourage clicks.

5. Trends and statistics

Trends and statistics are very similar to original research, as they are often the desired output of an original dataset analysis.

Suppose you can come up with, and prove, a trend or show how you got insightful statistics on a topic relevant to your industry. In that case, people within your industry will want to know about it, and share that statistic in their own content as it shows they are also current and up-to-date with the trends going on right now.

The subject matter will determine how successful any original statistics you come up with will be as a linkable asset.

6. Infographics, GIFographics & “Map-o-graphics”

Infographics, GIFographics and map-o-graphics share a few things in common: they’re all visual representations of data that you can present to your audience and most importantly: they’re all linkable assets.

Infographics and gifs are the most popular types of linkable assets. I like GIFs because they don’t require any styling or editing when they get shared so you can just use them as is when sharing on social media.

Infographics usually contain data in charts and diagrams, sometimes also with text. When someone shares an infographic on their blog or social media platform, it’s usually because they want to help others understand the concept explained within the infographic, not just because it looks good.

7. Awards & Rankings

Awards and rankings are similar to listicles and original research, where you collate data on relevant industry information and grade them according to various rankings metrics.

How you list these is up to you, but the important thing is that you show your working out and explain why the items in your list are ranked and awarded in the way they are. This helps other readers and content consumers understand the logic behind your ranking system, which will contribute to whether they’ll use the list in their own content.

8. “Definitive” Guides & Tutorials

This type of linkable asset is becoming tricky, as people have cottoned on to the effectiveness of these words in an article title.

This means that many articles are titled as definitive guides and tutorials, but don’t include the relevant information to actually be such an asset as they claim.

If you’re going to create a definitive guide as your linkable asset, then you better be sure you’ve created a monster article that covers every single aspect of your topic, complete with images, actionable examples and steps on how the do the thing you say you can.

9. Coined Terms

Coining a new term means assigning a new word to an action, status, concept or thing where one doesn’t already exist.

It’s getting harder and harder to actually coin new terms, but a classic example of a coined term is from Charles Dickens’s word “boredom” in his 1853 novel Bleak House.

It’s easier to coin new terms in emerging industries such as cryptocurrency and fintech, so be sure to only try and coin a term if it makes sense and doesn’t make you look silly.

How To Create Linkable Assets

Linkable assets are social media-friendly – They can be shared on all popular social media platforms. That is one of their biggest advantages. People want to share things that will help others understand the concept they’re sharing so linkable assets are great for this purpose.

If you keep this concept in mind – that of sharability – then creating a linkable asset relevant to and beneficial for your website won’t be too hard.

One of the best ways to create a linkable asset is to look at your competitors, and see what types of assets they are making. Your target audience will be the same as your competitors, so doing something similar to them, only better, is a good way of targeting and capturing that same audience.

Not to engage in cliche, but do your audience research before investing in creating a linkabale asset. Just make sure what you hope to create will appeal to your audience and it contains information they’ll find enlightening.

Backlink Asset FAQs

What is linkable content?

Linkable content is something that people can share on social media or use as a resource in their own content that will drive more people to your content.

For example, you could publish a post with some beautiful images from a recent vacation. Instead of sharing those images with friends on social media, you could make those images into a linkable asset and share the link to the post instead. This way your friends can see your beautiful images, but they’ll also be shown by other readers as well because they were able to find the image on the website itself.

You could also just create an infographic about your top tips for traveling and share it on Pinterest.

How do you earn links?

You earn links by helping other people. The easiest way to do this is to share your linkable resources with the community and let them use those resources as they see fit. This will help you build your reputation with your audience so they’ll trust you when you publish more content on your site.

Once you start earning links, their benefits are huge.

The more links you have, the better known your website is. This will help improve how many people visit your site and the number of conversions from their visits. The more people who know about your content, the more followers you’ll get on social media etc.

The bigger your audience, the better conversions from visitors to subscribers etc. You can use a link-building tool to find potential sources of links that will work for each piece of content that’s published on a specific topic or post type.

How do you get high-quality links?

Link building is done in many different ways, and securing high-quality backlinks is best done with a combination of different link-building strategies. The backlink quality you manage to secure will determine how much those links grow your website.

One of the best ways to get high-quality links is to help others by giving them something they can use. For example, if you’re creating a video tutorial on how to build a website, you could create an infographic on the same subject that includes text with screenshots of your website. You could then include that infographic in the post as well.

SUMMARY

Hopefully, you now have a clearer understanding of linkable assets, their role in SEO, and why you should invest in creating one or more linkable assets on your website.

If you conduct your initial research carefully, then creating a linkable that appeals to your target audience isn’t difficult. Use linkable assets as part of an overarching SEO and link building strategy, along with buying links from reputable vendors, and you’ll be very pleased to watch the number of backlinks to your site increase, your domain rating and authority grow, and the amount of organic traffic you get from search engines swell.