Using Partnerships To Accelerate Content Marketing & Link Building

So you've built great content, but how can you take it to the next level to boost your visibility and attract more links? Columnist Eric Enge recommends partnerships.

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Last month, I wrote about how you can get started in content marketing. Getting off the ground is great, but we all like to accelerate our progress, and one of the fastest ways to do this is to partner with third parties on content projects.

Today’s post will explore the benefits of such partnerships and discuss how you can go about putting them together.

Key Elements for Quality Partnerships

Benefits Of Content Marketing Partnerships

The two most important benefits of partnerships are simple:

  1. Both parties help promote the content. This means exposure to more total people for your content and the potential to garner more links.
  2. Each party gets exposure to the audience of the other party.

Of course, many times there is the benefit of dividing up the work as well. However, if you are less well-known than the party you are partnering with, you may not end up splitting the work equally. In fact, there are three different types of partnership scenarios:

Partnership Scenarios

If the visibility gap between you and the company you are partnering with is large enough, you may end up doing all the work, and that’s OK. The exposure to their audience, and the visibility that brings you, is often worth it.

If you are the party with the greater reputation and visibility, a partner may give you the bandwidth to do some great things that your team would not be able to do without the partner’s help.

At Stone Temple Consulting, we have used partnerships on many occasions. My own personal visibility got a big boost after I responded to a Rand Fishkin post that called for someone to do an analytics study.

Influencer Call for Help!

This was a simple partnership. I did the work, and Rand helped promote it. But, it was very worthwhile. Not only did I get the direct promotional benefits, but I built credibility with Rand and the Moz community in the process. This ultimately helped lead to my involvement in co-authoring The Art of SEO.

Bring The Goods To The Table

The benefits sound great, but they don’t come for free. No one is going to be interested in partnering with you unless you are contributing real value, such as:

  1. Your own audience
  2. A great concept for the content piece
  3. Unique data or research
  4. A willingness to do the work you commit to
  5. Credible proof that you can do your part

You may not be able to satisfy all of these parts, but you will need to have some of them to be someone worth partnering with.

If you are the less well-known partner, a simple willingness to do the work is probably not enough by itself. You will likely need to be able to offer more than that to the potential partnership. However, if you have a great idea and a willingness to do the work, that could be enough.

Sometimes Heavy Lifting is the Right Thing to Do!

Warning: I am a creature of the digital marketing industry, where most participants are highly ethical, and they won’t simply steal your idea and run with it. If your industry has a substantially different feel to it, you may want to have the concept really well built out and nearly ready to publish before approaching someone to help promote it.

The bottom line is this: Get clear on what value you are going to bring to the table before you start trying to line up a partner.

Scouting The Field

Finding good partners is a critical step in the process as well. Don’t simply reach out to people or businesses that have large social followings and big reputations. You should look for evidence to convince you that they will make a good partner:

  1. Find out if they have previously participated in partnerships, and examine how they appear to have been executed.
  2. While it’s important that you have the goods to offer, make sure they do, too!

In addition, it’s very useful if you have already established some sort of relationship in advance of asking for a partnership. This could be as simple as interacting with the potential partner on social media. For example, this may come in the form of retweeting/resharing and commenting on their social media or content marketing efforts. Of course, the more ways that relationship has been established, the better.

This process of establishing a relationship in advance really helps grease the wheels. It’s not necessarily an absolute requirement, but it’s highly desirable.

Summary

One of the most important goals of any content marketing campaign is to continuously build your own audience. Working in cooperative partnerships with others is an excellent way to do that. Even if you already have a good-sized audience, growing that audience and keeping it engaged can be activities with high ROI.

One last key point: Once you get started on a content marketing project, make sure you do everything you committed to. You don’t want to turn the outcome into a negative. For that reason, be careful not to over-commit.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Eric Enge
Contributor
Eric Enge is President of Pilot Holding. Previously, Eric was the founder and CEO of Stone Temple, an award-winning digital marketing agency, which was acquired by Perficient in July 2018. He is the lead co-author of The Art of SEO, a 900+ page book that’s known in the industry as “the bible of SEO.” In 2016, Enge was awarded Search Engine Land’s Landy Award for Search Marketer of the Year, and US Search Awards Search Personality of the Year. He is a prolific writer, researcher, teacher and a sought-after keynote speaker and panelist at major industry conferences.

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