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Disclaimer & Credit: This information comes from Reddit user mikkel53, who says his buddy Sam spent a month reverse engineering Casper's backlink profile and how they acquire their links. You can read the full post here.
I'm summarizing it and crunching it down to just the goodies with no fluff, but I thought it had some nice insights we can use, either directly or by applying our own twist. It shows a good way to think about link building as much as doing link building.
Casper sells mattresses to more than 1 million customers in 8 countries, giving them a valuation of $750 million dollaridoos.
They primarily use three tactics to gain links:
In case the image goes down one day, that's 148,000 backlinks from 5,540 referring domains, giving them an Ahref's DR of 77 and an estimated 576,000 monthly visitors.
1. The CSD Method
You may be wondering what CSD is but check these links out first:
CSD is what this Sam guy is calling College Student Discount method. Instead of offering scholarships, which is legit but played out and college webmasters are on the defense now (and the links drop after the semester a lot of times), Casper has been contacting colleges and offering a student discount for their store. This nets them a link on a discounts page similar to a scholarship page. That is slick.
This is what I meant by thinking about link building. They took a common, powerful method and put a twist on it, got it out into the live playing field, and didn't blog about it and share it. They used it to dominate. We'll probably see it on blogs soon enough once bloggers read this post and the Reddit post, and they'll pretend they came up with it. That's a second lesson here. Zip your lips, forget your ego, and make money.
It looks like this in the end:
With the link itself looking something like this:
Consider this. We could find another twist for helping out students to get colleges to give us a link. But we can also take this very method and use it across pretty much every website in our niches if we have a product, and can probably even make it work if we don't have a product if we can convince some company to give us a custom coupon.
2. Publish Original Research & Promote It
This isn't new but it works like gangbusters, largely because so few webmasters are willing to do it.
It took me two weeks to do this for one post once. I promoted it a bit and then had Steve Brownlie do the same. The post itself is now at an Ahref's UR 22 with 77 backlinks from 26 domains (not a ton, but the domains are nuts). I don't even care about the traffic to that page. What I care about is that there's only one single contextual link on the page and it leads to a very valuable money page that's sucking up all that page rank juice. It makes me money regularly now. A couple more rounds of stuff like this to that page and it'll dominate.
Casper's version is "How Often Should I Replace My Mattress?" They're spin is that they debunk all the other myths that contradicted the results of their own research. When you meticulously back the claim up with graphs and tables and charts of your own data, you will get the easiest links of your life. This page of theirs got a DR90 link from Healthline.com, among a boatload of others.
There's no twist or special way of thinking here. You just have to put in the work and present the data and results in a marketable fashion and it's game over for outreach and social media promotion.
3. A Twist on the "Best-Of" Content.
The game here is a simple one, but it requires a lot of earlier footwork because you need to be believable, and that largely means being a killer brand. You'll get some of these naturally even if you're just a blog or authority site, but it's easier if you have a killer product.
The idea is to reach out to sites that do "Best" articles. But not "Best ____" product style articles for affiliate sales. You're looking for stuff like "Best Anniversary Gift Ideas" and "Best Gift ideas for Grandmothers" and any infinite variation on those. Your product might have a wide enough demographic (like mattresses) that you could do this forever.
You simply want to get included into these lists like this:
If you have an affiliate program for your product, it's game over for this method. All you need to do is get them to sign up and ask them to add you in their content. You could even buy links for an affiliate link of your own on different sites in their high trafficked pages, but be careful about misrepresenting your relationship with the manufacturer.
That's it. I hope this gets the old noggin churnin', and if it does, maybe share what you're coming up with or let us help you think it through, and we can do the same.
I'm summarizing it and crunching it down to just the goodies with no fluff, but I thought it had some nice insights we can use, either directly or by applying our own twist. It shows a good way to think about link building as much as doing link building.
Casper sells mattresses to more than 1 million customers in 8 countries, giving them a valuation of $750 million dollaridoos.
They primarily use three tactics to gain links:
- Apply their "CSD Method" to get .edu links
- Publish original research & promote it
- A twist on the "Best-Of" content.
In case the image goes down one day, that's 148,000 backlinks from 5,540 referring domains, giving them an Ahref's DR of 77 and an estimated 576,000 monthly visitors.
1. The CSD Method
You may be wondering what CSD is but check these links out first:
CSD is what this Sam guy is calling College Student Discount method. Instead of offering scholarships, which is legit but played out and college webmasters are on the defense now (and the links drop after the semester a lot of times), Casper has been contacting colleges and offering a student discount for their store. This nets them a link on a discounts page similar to a scholarship page. That is slick.
This is what I meant by thinking about link building. They took a common, powerful method and put a twist on it, got it out into the live playing field, and didn't blog about it and share it. They used it to dominate. We'll probably see it on blogs soon enough once bloggers read this post and the Reddit post, and they'll pretend they came up with it. That's a second lesson here. Zip your lips, forget your ego, and make money.
It looks like this in the end:
With the link itself looking something like this:
Consider this. We could find another twist for helping out students to get colleges to give us a link. But we can also take this very method and use it across pretty much every website in our niches if we have a product, and can probably even make it work if we don't have a product if we can convince some company to give us a custom coupon.
2. Publish Original Research & Promote It
This isn't new but it works like gangbusters, largely because so few webmasters are willing to do it.
It took me two weeks to do this for one post once. I promoted it a bit and then had Steve Brownlie do the same. The post itself is now at an Ahref's UR 22 with 77 backlinks from 26 domains (not a ton, but the domains are nuts). I don't even care about the traffic to that page. What I care about is that there's only one single contextual link on the page and it leads to a very valuable money page that's sucking up all that page rank juice. It makes me money regularly now. A couple more rounds of stuff like this to that page and it'll dominate.
Casper's version is "How Often Should I Replace My Mattress?" They're spin is that they debunk all the other myths that contradicted the results of their own research. When you meticulously back the claim up with graphs and tables and charts of your own data, you will get the easiest links of your life. This page of theirs got a DR90 link from Healthline.com, among a boatload of others.
There's no twist or special way of thinking here. You just have to put in the work and present the data and results in a marketable fashion and it's game over for outreach and social media promotion.
3. A Twist on the "Best-Of" Content.
The game here is a simple one, but it requires a lot of earlier footwork because you need to be believable, and that largely means being a killer brand. You'll get some of these naturally even if you're just a blog or authority site, but it's easier if you have a killer product.
The idea is to reach out to sites that do "Best" articles. But not "Best ____" product style articles for affiliate sales. You're looking for stuff like "Best Anniversary Gift Ideas" and "Best Gift ideas for Grandmothers" and any infinite variation on those. Your product might have a wide enough demographic (like mattresses) that you could do this forever.
You simply want to get included into these lists like this:
If you have an affiliate program for your product, it's game over for this method. All you need to do is get them to sign up and ask them to add you in their content. You could even buy links for an affiliate link of your own on different sites in their high trafficked pages, but be careful about misrepresenting your relationship with the manufacturer.
That's it. I hope this gets the old noggin churnin', and if it does, maybe share what you're coming up with or let us help you think it through, and we can do the same.
