How I Get Backlinks (incl. Hubspot) for Just $2.26 Each

Welcome to the first Digital Surfer Insights email!

These will be irregular emails that I’ll send out to share insider tips and strategies that I’m doing myself.

While I'm known for my expertise in topical maps, these emails will also explore a broader range of topics to boost your online presence and topical authority.

In this inaugural email, I want to talk about a couple of the things I’m doing for branded backlinks. What are branded backlinks?

The main benefits of branded links are to:

• Boost brand awareness

• Diversify your overall link profile

• Improve search engine rankings

A couple of the platforms I’m using to get them are Featured and Einpresswire:

• Featured - Answering questions à la HARO/Connectively, but easier.  

• Einpresswire - DIY press releases

I’ll talk about Einpresswire in the future. I want to take a look at Featured first and how I got 15 branded links for $2.26 each 🔥 

FYI: And this isn’t a sponsored ad. Featured doesn’t have an affiliate program (I did ask). I wanted to share it because I’ve found it as a great way to get very affordable links.

Featured is a HARO-style question and answer way of getting backlinks by answering journalist questions as an expert. Here’s an example of a backlink I received on Hubspot, DR 93:

There are actually two links that you get. One is my name that links to my LinkedIn profile. The “Topical Maps” link is to topicalmap.com.

I talked with the Featured team to find out more about how they work:

So, it’s a different process from HARO and other similar platforms because you’d usually be sending answers directly to journalists. Featured acts as a curation and content creation service for Publishers and journalists.

Featured has 3 plans, with the Pro plan being great value for the number of potential links you can get. They do have a free plan where you can answer up to three questions per month.

I have the Pro plan now and in the first month, I received 15 backlinks. My answers were also selected for 7 others in the first month of service. The DR for the sites that accepted my answers range from DR 1 to 68, but only 4 were less than DR 20.

I’ve answered 72 more questions that are currently “In Review” and it says 10 were “Selected” because 3 more were selected in my second month of service already. Links don’t go live immediately once they’re selected, so it could sit there for a while.

Here’s what the dashboard looks like:

The setup and workflow is simple too. After signing up for Featured, you fill out a Profile with a photo, name, job title, company name, LinkedIn profile URL, and website. That’s where all the information is grabbed from.

Once you see a question you can answer, you click the “Answer” button and add your answer to the popup window:

The Hubspot link was actually achieved by the Backlinker.ai service that uses AI to reply to Featured questions. Their service is $250 a month. That’s how I found out about Featured. I first tried out the service using my own name and brand, and then went the DIY route.

But I’m still using Backlinker.ai to create answers for one of my other sites. It’s a good way to get 5-10+ branded links per month without lifting a finger.

Backlinker.ai got me 8 links in the first month, but 6 of them went to the same site that’s a DR 33. That’s unfortunately one of the cons with going with a service because you can’t control how many submissions are made to one publication.

Featured has a number of publications that post multiple questions every day, so if you submit answers and are selected for publication, you end up with many links from one source. By DIY-ing it, you can control how many are sent to the same publication.

Another issue with Featured are the quality of publications that are asking for questions. Similar to HARO, you will want to vet the sites asking questions. There are a number of sites that are, shall we say, not as great.

Many of those are exact-match domains (EMDs) for specific topics. They also have AI-generated images that I believe lose a visitor’s trust. Stock photos are still better than the AI-generated graphics that low-quality sites use because of their low cost and ease to automate.

Featured has publisher profile pages and it only takes 10 seconds to vet it and see if it’s populated with AI-generated images. These sites seem like they’re created to post expert roundup articles to hopefully get links themselves from the experts they feature.

Here’s an example of Featured’s publisher profile of one of those sites with AI-generated images:

I’m not sure if Featured is a “long term” source of backlinks, but it does offer a good variety of sites for branded links. It’ll help add diversity to your backlink profile for a low price.

There is the free plan, but you can only submit 3 answers a month and you might get lucky with maybe one link. This is a numbers game and you just need to submit to as many as are relevant.

Featured is also not useful to use for research and to go direct to journalists because Featured acts as the middleman, so there’s no other contact information.

And because they curate and create, I’m also trying out Featured as a Publisher with the Topical Map site by requesting content for a couple of questions. The reverse-Featured method 😉 

With the way Featured works, they will collect and curate good answers. Then they will create an article and send it to me for approval after a couple of weeks. I’ll then post it on the TopicalMap.com blog.

Not a bad deal to get free content.

Ready to get more branded backlinks to increase your brand awareness on the web for search engines? You have a couple of options:

1. DIY Option: Sign up for Featured.com and get started answering questions to build branded links. Dip your toes in with the free plan and answer three questions.

2. DFY Option: Sign up for the Backlinker.ai service to make it hands-off for you.

Let me know what you thought of today’s insight! I want to get your thoughts, so I know if it’s helpful or not, and can adjust it in the future!

I’d also appreciate it if you shared it with fellow digital surfers.