About seven years ago, around 2017, my partner and her father wrote a book about urban gardening. It was purely for the love of it, without any great ambition behind it. As an online marketing professional, I advised them to create a website to promote the book, since it would be self-published and wouldn't have the marketing support of a traditional publishing house.
Although I'm not a programmer, I've worked extensively with WordPress over the years, building several websites and working on those of my clients, so I offered to create their website. The idea was to create a simple blog to share content about horticulture. This blog would also serve as a way to promote and advertise the book.
In a short time, thanks to their dedication, they had a pretty decent blog, with different sections according to the themes, a section where they told their story and, of course, some calls to action to invite blog readers to buy the book.
The importance of content
Simply creating a website, except in rare cases, is usually not enough to generate traffic. Just having a website is no guarantee that people will magically visit it or find it, especially if its launch lacks a clear content strategy and a good marketing plan. technical optimization, a solid plan of off-page SEO or the thrust provided by other factors, which are brand awareness or other traffic drivers.
Obviously there are a thousand different situations and many nuances, but let's say that in the case of "homemade" websites with little or no budget, it is very unlikely that by simply creating a microsite of a few pages, it will start to generate traffic and visits.
Therefore, it was clear they needed to provide content for the website. After the enormous undertaking of creating a book from scratch, and without prior experience in similar tasks, father and daughter set to work filling the blog with content, writing potentially interesting articles for their readers: “Everything you need to know to grow tomatoes at home,” “How to protect plants from frost and snow,” “The myth of 'I have no green thumb' and how to care for what you buy at a nursery,‘ ’Special feature on growing strawberries: how to enjoy those from your own garden,” and more blog posts of that kind.
Obviously, I gave them tips for writing following SEO guidelines: I suggested topics with a high search volume and a level of competition suitable for a domain that at that time had neither age nor authority, guidelines for writing articles and the structure of the content, and so on.
A little bit of link building
But of course, as you probably know, semantic SEO isn't everything. So I started looking at the top-ranked horticulture blogs and analyzed their link profiles to see where they were getting links from and if there were any opportunities we could replicate.. In other words, which websites with a certain authority and which with thematic affinity were linking to those blogs about gardens. We discovered that one of them, having won a blog contest sponsored by a well-known newspaper, had several links from the newspaper's website and other websites mentioning the contest and its winner. To our surprise, the submission period for the annual edition of the contest was open!
Our idea was simply that, as participants in the contest, they might link to our blog, nothing more. However, my partner and her father were aware that the content was very well done and that we put a lot of care into it. They took care of everything to register for the contest and… all that was left was to wait and cross our fingers. It was the “20 Blogs” contest by the newspaper 20 Minutos.
And then, suddenly, a national award!
It must be said that, before they knew they had won, they were informed that they had been among the three finalists. This was, in itself, a real prize for them. Especially since they were competing against a Madrid-based digital newspaper specializing in environmental news, with a full staff, and the blog of a public gardening professional whose goal was to safeguard the city's green spaces. The competition was truly formidable. What chance did an amateur blog run by a father and daughter sharing their tips and tricks about urban gardening have?
The title of this post is a spoiler in itself. So you can imagine the result. They won the Best Blog 2020 award in the Green Blogosphere category!
And yes, they obviously got the coveted link from the 20 minutos website – quite a link building achievement!
Link building is a fundamental aspect of organic positioning that requires planning and research (of the competition, the market in which a website operates, etc.), but also, as in this case, sometimes opportunities to carry out good quality link building that adds authority to your site can arise in unusual situations.
By the way, you might be thinking that I haven't mentioned the name or URL of this famous gardening blog at any point. I did that on purpose, to maintain a bit of hype, and if you've made it this far, now comes the "reward": the site is called Growing at home And, obviously, I encourage you to visit it.
I also encourage you to contact me if you don't have a link building strategy or if you want to improve your current one.
