Generate Links From Experts In Your “Expert Roundup”

It’s a practice that’s been around in journalism from it’s beginning. If you want to create an article on a subject, then you need to speak to subject matter experts!

Strangely enough, for a lot of blog posts and companies this aspect of creating quality SEO content fell by they wayside in favor of using a single, in-house writer or team of writers to create content.

An “Expert Roundup” Is Born

Around 2013 or 2014, a new type of blog post was born, the expert roundup. It was a huge “thing” in the SEO industry because of the vast number of easily accessible talking heads claiming the title of SEO expert.

What is an expert roundup? The content creation idea harnessed that simple concept of getting expert opinions and crafting their responses into a blog post, often luring the participation of the expert by offering to give them a link.

This process of being a regular contributor to roundups actually is it’s own link building tactic, and can actually net some powerful links!.

Here’s a couple examples of well executed “expert roundups” for reference when you’re building yours:

• 20 Local SEO Experts Share Their #1 Ranking Tip & Local SEO Tools
• 55 Content Marketing Experts Roundup
• 14 Experts Share Their Most Under-rated SEO Tactic

The Fatal Flaw Of “Expert Roundups”

There’s no reason for experts who are gaining links from YOU to take the time and energy to link to it.

You’re already trading value, an equivalent exchange of the contributors time and expertise in exchange for a link.

This means that most often, out the gate even though you did make a great article, it has no inherent means of gaining links. This then diminishes the sucess of your content, because it won’t have as many links unless you specifically leverage some other method of link building!

Egobait & Attention To Detail Gains Links

Look. We’re all human, and we like to be told that we did something well.

We can use that to fix the flaw inherent in expert roundups!

When someone takes the time to answer your questions, you take things a little further than just curating those answers into your post. You generate a unique “quota-graphic” with their response.

Then, after a cursory review of their site’s blog content, you email the expert contributor and let them know that not only is their quote live on your blog post but you also made a custom graphic out of it. Then simply point out a post or page on THEIR site that would be improved with that graphic.

Hey Mario! Thanks for your contribution to the post, it’s live at StompOndaKoopa .com/blog/koopa-stomping-expert/. By the way, I LOVED your quote, so I turned it into it’s own graphic. I thought you might want to add it to your own /stomping-bowser blog post or share it on social media. Thanks again!

That’s it. That’s the link hook and bait.

If they use your image, they’ll LIKELY link to you and your article out of a sense of ego. If they don’t you can always politely follow up and ask for a link.

Worst case scenario, you have excellent content and can use the image in your own post and social media. It also is worthy of noting that you can also use the quotagraphic for it’s own link building process as well.