I don’t care how good your content is, it is worthless if no one ever sees it. This means you need to do something to draw eyes to it. You may think you have the To Kill a Mockingbird of online content, but the internet is not Field of Dreams. There’s no such thing as “If you build it, they will come.”

This is where link building comes in.

If you have a great piece of content out there on the web, build links to it. Or at least try to, through active promotion to engaged audiences and relevant sites. Not only will you be generating referral traffic to your amazing content, but it will help to improve your content’s performance in search, thus further improving traffic. Don’t let anyone fool you into believing that link equity isn’t valuable.

There are a few ways you can build links to your content, thus improving visibility in the SERPs. You can set up a Google Alert with, say, the name of the article, and track every mention of your content. If someone mentions the article online, but doesn’t have a hyperlink attached, outreach to that webmaster. If that person was kind of enough to mention your content without provocation, the chances are he or she will insert a link when asked. This is called fresh mention link building.

If there are several key/notable influencers mentioned in your content, build an outreach list and email those people. If you’ve said something positive about them, they want to know about it. It could be beneficial for their marketing, and even if it isn’t necessarily, no one is immune to flattery. If it IS beneficial to their marketing, they are likely to link to your content.

There are a few more ways you could build links to your valuable content; just know that it needs to be done. Content marketing can be an exhaustive process, but you make things more difficult for yourself if you expend all of that time and effort but no one actually sees your content. You have to be willing to invest more energy, but it will be worth it.