Find Out Where People Talk About Your Online Content: Backlinks

Backlinks help you to see where your content is shared and what people talk about it! This works for websites, articles, posts and projects.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are links on other sites, that direct to your content. If your content has backlinks from credible sources, then it will be more visible in search engine results pages (SERPs). This means that you have a higher chance of getting more visitors and potential customers (if you own an online shop).

How can you use backlinks to your benefit?

There are methods to get a list of links that direct to your content. Those lists are called backlink lists. Before I tell you how you can get those lists, I will tell you why they are beneficial to you.

Backlinks can tell you where exactly your users are coming from. If someone tweets about your content, his tweet will show up in your backlink list. You can then easily look what he said about your content and take part in the comments. This goes for every social-media platform!

If you have a backlink from a website, it means that somebody mentioned your content on that website. You can then find out what they said and, if possible, take part in the discussion via a comment section or even talk to the website creator if you have feedback.

This helps you build relationships with the people that mentioned your content. It also gives you a pretty good insight into who your users are, allowing you to better target your audience.

How to obtain backlink lists?

There are plenty of services that collect backlink lists and provide them to you. Most of them are paid, which might not be what you’re looking for. As backlinks play an important role in the online industry, such services tend to be rather expensive (hundreds of dollars per month). There are, however, some services which offer basic backlink lists for free, such as the one that I use: https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker

This service features to look for backlinks to your content for free without registration.

Here are some examples of such a backlink list with my content:

Example #1: Programming Project

I have a programming project, which I used in this example.

Enter the URL of your content and choose “Exact URL”. Then submit the form.

As you can see, there are plenty of links to my project. Seeing all the websites and posts about my project helps me to get feedback and “oversee” my community. It’s also motivating to see people talking about your creations!

Example #2: Medium Article

This also works for articles on Medium. I will take one of my latest articles as an example.

This gives me good insight, where my article readers are coming from. If you ever wondered, where yours are coming from, you might also want to give it a try ;)

Backlinks have way more uses and there is a whole science in getting more backlinks, thousands of articles, which evaluate if they help your content in search engines, online courses and much more. I didn’t discuss all of that here, as there are many SEO experts who already have excellent articles for that. This article is focused, on how you can get better insights about your user base using backlink lists.

I hope you liked the article, let me know what you think about the method and have fun analyzing your community!