Link Building with Four Kids and a Chicken

Guys, we have to talk about link building for a minute. I get about 5-10 daily emails about link building, guest posts, etc… Not to mention all of you SEO experts and Affiliate Marketers that can “change my life every day.” If you just send me a spammy email, I will probably not bother to even open it. Here’s why, if you send a spammy email, you probably will do other spammy stuff and I don’t want my readers to have that experience.

If you read this and then reach out to me through the form below we can very likely make something work. I’m a pilot and may be gone for a day or two, but I will read the contact forms and get back to you.

Link Building Rules

FourKidsAndAChicken.com does low-risk, white-hat (best practice) link building only. The purpose of what we do is to give our readers (and yours) the best experience possible on our sites. We do this by strictly following a few simple rules:

• Links must be editorial. In other words, it must naturally fit into our articles, and be of a “recommendation” nature. It can’t be part of a list sitting at the bottom, or in a blurb that is not actually part of your article. Examples of good editorials would be mentioning Thing A as part of your post and then saying, “xxxlink has a great article on Thing A if you want more information.”
• We don’t buy and sell links here. Sorry. Message me and I will hook you up with some other large, legit blogs I own.
• Links must be relevant. Content on both sides of a link must be great content and relevant to each other. For example, I have a chicken wings post and I link to your awesome chicken wing dipping sauce. Look at these two links. They make sense together. My awesome chicken wings and Macheesmo’s awesome chicken dipping sauce.
• Links must add value. The link should add something to what is already written to the post for the reader.
• Content is King. We won’t link to short posts, spammy articles, index pages, etc… Just good, long-form, well-written content.

The bottom line is this: Does the link add value to the reader? If it does, then it’s probably a good link worth doing.

Earning Links

We try to make shareable and linkable content with every post. We do 100% of our own writing and photography which means I own it and can do whatever I want with it. I decided to dangle it out in front of other bloggers and writers to give it away for a link back to my site. You are allowed to do the following:

• Use my pictures! Nearly 100% of professional photographers are overpriced and don’t understand the actual value of their work. I have found they fight tooth and nail to collect a nickel when there is $100 out there they ignore. While I keep my copyright, I let you use it indefinitely so long as I get an editorial-type link back. For example, this is great for when you are writing a travel blog and need a picture of a destination. Go ahead and pull the image and give me a good link back to my site somewhere. I don’t care which category. It could be food, gardening, travel, whatever. Use it, love it, enjoy it. Just give me a link back from your site. I do image searches and I will look for this. Everything I have online is branded, send me a note below and I can get you an unbranded image if you prefer.
• Review my recipes! Like a recipe we did? Do it yourself. Just link back to ours.
• Quote me. Pull quotes from my articles and link back.
• Don’t get me flagged for duplicate content. It hurts you more than me anyway. You can’t just copy and paste a full article. Take a piece, talk about it. Copy some, and re-wright it with a link back to the original article.

The spirit of this is that I want you to use my content where it helps you. I just ask for links back to my site.

Bloggers

Guest posts are fine. But they are a lot of work and are kind of spammy. Obviously, most bloggers do this for link backs and Google knows this. Let’s just find a couple of good articles we each have and a very high-quality editorial link to each other.

Affiliate Marketers

Yes, we do affiliate marketing … through Amazon. I don’t have time to manage other networks and Amazon is king.

Sponsored Posts

Yes, we will do sponsored posts, but it is a low percentage of our posts. A good sponsored post can still add value to my site if it educates, solves a problem, or inspires our readers. If that process includes demonstrating your product, then that is a great fit for us.

Want to work with us?