Today I’m going to share with you a fairly simple tactic you can use to build some high-quality and relevant links to your site through the creation of Top 10 video lists.

Why Top 10 Videos?

The thing about Top 10 video articles (Example: Top 10 Moments Caught on Google Maps Street View) is that they’re fun, they’re quick (assuming they are short clips), readers don’t have to do too much work like read, and it doesn’t take much time to put them together. It’s not like you have to go out and film all these videos yourself. You are piecing together a “list” from others’ content. And in the end, your Top 10 compilation will be more enjoyable/sharable than the videos individually.

I thought of this link-building idea when I was checking out 10 Amazing Slow Motion Animal Videos at nwf.org, which yielded…

I was thinking A) this is a very entertaining article and then B) I bet this didn’t take them that long at all to make… and I thought… this would make a great link-building tactic, especially if your website doesn’t have quite the reach as other sites. It’s a piece that is entertaining enough that many (even large) sites would accept and give credit in the form of a backlink in the author bio. And it’s something that will get tons of visibility with social shares and even generate backlinks of their own, which in turn will make for a high quality page that links to your site.

Make the Top 10 Article Relevant

I work with a surveillance camera company. Obviously, we wanted to make the article relevant to our site, so we thought we would make various Top 10 video articles about “Top 10 (some topic w/ lots of YouTube-age) Caught on Surveillance”. Here is one we did on 10 Astonishing Natural Disaster Events Caught on Surveillance, published at EarthSky.org, a big-time science site. It received 422 Likes and 65 Tweets…

I also saw tons of Facebook Shares and some backlinks from other websites. We pretty much had the same response at our Top 10 UFO Sightings Caught on Surveillance, 178 Likes, 13 Comments…

Plus there were lots of backlinks and social shares. We have backlinks pointing in to our site from both articles.

“That only works for what YOU’RE selling…”

The creation of the Top 10 videos list is, as you may think, the easy/fun part. The harder part is actually coming up with the idea, one that’s both relevant and entertaining. Well I’d like to try and convey just how easy it is to spark a creative idea within other niche verticals and industries.

Discover a Topic in Google (Search and Videos)

Here’s how easy this is: I was driving home the other day, stuck in traffic, thinking about this article. I wanted to be able to show other examples to share, so it could be seen as a replicable strategy. I tried to think of some random product, so I looked around at the cars stuck in traffic with me and thought car parts (not so random I guess). I took out my iPhone and performed a Google search for “car parts video” and a Google Videos search for “car parts”. Looking at Page 1 of the SERPs for both Search and Videos might be all you will need in order to come up with a great idea. After searching, I immediately took notice of some video about Jay Leno’s car collection, so then (to see if there would be enough material to create a Top 10 list) I did another search in Videos for “celebrity car collection” and lo and behold, there is a great deal of content to choose from to construct an excellent list of “Top 10 Celebrity Car Collection Videos”.

Select your Target Site(s)

Now before you spend time actually creating the list, make sure you have an excellent target site that’s already into your idea, so you can feel very confident you aren’t wasting your time. The celebrity car collection article would be perfect for Celebrity and Entertainment sites. You don’t need to use search parameters in Google to locate sites that say they accept Guest Posts/Articles. Many are willing to accept them and just don’t say so on the site, assuming it’s something they believe is a great idea.

Contact Them

As far as contacting the site editor, there is really no specific wording strategy you need to entice them, not that I’m using at least... but uh...don’t make it sound like this or this. Just let them know your idea. (Note: DO NOT ask for a link. Wait til later to ask about that.) Send out to a few of the top sites and wait. Remember, be choosy, this is a good piece of content, you want to house it somewhere where it will have potential for (hopefully) thousands of eyeballs to see it, share it, like it, etc. etc.

Maybe you can come up with something better, but this particular Top 10 list idea for car parts took all of five minutes …

Product: Car Parts/Accessories
Topic: Top 10 Celebrity Car Collection Videos
Target Sites: Celebrity/Gossip/Entertainment

Ok, so I was still stuck in the same traffic and had thought of another one I wanted to try – flowers.

I started the exact same as above, going to Google Search and Videos and searching for “flowers video” and “flowers” respectively. I went through a very similar process as with the car parts and quickly came up with an interesting idea – “Top 10 Flower Blooming Videos (Time Lapse)”. There are apparently a lot of these with lots of interesting and unique flowers with cool music in the background. This collection would go perfectly with Nature sites. If I sold flowers online, I would find the top 2-4 nature websites and contact all of them with my idea.

Product: Flowers
Topic: Top 10 Flower Blooming Videos (Time Lapse)
Target Sites: Nature

Obviously for this idea to work, you do need to have some creativity to discover an interesting topic for your Top 10 list. If you are 0% creative, then go to Google Videos, search for the product you sell, and have your creative friend look at it and see if he/she can come up with something.

Once you have your idea, the Top 10 article will write itself. This is an excellent strategy to go out and get a few high-quality links. It’s fairly quick & easy to create, it can be quite fun going through the videos, and it’s a good enough piece of content to score you a high-quality (and relevant) link on an authoritative site.