What is Link Earning? And Is It Better Than Link Building

Updated March 4, 2025

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Building From Solid Foundations

We’ve all heard of Link Building. Generating links through partnerships or direct collaboration with other companies and websites. Link Building is one of the foundations of SEO and a much-discussed topic among SEO practitioners. However, an offshoot of link building, Link Earning, isn’t spoken about as much.

How do you do Link Earning? The answer is; you simply earn the links. By creating high-quality content that other companies can’t stop themselves from sharing. However creating a viral buzz from every piece of content you make isn’t easy.

Link Earning

Basic Link Building is straightforward. You create content and find people who may be interested in it and offer to share it. Or you offer to write/ design something for their site, to help ease their content creation woes and they repay you with a link back to your website. While obviously, the quality of the content will be important to the company you are giving your work to (and if it isn’t you probably shouldn’t want a link on their website) there isn’t an X-factor involved. You write solid, factual, content. Company shares. You get a link.

However, Link Earning requires you to have a spark of inspiration. That lightbulb moment. In the most part, viral content isn’t created by the same company regularly. Once a company has status, like say Moz in the SEO world, their content becomes more shareable because of their name alone. But for smaller companies, this is much less likely to happen.

Your link strategy cannot rely on Link Earning to survive. You need to focus on the day-to-day process of Link Building to keep your SEO engine running. But that doesn’t mean the occasional viral idea should be ignored. Like anything in business, you shouldn’t put all your efforts into one plan. A moonshot might work, but it isn’t a business strategy on its own.

Going Viral

To create content worth of virality you will need time. It won’t be as simple as just writing a blog on the plane back from a meeting, or forcing out 30 minutes before you go home. If you want to create something that organically earns you links you should brainstorm ideas as a company and involve as many people as you need in the editing process to create something truly worthy. Then, once you’ve done that, you might have something that goes viral…

So, is Link Earning better than Link Building? Yes. Creating content that goes viral organically without much effort from you is great. But the real question should be “How do I earn more links, while still having time to build them too”.