Editorial Calendar Post Generates Backlinks Not Lost in Translation

I was looking at my referral logs to see where I was getting a new surge of traffic and was surprised to find a post I made back in 2009 about editorial calendars for bloggers was popular enough to have folks use Google Translator to translate that post.

In Portugese:

And Spanish:

I found it interesting that folks in those countries felt my blog post was worth their time to enter the URL into Google Translator so they could read it in their own language.

In fact, that post has generated some great backlinks from all over the world… Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Russia and other countries. Including websites with high page rank. One site alone has sent over 700 click to my blog from that one post.

The reason? I’m giving away a free spreadsheet and Open Office document of my blogging editorial calendar.  No strings attached. No opt-in required. Direct links which in turn has led other websites to link to my post without me even knowing about it.

That has resulted in more traffic and I’ve seen an uptick in opt-in’s from that blog post. That free download and post has even landed me on page one of Google for “editorial calendar”… well, sort of… Smash Magazine wrote about editorial calendars and they linked to my blog post in their own post, which is ranked on page one for that search term.

All that link love, just from giving something of value away for free.