Why one great post dies alone (and how to save it)

_{Day 130/100}

Hey—It's Tim.

Samsung tablet, stylus, three long blacks.
The plan was a slick deck.
What you’re getting is five raw sketches - and, honestly, they work better.

Below is the Backlink “Spider-Web” Diagram I would run my consulting clients through before I built this out into the cluster feature inside of Penfriend.

Today, you get it in a newsletter.

1. A Lone Hero

You publish a great pillar article.
A couple of sites toss you backlinks. Ego boost secured.

But one page is a helium balloon: it rises fast, drifts nowhere.

2. Recruit the Side-kicks

You add four supporting posts.
Each one points to the pillar, and the pillar points back.
Authority starts circulating instead of leaking.

3. Close the Ring

Now the subs link to each other, not just the pillar.
Think of it as an internal Lazy Susan: crawl-bots spin around, never fall off the table.

4. Layer in Context Links

Descriptive anchors. Related snippets. Cross-references.
This is the semantic glue LLMs use to guess what your page really means.

5. Weave the Wider Web

Multiple clusters, multiple topics, yellow arrows stitching them together.
This is where earned backlinks land: they don’t just juice one page — they electrify the whole grid.

With Great Links Comes Great Rankings

They pass authority, surface forgotten pages, whisper to Google, “Here’s the tour guide.”

Backlinks still matter.
Mentions prime LLMs the same way citations prime academics.
But without a tight internal web, backlinks are just VIPs arriving to an empty party.

What’s Next

Getting those first backlinks is hard.
We have it down to a science at this point.

And every time I mention this I get emails asking how we do it.

I’ve been teasing a backlinks workshop for a while.
Here’s the thing, we have a process that we use internally to make this happen.
And we wanted to make a version for you to use.

So, we did just that. The tool, and the workshop, coming soon.

We’re aiming for mid-July — live teardown, Q&A, the works.

Want first dibs?
Hit reply with “Spidey” and you’re on the wait-list.

✌️ Tim "My spidey senses are tingling" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. If you read all the way down here, reply with your favourite Spider-Man GIF and I’ll guess your Domain Rating. (Accuracy not guaranteed. Entertainment is.)

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Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.