How $750M Mattress Company Casper Builds Links (3 Replicable Tactics)

Ryuzaki

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Disclaimer & Credit: This information comes from Reddit user mikkel53, who says his buddy Sam spent a month reverse engineering Casper's backlink profile and how they acquire their links. You can read the full post here.

I'm summarizing it and crunching it down to just the goodies with no fluff, but I thought it had some nice insights we can use, either directly or by applying our own twist. It shows a good way to think about link building as much as doing link building.

Casper sells mattresses to more than 1 million customers in 8 countries, giving them a valuation of $750 million dollaridoos.

They primarily use three tactics to gain links:
  1. Apply their "CSD Method" to get .edu links
  2. Publish original research & promote it
  3. A twist on the "Best-Of" content.
Here's their current backlink profile to lend this some validation:

jQLs01F.png

In case the image goes down one day, that's 148,000 backlinks from 5,540 referring domains, giving them an Ahref's DR of 77 and an estimated 576,000 monthly visitors.

1. The CSD Method

You may be wondering what CSD is but check these links out first:

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CSD is what this Sam guy is calling College Student Discount method. Instead of offering scholarships, which is legit but played out and college webmasters are on the defense now (and the links drop after the semester a lot of times), Casper has been contacting colleges and offering a student discount for their store. This nets them a link on a discounts page similar to a scholarship page. That is slick.

This is what I meant by thinking about link building. They took a common, powerful method and put a twist on it, got it out into the live playing field, and didn't blog about it and share it. They used it to dominate. We'll probably see it on blogs soon enough once bloggers read this post and the Reddit post, and they'll pretend they came up with it. That's a second lesson here. Zip your lips, forget your ego, and make money.

It looks like this in the end:

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With the link itself looking something like this:

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Consider this. We could find another twist for helping out students to get colleges to give us a link. But we can also take this very method and use it across pretty much every website in our niches if we have a product, and can probably even make it work if we don't have a product if we can convince some company to give us a custom coupon.

2. Publish Original Research & Promote It

This isn't new but it works like gangbusters, largely because so few webmasters are willing to do it.

It took me two weeks to do this for one post once. I promoted it a bit and then had Steve Brownlie do the same. The post itself is now at an Ahref's UR 22 with 77 backlinks from 26 domains (not a ton, but the domains are nuts). I don't even care about the traffic to that page. What I care about is that there's only one single contextual link on the page and it leads to a very valuable money page that's sucking up all that page rank juice. It makes me money regularly now. A couple more rounds of stuff like this to that page and it'll dominate.

Casper's version is "How Often Should I Replace My Mattress?" They're spin is that they debunk all the other myths that contradicted the results of their own research. When you meticulously back the claim up with graphs and tables and charts of your own data, you will get the easiest links of your life. This page of theirs got a DR90 link from Healthline.com, among a boatload of others.

There's no twist or special way of thinking here. You just have to put in the work and present the data and results in a marketable fashion and it's game over for outreach and social media promotion.

3. A Twist on the "Best-Of" Content.

The game here is a simple one, but it requires a lot of earlier footwork because you need to be believable, and that largely means being a killer brand. You'll get some of these naturally even if you're just a blog or authority site, but it's easier if you have a killer product.

The idea is to reach out to sites that do "Best" articles. But not "Best ____" product style articles for affiliate sales. You're looking for stuff like "Best Anniversary Gift Ideas" and "Best Gift ideas for Grandmothers" and any infinite variation on those. Your product might have a wide enough demographic (like mattresses) that you could do this forever.

You simply want to get included into these lists like this:

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If you have an affiliate program for your product, it's game over for this method. All you need to do is get them to sign up and ask them to add you in their content. You could even buy links for an affiliate link of your own on different sites in their high trafficked pages, but be careful about misrepresenting your relationship with the manufacturer.

That's it. I hope this gets the old noggin churnin', and if it does, maybe share what you're coming up with or let us help you think it through, and we can do the same.
 
Taking on the College Student Discount angle, you can do this with things that cater to other groups of people too that regularly get discounts:

1. Military personnel
2. Senior Citizens
3. Kids (think kids meals)
4. Minorities
5. Small business discounts/coupons
6. Disabled Individuals
7. Ladies (think Ladies night)
8. Gamers

Honestly any group of people that has a common interest, or are grouped together can be targeted. Find the platforms/websites that cater to those different groups and approach them with this angle. The College angle is easier since getting a list of colleges around the country is a lot easier than getting a list of kids websites for example - but the better links are usually the harder ones to gain anyways.

You can even make up your own groups if you get creative. Think "Are you currently a client of [MY COMPETITOR]? Show us your most recent receipt/invoice and we'll give you 20% off for switching to us."

See if you can throw that up in re-targeting campaigns just for more lulz.
 
@chanilla, yeah. They sued Sleepopolis.com for having a lukewarm & honest review instead of an amazingly positive one (among a ton of other sites). Sleepopolis fought it until Casper drained them of cash and the only recourse was to sell them the site and walk away. Now Sleepopolis is owned by Casper and coincidentally shills Casper as the best mattress and gives them all the attention, while cutting the profit margins of all their competitors by taking commissions. It was dirty dirty dirty.

They got a lot worse out of the situation. Now articles like the two you linked rank in the top 10 for their brand terms.
 
Awesome thread!!

I'm sure you're already aware of the other things they do as well, but in case not:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928...ggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars

The Fast Company article is a must read for anyone in the affiliate industry.

Also, related is the Purple mattress company sued and won against another review website.

https://purple.com/blog/purple-wins-order-in-ghostbed-hmr-lawsuit

Good overview by a copyright attorney of the case here-

 

That’s a great read, and it makes you think about what actually goes on in the online marketing industry.

This just reminded me, a couple of months ago one of the top product manufacturers in my niche emailed me.

In one of my buying guides I listed their second latest product as the best, and said it was a better buy than their latest product due to the fact the latest model only had 1 extra feature and was a lot more expensive.

One of their guys emailed me and said, “actually, there are 3 significant improvements over the last model and we would appreciate it if you would add this to your review and maybe think about having our latest model as the best.”

In my view this still didn’t justify the extra cost, but I added a section onto my review explaining the new features.

I never heard from them again but it just shows you that all these product manufacturers are keeping an eye on things, and if they don’t like what they see you’ll know about it.
 
This is what I meant by thinking about link building. They took a common, powerful method and put a twist on it, got it out into the live playing field

This part and CCarter's expansion on it is the real gem of this info and thread.

I'm trying to think up another example other than coupon codes for groups of people.

How about taking a huge site that you want a link from, like The Verge or some tech-ish site that will be open to this sort of thing, and doing a giant analysis of all their content in some fashion, and putting the data into interactive graphs, pie charts, tables. Just real nerdy data bait. Make it have a positive and interesting angle to it and I bet you can bait them into linking to you.

Worst case you end up on their social media and can push it on Reddit and Facebook and Twitter and Stumbleupon. You could rinse and repeat for every big site and probably get a 25% success rate. It'd be a massive campaign but would probably be a game changer, especially if once you're all done and the dust settles, you go back to all these pages and link them all to your money posts to push the juice where you need it to go.
 
I've worked in this industry quite a bit and while I didn't get deposed yet, I can just say it's fucking gnar. If you want to look at someone to replicate campaigns, UX, design, CRO, FB ads - whatever, look toward the product leaders in the space. They've got rocket science level people destroying out there.
 
I've worked in this industry quite a bit and while I didn't get deposed yet, I can just say it's fucking gnar. If you want to look at someone to replicate campaigns, UX, design, CRO, FB ads - whatever, look toward the product leaders in the space. They've got rocket science level people destroying out there.

Is this amongst affiliates or the brands themselves?
 
Is this amongst affiliates or the brands themselves?

I worked directly with the brands, but they keep a real close relationship with the affiliates. It's a very small world. In fact, a handful of court documents allege that they were one and the same :smile:
 
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