Venchito Tampon Jr, Author at Sharp Rocket

6 Content Analysis Methods Using Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is relatively new to the market when I first saw its features that are useful in content ideation and content promotion activities. The easy to use dashboard and navigation makes the tool highly regarded by many marketing professionals as one of the best content marketing tools in 2014 both for advanced and new content marketers.

Disclaimer: I am not an affiliate marketer of Buzzsumo but just want to share my knowledge with you on how this product can help you get tremendous results for your content marketing campaign.

Content analysis is searching for specific content assets (either hosted on your site or on other brands) and identifying and analyzing their potential business values in order to set goal-oriented actions for your campaign.

In order to deeply this topic, let me share and discuss to you 17 content analysis methods that you can apply using Buzzsumo.

1. Insight-driven analysis based on other brands' content assets

Competitive analysis is the most common and underrated techniques to improve current set of actions based on insights formulated from analyzing other brands’ existing strategy or tactics.

This can easily be performed using Buzzsumo’s top content feature.

Few things to consider in order to get the most value out of the search results (domain’s internal pages):

Filter the results by content type if your website is only hosting one or two types of content (e.g. news sites covering text-based content or video blogs publishing video posts).
Sort the results by specific social shares (i.e. Twitter shares). Base it on your current social media stats. If you are getting several shares on Twitter, then you can push your other social profiles (Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, etc..) to leverage your overall social campaign. If you’re not really concerned with just one social site, then simply sort the results by total shares.
If the site covers general topics in your space, you can be very specific with the results by adding keywords to the search bar (e.g. kaiserthesage.com “content marketing”)
See if the post/page is consistently earning links and shares (this is a good signal that the site has an outstanding position in SERPs).

One other tool that I’m very much acquainted with Buzzsumo is its domain alert feature.

The feature allows you to send alerts to your email every time the brand/site was mentioned on other blogs.

You can set the alert by realtime or daily digest (daily digest can save you time, good for productivity, since you can just read all emails once every minute/hour of the day).

You can also use link feature if you want to receive alerts about links generated on other blogs pointing to the domain/site you want to monitor regularly.

I suggest you use the search scope, “links to any page on the domain” so you don’t have to create another alert to monitor the other pages of the domain (in case you use the search scope, “links to the exact url”.

Insights from other brands’ content assets that you can consider for your own campaign:

See if your competitors or domains that you regularly monitor are focusing on producing high quality content and earning links or are just building links from other blogs (guest posts) (links generated by your competitors can be tracked using Buzzsumo’s link feature). Replicate their strategies or invest on two activities: high quality content production and active content promotion.
To which level of readers are they tailoring their content to? Check out social shares of their content, look at the # of social followers of their sharers and from that, you can determine the level of audience that they target (either common readers or influencers). This is not an absolute metric but a good factor to consider.
Identify their most engaged content type. There are times that a blog will have most successful social performance on its video content rather than on other content types (text-based), because it is what the community is interested to consume among all content types.

2. Focusing on author relationships rather than on hosted domains

Marketing is generally focused on relationships. Any type of relationships when built with strong foundation can largely impact one campaign’s results.

So it is important to not just focus on creating a huge list of domains but on investing on relationships with authors/people whom you want to engage with for deals or content partnerships.

If you still don’t have a spreadsheet of authors’ names, you can apply any of the methods to create your own database of authors:

Do a Google search for industry personalities (e.g. “authors” OR “journalists” OR “bloggers” “industry”). You will commonly see blog posts curating lists of the best blogs/bloggers in 2014 or previous years. Check if listed blogs still exist and jot them down in your note/sheet.
Use Alltop or DMOZ to find popular/authority blogs in your space and identify the owners of those blogs by looking at the site’s branded pages (about us, team us, blog section, etc.).
Identify multiple authors of a popular blog (where several contributors are allowed) by using the domain-specific filter of Buzzsumo (domain.com).

Actionable points to analyze author relationships:

Utilize contributed content by authors to spark interests in conversations. Adding the site’s URL (where the author contributed his/her content) to your pitch will signify commonality between you and the other author.
See what topics are being discussed by the author on his contributed blogs and niches he’s penetrating (e.g. entreprepreneurship, marketing, startups) so you can use this as your own advantage of widening your content outreach and connecting to other niches’ community as well.
Set author alert (Buzzsumo’s feature) to track future posts of the author. Engage with the author by sharing his new posts on social and/or linking to his future content. Letting him know your pre-outreach activities can secure positive response from him.

3. Identifying commonality in social sharing by popular authors or brands

Brands that are connected to each other always have at least one similar attitude or characteristic in terms of sharing popular content and linking to useful and trending posts in the community.

Using social’s commonality can help you identify which posts had been shared by popular authors/brands, which only proves the quality of the content.

Buzzsumo can help you identify the most-shared content in your space, basing it on the common shared post by popular brands. Shared all functionality of Buzzsumo allows you to do that.

Few things to keep in mind in this content analysis approach:

Note websites that are not hosted by social profiles you included in the query (shared:@hubspot, @moz, @buzzsumo). Getting exposure on those websites have high amplification rate given that there is a solid community composing of popular brands/authors/influencers in the industry that are ready to share new posts published on those websites.
Find other social influencers who’d shared the content (use the view sharers feature). These influencers when engaged can become your potential brand partners/evangelists, so keep an eye on them.
Look for potential linkers (use the view backlinks feature). Because content listed in the search results are highly recommended by popular brands or social influencers, the link acquisition rate (in terms of link earning) in the blog where content is published is higher.

4. Tapping engagement signals for press coverage

There are thousands of content managers and outreach specialists that aim to get their brand stories covered on top news sites (whether local or niche-specific). However, there are only a few companies that are able to penetrate the press market because of not being able to create a strategy that will benefit not only their websites but journalists they’re trying to connect with.

Content prospecting and analysis for press coverage is now easy with Buzzsumo. Filtering the results by journalists will help you find top press professionals in your industry. Pro tip: If you are working in the local scene, filter the results by location as well (type in the country or city in the left side of the dashboard).

To find more journalists, type in the domain’s URL in the search bar plus a niche phrase/keyword. In the given example, you can use www.wsjd.com “link building” to search for more journalists working on WSJ and writing about the same topic.

Engagement activities that you can try out for effective press coverage:

Analyze what type of links and which blogs journalists are most commonly sharing on social platforms.
Use the commonality function of Buzzsumo (shared:@hubspot. @moz, @buzzsumo) to find posts commonly shared by journalists you’ve found in the dashboard’s search results. You can focus your pitch on what interests your target content amplifiers (journalists) to increase response rate in your outreach campaign.
Tweet journalists (with personalization) straight from Buzzsumo’s dashboard.

5. Leveraging topical analysis in a regular basis

Consistently monitoring the changes happening in your industry’s content environment is an effective tactic to improve your brand’s current content strategy.

Using Buzzsumo, you can analyze content in your space and use the gathered data to make decisions that can refine your content marketing campaign.

Notable features of Buzzsumo’s content analysis feature:

Average shares by network – helps you to focus on one or two social networks that have high chances of amplifying your future content pieces.
Average shares by content type – gives you a more specific overview of what social platforms (by content type) you should really invest your time and effort in content promotion.
Total shares by date published – provides you insights on what day(s) you should schedule your social updates and earn the maximum engagement signals for your content.
Average shares by content length – you can consider this data when creating your content to ensure higher engagement performance on social sites.
Most shared domains by networks – domains in the graph are good to monitor for future link opportunities. Submitting content to those sites can give a boost to your brand’s exposure and social following.
Popular topics for content related to “keyword” - you can gear your content creation activity towards these popular topics so you can quickly attract exposure and social shares for your content/brand.
Top pieces of content for “keyword” – do a competitive analysis (identifying social sharers and potential linkers) to understand the behavior of your linkers and what type of content is already working effective in your niche.

6. Setting content and link alerts to improve current content strategy

In online marketing, setting email alerts for your campaigns is one of the best strategies to stay up-to-date with industry changes and learning from what works with other brands and related niches.

Getting inspirations from other niches/companies can help you make unique actions that can guarantee results for your brand. You may want to check out this post on SiegeMedia about 10 content creators that you can inspire your content marketing.

One way to constantly seek for inspirations is to set an alert system in your email (monitoring new posts, brand mentions and link opportunities in your space).

Buzzsumo has a keyword/brand alert feature that can help you keep track of content and link opportunities.

Things that you can do with Buzzsumo’s keyword/brand alert:

Track targeted keywords and related industry phrases to open up opportunities for link outreach (new posts are more inclined for changes than old/outdated posts – so make sure you perform link request outreach after you’ve tracked new posts).
Be broader with keyword monitoring. You can also track entity names and associations to widen your reach. This is effective if you have a content that discussed tools or products in your industry.
Don’t forget to find new sites that publish regular roundup posts. Bloggers who’re still building their brands from scratch are willing to commit their time for brand partnerships.

Content analysis can provide great insights for your content marketing campaign which are vital to improve your content assets in terms of link acquisition, social performance and branding.

Other Resources:

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

11-outreach-best-practices-can-easily-apply-blog

11 Outreach Best Practices That You Can Easily Apply To Your Blog

Great outreach always lands coverage. Whether or not it is accompanied by a link/mention, the potential business value that coverage can provide to your brand is still worth your investment.

Best practices in outreach are not products of great inputs by experts in the blogging/internet marketing scene but rather just a collection of small pieces that improve a specific outreach in order to yield great results (higher response and press/link coverage rates).

In this post, I’d like to share a few outstanding outreach practices that you can immediately apply to your blog.

1. Using corporate emails with branded signatures for commercial sites

I’ve seen a large percentage of outreach emails fail even before the battle begins because of one simple reason – not using corporate email for the initial and subsequent pitches.

Using a corporate email for outreach doesn’t only make your pitch professional, but would also make it easy for your prospect to contact you via your website’s contact form, in case they will offer content partnerships or other brand-related opportunities.

Uniqueness adds more chances of getting your pitch remembered by your link targets. Instead of a common gmail account, your prospects would see a unique domain that might help them decide if your pitch deserves a response. Domain names that include industry related phrases can get more attention from recipients than domains without semantic relevancy in their brand names.

For instance, you can easily determine that this working shoes site is a working shoes brand because of its brand name. So when this particular business asks for a specific link or partnership, the link target can quickly understand the nature of its business, which will be his/her deciding factor when trying to respond to the pitch.

In this actionable post by Ross Hudgens on SiegeMedia about using PR practices for link development campaigns, he emphasizes the value of using branded signatures for outreach.

Some significant points from the post about the importance of using a branded signature when pitching bloggers/journalists in the field:

Increases the credibility of the pitch.
Adds a differential factor against other outreach emails (because you make your brand’s phone number visible in your first email).
Higher friction of earning a response/contact via direct email or phone.

Here’s an example of a branded signature.

It’s easy to add default signature to your email. Go to your email provider settings and insert these specific details to your signature:

Name
Company position
Company name (linking to your website)
Logo
Phone number
Email

This action tip is pretty basic for advanced link developers out there, but if this is done correctly, this could really make a big difference to your campaign’s result.

2. Using top pages to identify link target’s interest

Identifying interest of a certain business/site is one of the underrated techniques to secure positive responses from niche bloggers/journalists. Knowing what idea, strategy or topic he/she is interested to discuss with you can help improve your pitch and make it beneficial to your prospects.

There are so many ways to determine what a specific website/blogger’s interest is. One of them is using Open Site Explorer to track the top pages of a certain website, which is commonly based on the page’s performance in terms of authority and # of referring domains. The tool is indeed useful when scaling this outreach approach – identifying link target’s interest.

Why ranking pages is a good identifiable factor of a link prospect’s interest?

Efforts devoted by a person can result to higher performance of the page, which means that if someone is very interested with the content he produced, he would promote the page to increase its page discovery (leading to a good link and social performance). Removing important pages like homepage and branded pages – about us, our team, etc.., this assumption is probably true.
Pages that get a lot of traction in the community can be sources of highly useful/acceptable content ideas.

Inserting prospect’s interest in your email is a good technique to spark some interesting conversations with your target.

3. Pitching unique ideas not yet discussed in a blog’s existing archives

Sending two or three content ideas to write about for a specific blog is one of the common strategies outreach specialists/marketing managers are using to get the attention of blog editors.

This guest blogging approach could still be improved by adding creativity to the content ideation process – pitching only unique blog topics.

These are just a few examples of how this approach can result to positive responses from bloggers.

This is very much applicable for contributors who don’t have any writing samples to include in their pitch in order to prove their capability of writing great content. By pitching unique ideas, you’ll be able to show how knowledgeable you are in your industry and how interesting your piece would be even you haven’t started writing it.

One of the content ideation tools I’m very much amazed and is part of my SEO arsenal today is FAQFox. What it does is that it allows you to see a list of questions people are asking in your community related to the keyword/phrase you inserted in its search box.

If you’re working on a new content marketing campaign, FAQFox can provide you several topics that might not yet been discussed on your target guest blogs. Including those topics to your pitch could make some difference to your campaign’s response and link acquisition rates.

4. Pursuing commitment to earn trust

The hardest part in outreach is not finding the contact emails of your target bloggers or journalists nor scheduling emails in your CRM tool but actually building the right relationships and earning trusts from your potential amplifiers.

Effective relationship building doesn't only break relationship barriers between you and your amplifier but allows both parties to benefit from the partnership you both actually agreed on.

There are many ways to strengthen relationships but one of the most valuable methods is initiating commitment to a specific task. This approach is doable in many simple actions (that you can also insert to your pitch). A few of them are:

Helping a blogger lighten his blogging workload by applying to become a regular blog contributor, especially in busy seasons like Christmas.
Committing yourself to send any future error pages that you might encounter in a links/resource pages (assuming you’re executing a broken link building technique).
Sharing someone’s content works on social and blog communities without asking for any incentives from that person. You can also use this commitment as your initial sentence to your pitch (i.e. I’ve been a social follower of your blog and shared your recent posts on [topic 1] and [topic 2].

Though commitment will always require time and effort, and it seems that this can’t be done in a scalable manner, the fruits of doing so would be much higher than plain engagements with your target influencers/bloggers.

5. Improving subsequent pitches by analyzing unsuccessful emails

There are tons of reasons why your email didn’t get a response (that you can somehow track using your CRM tool). Below are some of those reasons:

Pitch sent at non-peak hours of the recipient (burying down the email to the bottom part of the inbox).
Non-related pitch (wrong choice of potential amplifier).
Inactive or non-validated email.
Low interest to respond to the email (email may not be straightforward or beneficial for the receiver).

Knowing those reasons should push you to take actions to increase response and coverage rates in your next round of pitch. Those actions include:

Perform necessary actions to directly connect with your recipient in case you don’t get a response (they could be in the form of blog commenting or social engagement).
Find secondary emails and note them in your spreadsheet (look for non-generic emails like name@domain.com; don’t be satisfied with info@domain.com and other common types of emails).
Go back to auto-responder emails. They may include other contact points that you can utilize for second pitch.

6. Personalizing pitch based on industry’s needs

Personalization always comes to play when outreach/content promotion is being discussed on blogs and communities. But what most personalization in outreach lacks is including details that best describe the needs of the community.

Notable tips to consider in persona outreach:

Get insights from existing industry articles and determine the most common pain points in the industry (e.g. relationship building with family members in the parenting niche). Semantically improve your pitch by adding those insights to your pitch, in order to emphasize the need to respond to your email.
Utilizing information found on a specific website to focus the pitch on your content’s benefit. For instance, blogger outreach specifically designed for scholarship page promotion should note the range of budget and list of expenses the scholarship will cover (e.g. laboratory expenses for medical students).
Change opening and closing remarks in email (e.g. Happy parenting! for parenting bloggers).

7. Engaging early before performing initial outreach

Adding personal touch to pitch is good enough for mediocre outreach campaigns. However, if you are targeting high-tier blogs and news sites, you have to execute pre-engagement activities to tap signals to your target content amplifiers.

You don’t want to receive this kind of email, right?

Actionable tips to perform pre-outreach engagement activities:

Follow blogs you’d like to reach out to and share their recent blog posts on social and blog communities.
Authentically comment on targets’ recent blog posts (you can use RSS feeds to track their future articles). Let them remember you by adding value to your comments.
Include your blogs’ high quality articles to your own content. Let them know about it via email/social even before you connect to them for your main pitch.
Subscribe to their newsletter and learn the latest updates about their brand and its industry.

Pre-outreach engagement initiates relationship building right from the start of your outreach campaign, which makes it easy for both parties to know each other and help you identify what would best work in your pitch.

8. Writing more on benefits rather than descriptions

If you’re doing PR for quite some time now, one of your must-do acts is writing email copies that are saleable to journalists who are looking for new stories to cover in their news sites.

This sales approach in outreach is also applicable to other outreach campaigns like content contribution or link requests wherein they require solid lines of benefits to persuade someone to give a link to a certain blog whether or not there is an intention to have one.

Now, here are some tips to make your pitch benefit-focused:

Get straight to the unique value proposition of your content (if it is a direct product, then doing so is very vital to your success). Emphasize content’s UVP in the first few lines of your email.
For content contribution, some authority blogs require bullet points of subtopics that you want to discuss in the article not just the list of suggested topics/titles. In this case, adding benefits or points to your pitch would be a better option rather than just listing down suggested ideas that you want them to choose from.
For content aimed at getting links from industry-related blogs, you might consider adding a few lines in your pitch detailing which sections/paragraph in the post you would want to be mentioned. Provide reasons why it would be a great fit to add as a resource to their article.

It is very important to understand the worth of your content before promoting it to your target audience. Confidence in selling can easily be seen in your pitch.

9. Aiming for semantic improvement

Editing your email copy before sending it or running an editorial review for email copies/templates can help filter out unnecessary lines/texts in your pitch, which can overall help increase your campaign’s response rate.

Editorial review for outreach involves semantic improvement, which is identifying elements that are robotic in nature and changing them to make pitches appear natural for receivers.

One good example of this is using the phrase personal blog instead of naming the personal website of the blogger (e.g. www.venchitotampon.com).

This is a basic editing knowledge for writers that should also be impart to outreach specialists.

10. Including the brand’s latest activity

Pitches that are appreciative in sense must include details of the brand’s latest activity.

If you’re telling someone that you like his blog, you should include his brand’s latest activity. This approach will let that person know that you really know something about his website and his personal interest.

Other latest activities of the brand that you can include in the pitch:

His latest tweet or other social profile updates (choose one that you know that you can provide feedback/insights to).
His latest newsletter (subscription) and add some feedback to it.
His latest blog post/content (leave some comments straight in your pitch).

11. Lending two hands for ongoing conversations

Best results in outreach can't be achieved in just one-time conversations. It may take five rounds or more exchange of emails before actually yielding the desired result (partnership, link/mention, brand coverage, etc..).

So it is very important that you offer the best help all throughout the conversation with your outreach prospect to let him feel of the value that you want to provide to that person.

Helping hand tips that you can apply:

For content contribution, you can ask the blogger/editor if he is interested to give you an access to his Wordpress blog so you can by yourself create a draft of your article and submit it for review, instead of just sending your finished article with images attached via email and let him do the review and publishing himself.
Create customized featured images for all your third-party content. You can find free non-licensed photos here. Add some texts and borders and you now have high quality images for your posts.
If it is a link request, send him the date of the post and specific section in the article where you want your brand/content to be mentioned.

Other resources about helping hand outreach approach:

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

The Rules of Link Building

Link building is a fast-pacing game where every marketer competes with one another to achieve a certain goal, while still following the rules of the game.

Building links today doesn’t require you to know every high quality link building strategy other marketers are aware of. What matters today are the result of the game and how you win it using your own strategy.

If you’re wondering about the link building rules, then here’s an infographic (created by Me and OSI Affiliate) that will show you the dos and don’ts’ of link building (with actionable points below the image). Don’t forget to share it to your followers.

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Please include attribution to Digital Philippines with this graphic. <a href='http://digitalphilippines.net/rules-link-building/'><img src='https://sharprocket.com.ph/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Rules-of-Link-Building.jpg' alt='Rules of Link Building ' width='540' border='0' /></a>

Dont’s of link building

Beware links you control

Controllable links can sometimes tempt you to abuse using your target keywords as preferred anchor texts for links that you’re building from other websites.

Though exact match keyword-rich anchor texts are still valuable for your site’s search visibility (as discussed by Rand Fishkin in his Whiteboard Friday at Moz), you need to be careful with how you use anchor texts for link building.

A few things to consider when building controllable links:

Balance your exact match anchor texts with partial match anchor texts.
Use other related phrases or synonyms of your primary keywords as your secondary anchor texts – e. g. white hat link marketing services for link building services.
Optimize your contributed content for search engines so even if you don’t have keyword-rich anchor texts, you would still get value from the page because it ranks very well in SERPs and can give you recurring referral traffic back to your website. You might want to check out this comprehensive on page SEO guide by Cyrus Shepard on Moz to learn how to properly optimize your page.

Links that scale

Scalable link building may be harmful at times because it pushes you to just follow one process that repeatedly gets the same results for your website. If the process doesn’t have any improvements over time, chances are your campaign would be ineffective after a few months or execution.

If you are a part of an SEO team or a link building agency, you deeply understand that having at least one tactic that can help you build links for any websites (regardless of their industries) ensures your team’s capability to get results for your clients’ campaigns.

The reality is there’s no tactic that fits to all industries and all types of websites.

For instance, guest blogging won’t be applicable to all niches unless you intersect your website’s theme to other industries (i.e. linking to travel blogs from your running shoes store). But for a direct guest blogging approach (i.e. running shoes store – running shoe blogs), there are little chances that you can build several contextual links using content contribution approach.

Most of blogs in the finance niche requires payment of at least $50 in order to allow you to publish posts for their websites. This doesn’t make sense for agency owners. They can simply hire someone to write a post for their client’s blog that will also cost the same amount but will get more than just one link from relevant blogs.

Broken link building also has the same situation when it comes to scalable link building. Garett French shared a list of sub-niches where you can find profitable resources/links pages. These are specific sub-categories of main industries that you need to intersect with your brand’s content theme in order to create a highly linkable content asset (given that the broader your content’s target audience is, the probability of building more links to your page is higher).

Never ask for anchor text

A natural link profile has diverse types of anchor texts: exact match, partial match and branded anchor texts. See this example below.

If a website naturally earns links to its homepage and deep pages, you should be able to see a link portfolio with a variety of non-branded and branded anchor texts. This helps Google know that the site aren’t manipulating its link building campaign, particularly asking for specific anchor texts when reaching out to bloggers or potential linkers.

Never ask for anchor text.

But again, there’s still room for improvements here. You never ask someone a specific anchor text but you can nudge him what specific phrases they can use to link to your page.

Here are a few tips to apply this link psychological nudge:

If you’re looking to build a new brand/site for your business, you can consider adding keywords to your brand name to easily help people identify your unique selling point and use your keywords as anchor texts for external linking. Classic examples of brands with keywords attached to their names are Linkarati, SkyrocketSEO and PointblankSEO.
Initiate using target keywords as anchor texts when building links from other documents/pages (if they are controllable links) to entice other readers/bloggers who read your page to link to your page with the same keyword(s) that you used.
Produce content assets discussing related phrases of keywords you want to rank for in order to make readers understand how important those keywords are for you and for your brand.
Use preferred anchor texts in voice-led discussions like webinars to make it known to your audience about words/phrases that must be associated to your business/website.
Add descriptive keywords to your link building conversations to nudge potential linkers to use your preferred anchor texts when they link to your documents or pages.

Don’t link externally in footer

Links appear in the footers of pages carry less weight than links appearing within the main content areas of webpages (check out this reference on Moz). With that being said, if it is not necessary to link to your deep pages in the footers of your page, then don’t do so.

If external footer link is needed in such cases that you want visitors to easily navigate your visitors without trying to influence page rank in your website (even though, page rank doesn't exists anymore), then doing it would be useful for your audience.

Avoid site wide (except for navigation)

Websites with site-wide links from other pages (whether relevant to the website or not) are prone to Penguin filters.

Though there are exceptions to this rule, this type of actions are what Penguin trying to look for in every website, so having a careful action with regards to this case can help you get away from some sort of link penalization.

Instead of focusing on getting site-wide links, why not exert your efforts on getting truly editorial links within the main body of other sites which can definitely impact your brand’s ranking potential in search results.

Do’s of link building

Do link building

Planning is good and creating a good link building strategy matters. But executing what you’ve planned is more important than any other phases in link building.

There are many old-school white hat techniques that can help you get big results today but improving some of the methods would be a better plan before executing your link development campaign.

Tips to improve your link development tactics:

Do blog commenting or sharing of other related brands’ content on social networks to increase familiarity and to improve link acquisition rate when you start reaching out to them for regular content contribution.
If there are limited link opportunities within your niche, try intersecting your brand to other profitable niches so you can expand your link building territory and make it easy for you to build links for your pages.
Focus on 20 percent link attraction by creating uniquely useful content and consistently doing so until you build a solid community around your brand (and become known as an expertise in your industry).

Focus on distribution

Don’t stop creating content for your blog. Make sure you invest in distributing it to your target audience, specifically to your potential linkers/bloggers.

One thing to keep in mind in content distribution is the value of relationships.

Instead of reaching out to hundreds of like-minded bloggers, why not invest your time building connections with a few ones and strengthen your relationships with them. Building alliances with groups of people having the same vision/mission will help you expand your influence, that you will need later on to get more brand exposure and social shares and links for your content.

Content distribution hacks you need to know:

Add social sharing buttons to pages/posts you want to get amplified to increase chances of attracting new visitors from social platforms where your posts have been shared.
Link to your content from your content distribution efforts like guest blogging, interviews and knowledge participation on other niche-specific blogs.
Utilize paid ads like Stumbleupon to put initial eyeballs to your content and earn some organic visits from that activity (check out this post on Siegemedia about stumbleupon marketing guide).
Automate tracking of press coverage or information request on social (e.g. Twitter) using IFTTT that you can leverage to build more exposure to your content and naturally earn links from top media outlets in your industry.

Outreach rocks

Outreach always has a goal. Whether it is for a link or assisted conversions, having a goal and mission in mind when working on your link execution can help you push yourself to the limit until you acquire desired highly valued links for your brand.

Tips for effective link building outreaches:

Make your pitch straightforward by using subject lines that defines your outreach purpose (e.g. Broken links found on [Site Name])
Use pictures as introductory sentence to add humor to your pitch and encourage positive response from your link prospects.
Always tell who you are and what you do in your pitch. If you’re not an avid reader or follower of the brand, they won’t care about your email so make sure you add some human nature to your outreach.

Must-read link building outreach resources:

Link value = Quality of Traffic

Traffic is still the quantifiable measurement of how valuable your links are. But you need to understand that it’s not only about the quantity of traffic that matters, but quality of course.

If you are a real estate business and you’re getting thousands of links from an SEO blog, then it won’t convert much better than tens of links you earn from a real estate or niche-related sites like home improvement. One lead among tens of links is more valuable than 0 lead from thousands of links.

How to acquire high quality links with conversion-led traffic:

Identify where your audience resides. Don’t limit yourself with direct relevancy (i.e. flower shops – flower blogs) but identify opportunities where leads could also be coming to your business. In the given example, wedding blogs and dating/relationship blogs should also be included in your list of link opportunities.
Create a sub-niche targeted content to earn high quality backlinks both from commercial and non-commercial websites. For instance, if you are local medical store, you can create a scholarship program for nursing students. If promoted heavily, you can get links from educational sites in the health niche that can help you can build more partnerships with local health institutions (potential leads).

Embrace no follow

There are still debates about whether or not a no-follow link still adds value to a certain page/site.

Though I will not discuss that topic in this post, you can just read these articles on Wordstream and Moz that will explain to you why you should still consider no-follow links in your link arsenal strategy.

Other Resources:

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

how-to-monitor-backlinks-backlinks-this-2014-and-beyond

How to Monitor Your Backlinks this 2014 and Beyond

One of the difficult aspects of link building is finding websites or pages that can link out to your content or domain and bring targeted traffic to your website.

If you can’t find a relevant and high quality page to target for link building, then it’s impossible to increase links in your website’s link profile.

This problem can be solved by monitoring incoming links (new) pointing to websites that are related to your brand (whether or not they are your competitors).

Monitoring backlinks will help you in your link building activities such as:

Easily prospect pages that linked out to your competitors (those who’re rendering the same product/service).
Analyze the linking behavior of bloggers and webmasters in your space so you can easily plan a strategy that will guarantee links to your website.
Plan how you can build links from websites in similar industries that your competition has no clue about.
Create a content that is targeted to audiences of sites linking to your competitors that are likely to link to your website as well.

Becoming a proactive link builder rather than a reactive one can help you win the competition given that you’re the first one to find link opportunities that your competitors haven’t thought of yet.

Now the question is, how can you monitor backlinks of your competitors and even similar sites from related industries all at the same time?

The answer is to use Monitor Backlinks tool.

Table of Contents

Side Note: I’m a giving a discount coupon for those who want to purchase Monitor Backlinks (see the coupon code below).

What it does is that it allows you to monitor your links (obviously) of your domain as well as of your competitors all in just a single platform.

Let’s go first with monitoring links pointing to your website/domain.

Monitor incoming links to your domain

There are many reasons why you should start monitoring incoming backlinks to your website, but here’s a few ones you should consider:

To build stronger connections with bloggers and linkers in your industry (those who linked to your content) by sending thank you messages to their emails.
To identify which of your blog posts are highly linkable and which type of content you would want to invest further to attract more editorial links to your website.
To document the number of links you are earning every month (so you can leverage some of your linking activities to add more numbers to your link profile).

With the above reasons, you should have now decided to monitor backlinks to your domain.

Monitor Backlinks tool has an easy to use and understand platform. If you’re a newbie in the industry, then this may work for you very well.

If you wish to monitor your website, you simply go to the Select a domain tab and choose Add New Domain.

Choose between the two buttons:

Add Domain (yellow) – if you have a Google Analytics account in that domain, then choose this
Add domain without Google Analytics – self explanatory

If you choose the first option, then select the Google Analytics profile of that domain.

Then click Add Domain.

Add the websites of your competitors or just skip this step if you wish not to monitor links of your competitors.

If you want to track rankings of keywords you’re targeting for your website, then add them to the next step (add your keywords).

When done, you should now see this platform.

Monitor incoming links of your competitors

You have an option to add the website of your competitor or a non-competitor site that is also targeting your audience.

If you’re working on a teen driving website you can choose a parent driving blog (non-competitor) as a domain for link monitoring.

This way you’ll have chances of finding link opportunities that your competitors haven’t thought of.

Now, if the tool allows you to add four competitors, choose two non-competitor websites for backlink monitoring and leave the other two for your competitors.

How to add domains of your competitors

Click on your website, then choose Competitors in the drop down menu.

Click Add new competitor.

Add the website of your competitor and click Add competitor button.

Now you can already track links of your competitors. If you wish to see your competitors’ links straight in the dashboard of Monitor Backlinks, simply scroll down the page.

Here’s a quick overview of the dashboard (competitors’ links).

There is an export button that you can click on if you want to get a spreadsheet of all the monitored links.

Getting value from link monitoring

It’s very easy to monitor links of your competitors and similar websites in your industry, but the most challenging part is to actually think of how you can maximize those link data to improve your link building campaign.

To get more insights from monitored links, you have to export them from the Monitor Backlinks dashboard.

Once you have the spreadsheet, you need to remove columns that are unnecessary to make decisions from link monitoring.

The spreadsheet should now have columns for:

Ahrefs Rank/Rating
Domain
URL From
URL To
Anchor

Sort the links by increasing Ahrefs rating/rank to get a quick overview of the first hundreds high quality links.

Homepage links

If you consider building homepage links as your top priority, then you should only focus on pages in the URL From tab that only points out to homepage links in the URL to tab.

These are pages that are intended to link out to the homepage URL of your competitor.

You can also use the Anchor column of the spreadsheet to sort links based on their linking purposes (i.e. links pointing to homepage URL only).

See the quick tutorial below to sort links based on branded anchor texts (e.g WPBeginner or WPBeginner.com).

You can get homepage links for your website by focusing on two types of links (pointing to your competitors).

Internal pages (i.e. blog posts) pointing to your competitor’s homepage (e.g. Top Wordpress Resource Websites in 2014)
Blogroll links using branded anchor texts (e.g. WPBeginner).

We’re only talking about probability of linking here not the certainty that those pages/links would definitely link to your homepage. There are cases that linkers would love to link to your content and not directly to your homepage (e.g. a list of best wordpress resources page linking to your content).

Deep links

If you’re looking for some deep links for your website, then you can use the spreadsheet to see websites who linked to your competitors’ deep pages.

All the URLs in the URL To column are internal pages of your competitors that earned links from pages in the URL From column.

If you will analyze how each of those linking to pages (URL From) linked to your competitors’ pages, then you can think of a strategy to possibly get links from those pages.

Examples of tactics you can use for each competitor’s linking page/site

Participate in offline local niche communities

This type of local niche meet-up is hard to find if you will not consistently monitor links in your space.

What to do with this kind of event?

Invest your time in participating in this local niche community. Given that participants are part of your target audience, you have a high chance to get some coverage for your brand (when they start to write about you and your brand on their own blogs).
Become a regular sponsor if you have a huge budget set for marketing/promotion. Links will follow from bloggers in your space (e.g. news, stories or blog posts about what they learned during the event) once you start doing some sponsorships.
Show your expertise by speaking in the event. Links won’t be guaranteed using this approach but regular blog readers and additional subscribers are some returns you can obtain from public speaking.

Suggest a resource to a .Edu website

I know this is a common link building technique but if you’re adding a few texts to your outreach email, then you can get a higher conversion rate in your link building outreach.

You can add these sentences below to make your outreach more effective:

[Competitor’s content] has been a valuable resource for me since I started to learn about [topic]. Would you mind if I suggest a few more resources that you can add to your page?

Offer your content to be translated to other languages

If you published a content that is very well received by your audience, then you can offer your content to non-English blogs to publish in other languages.

Get featured on popular niche interview series

One benefit of monitoring links in your space is that you’ll be able to discover interview posts featuring your competitors (bloggers/authors).

You can then reach out to those blogs who conduct interviews and ask if they’re still looking for more interviewees to cover on their blogs.

Make sure you send them links that show your expertise and experience about certain subjects you want to be known for to increase the odds of being interviewed on those sites

Get inspirations for your next content asset

Link monitoring will help you find ideas/topics from successful content pieces that are already published on the web.

You won’t need to replicate the exact content but just get insights on why and how it managed to get hundreds of shares and attract editorial links

This example shows that a high quality illustration guide best resonates the non-techy people including small business owners.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

A Simple Broken Link Building Process for New and Intermediate Link Builders

Broken link building is still considered as one of the effective white hat link building strategies in the post-penguin era, seeing that the value it provides (telling the webmaster that there are error links in the page) will always be beneficial for both parties (the webmaster who wants to update and provide positive user experience to his visitors and the person who wants a link, as the defunct link is being replaced with the link pointing to his content).

There are already posts out there that discuss about this same topic, but I know that there’s room for some updates and simplicity. J

In this post, I’d like to share with you a simple broken link building process that I had been using for the past few months and hopefully you’ll learn some new tips that are still not on the SEO table.

Let’s get started.

Prospecting

Understanding the value of your content assets and how your market environment works would be very important factors in determining which niches you would want to penetrate for broken link building.

As marketers, we can be as creative as we want and should always think out of the box when targeting our audiences for branding and content promotion.

If you’re working on a link building campaign for an automobile website, then you will think car driving websites and related sites as your primary target for link building.

However, if you think laterally, you can come up with a larger view of niches that you can reach out for your broken link building efforts.

Source: BuiltVisible

If you always consider this approach when doing any link building methods not just broken link building, you will always discover opportunities that you haven’t seen before.

How to prospect broken link building opportunities:

If you already know your primary targets as well as your secondary link targets, then you can now use any of the following link prospecting methods:

Google search queries

If don’t know any advanced search operators, don’t worry. You can use the BLB tool by my friend, Jayson Bagio to easily find resource pages that are related to your brand.

The Plain Search tab has a list of advanced search terms (search operators plus keywords), wherein you will just include your target keywords, and the tool will automatically generate links pointing to Google search URLs.

Take this one as an example.

If you will add “safety driving” to the Pulled Keywords column, the spreadsheet will give you a URL pointing to its Google search page (under the Trigger column or Column E). Click on the URL and you will see the Google search page.

To click multiple pages in search results with just one click, you can use LinkClump. It’s a tool that will allow you to open multiple tabs with a single click (right click) on a page.

Reverse engineering

You already heard this link prospecting technique since link building has been known to marketers. But in broken link building, this is one of my favorite ways to populate a list of link targets (resource pages) given that a single resource page (when is highly linkable) can give tons of links opportunities (other link pages) pointing to it.

There are four pages that you can reverse engineer for broken link building:

Reverse engineer a similar content

When you already have a content to promote to your audience, then you can easily identify its similar content assets. If it is a parent’s guide to teen driving, then its similar content could be pages that rank for that specific search phrase.

Reverse engineer a resource page

When you stumbled upon a resource page and you think it is fit to standards you set (I will discuss this later in this post), you can consider it as your link target (copy and paste it to your spreadsheet).

But the wheel should never stop there. The resource page could have other links pages pointing to it.

Let’s take one example. This is a government’s resource page that list down driving policy related resources/content.

If you go deeper into pages that link to the above links page, you can discover more link opportunities from it, just like this example below.

Reverse engineer a broken page

When you identified a broken link on a page, you can grab its URL to your favorite link building tool and find pages that link to it.

Below is a broken page that has four referring link domains.

You can add these discovered links pages to your spreadsheet.

Reverse engineer a topic-centered website

There are websites that are themed to one specific subject matter (sub-niche), which
most of the time are described in their URLs (e.g. exact match domains). For example in the driving industry, there are many EMDs that are centered towards teen driving (like this example below).

To find topically-related resource pages, you can simply reverse engineer this entire domain using Ahrefs (or other link prospecting tools).

Head-term prospecting

I already discussed this technique in my recent post about profitable backlink sources. But for those who missed reading that post, here’s a recap on how to use this method for link prospecting.

The idea of head-term prospecting is creating a huge list of resource pages pointing to main domains discovered through simple Google searches for head terms.

Here is a short step by step guide for head-term prospecting:

Choose a head term in your niche (For the same example above, your head term is driving, secondary terms are teen driving and parent driving).
Do a Google search for that head term.
List down all the domains listed in the search results.
Populate your list by adding websites listed in the SERPs for the search query: related:domain.com (use listed websites earlier for related searches).
Plug each of your listed website to your favorite link building tool and check the most used anchor texts of referring domains linking to it.
Add each of those anchor texts to your search query to discover more resource pages in your industry.

Broken link building spreadsheet

Make sure all your prospected resource pages are documented in a spreadsheet.

You can use Google Docs or make a copy of this broken link building spreadsheet.

Here is the purpose for each column in the Link Prospecting section:

Linking from page – you’ll place your prospected resource page here (e.g. example.com/links)
Domain – it has a built-in formula that will automatically strip your linking from page URLs to their specific domains.
Linking to page – place the URL of content/page that you want to build more links to.
Page Title – insert the title of the page (not the meta title).
DUP – has a formula that will tell you if the prospected resource page is already a duplicate of a resource page you listed in the spreadsheet (Yes for duplicate, No for non-duplicate)

The next step is Qualification. You can do this phase while performing your prospecting activity (if you’re a sole link builder) but if you have someone in your team that you can work with, then let him do the part of qualifying the resource pages you listed in the sheet.

Qualification

There are only two things that matter when determining if a resource page is a good fit to the content you’re producing:

Relevancy
Obtainability

Relevancy

This one is pretty obvious and easy as you can look at the Title of the page and Categories listed in the page to see if the page is somewhat related to your content.

But there are cases where you need to think laterally to see if there’s a connection between that resource page and your content. A good example is when you find an education links page on a government website. If you have a teen driving content, then even if the links page didn’t list down any driving resources, you still have chances of getting a link from that page, only if that content has something to do with this topic - educating teens on how to drive safely on the road.

Always think the relations between two industries.

Obtainability

Understanding on whether there’s a chance to get a link from a resource page will help you filter out resource pages that are less likely to give you a link because of the types of links/resources they are only listing down.

Below are ratios that I consider when identifying if there’s a big probability that a resource page could give us a link.

Internal links to external links ratio

To help you understand this, I’ll give a few cases where this ratio could be considered.

Case 1: All internal links

It is impossible to get a link from a resource page that only lists down links pointing to its internal resources, unless you’re handling a website that is co-managed by the resource page owner.

Case 2: Partly internal links, partly external links

If the resource page has both types of links (internal and external backlinks), then there is a chance to get a link from it. I usually set a link percentage in mind to determine if the page is worth reaching out to (e.g. 70% external links, 30% internal links).

Case 3: All external links

Links pages with plain external links are always good to go in broken link building. However, there are still more considerations that you need take on, which are the listed ratios below.

Commercial links to non-commercial links ratio

You know your website right, if it is a non-commercial site (.gov, .edu. .org) or a commercial type (.com).

Considering your website commerciality when qualifying resource pages could help you remove links pages that have external links pointing to non-related commercial type of websites (if in case you’re a commercial website).

Let’s get straight to cases.

Case 1: All external non-commercial links

If you have a commercial website, then you won’t have chances of getting a link from this type of resource page.

Case 2: All external commercial links

If you have a non-commercial website (e.g. .gov), you could get a link from the page, since those websites are more likely to link out to authoritative content from non-commercial sites.

Case 3: All external (partly commercial, partly non-commercial) links

Both commercial and non-commercial sites have chances to earn links from this type of resource page.

Local-based to non-local based ratio

There are links pages that only list down local links, which in this case are easily determined by their page titles and TLDs of external links they listed.

You have chances of building links from resource pages that link out to relevant local external links. For instance, if you own this domain (www.homeimprovement.com.au), you’re pretty sure you can get a link from an Australian resource page, but for a local-based one (i.e. Brisbane home improvement companies), you need to have a home improvement office in Brisbane or should be offering services to Brisbane audience to get a link from that page.

Homepage links to deep links ratio

I don’t really consider much this ratio but for resource pages with listings for associations, organizations or companies, considering this ratio would very much needed to see if you can obtain a link from the page.

Most of the time, that type of resource page (listings for associations, organizations, etc..) would not bother to give a link to specific content even if the content is very much related to the page.

Set link standards

To filter out low quality resource pages in your list, then you really have to set standards for your broken link building campaign.

As an example, let’s use a website that sells second-hand used cars in Brisbane, Australia (with only one store location).

From the given example, you can set standards like the following:

Resource pages that are:

Topically related to car or driving topics or lateral topics
Page Authority of 30 and above (use Mozbar)
With 100+ referring link domains (use Ahrefs)
Contains less than or equal to 50 external links
No external links pointing to malicious or spam pages
No signs of link exchanges or asking for reciprocal links
Content should be above the fold

This example of link standards will help you and your team to become more effective in link prospecting as you can easily determine if the resource page is fit to your campaign.

Broken link identification

To identify broken links in a resource page, you can use Check My Links tool. When you click on the tool at the upper right side of your screen, it will automatically identify the status codes of each link in the resource page with color markings like:

Green for 200 code
Red for 40X code (404, 403, etc..)
Black for 50x code (e.g. 501)

The tool is not perfect. There are times that red-highlighted links are still live, so better make sure that you check out non-green colored links if there are still content place in them or they’re redirecting to another domain with the same topic.

When you identified broken links in a resource page, you can now include them to your spreadsheet.

If there are multiple broken links in the page, just choose 3 of them and add them to the broken link building spreadsheet.

Content creation

When trying to find ideas for content (particularly for broken link building campaign), I usually go with the following methods:

Webarchive on dead pages
Digging in to topically-related reddit sections

Wayback machine on dead pages

We all want content that can naturally earn links in its first few days of launch.

A linkable asset has its characteristic of attracting backlinks even without promoting them.

Looking this type of content is doable when you find a dead page with domains/pages linking to it.

You can do this by creating a separate tab to discover highly-linked dead pages from your link prospect list.

Add a function in the B2 column =COUNTIF(A2:A5,A2:A)

Copy and paste all the broken links you discovered in your BLB tab.

Then Sort the broken links with the highest to lowest number of occurences.

The broken link with the highest number of occurrence has the highest number of pages linking to it.

See the history of the dead page by using Wayback Machine (you can use this bookmark to quickly find its content history).

Examples on how to use this method:

Take a look at these 2 examples of dead pages.

Distractions in Everyday Driving and Safe Driving: A Parent’s Guide to Teaching Teens.

If you will both plug them to Wayback Machine, you’ll find that there are content in them (pdf files).

Tips to recreate dead pages:

Follow the pattern/outline of topics of the dead page when creating a new content.
Add more valuable information to make it more comprehensive than it used to be.
Invest in design and make the page visually-appealing to your visitors.
Add a downloadable pdf below the page to capture subscribers in your email list.

Reddit niche and local-specific sections

Reddit is one of the profitable places to find topics for your content given that the content ranked high in a specific reddit section proves that it is highly useful for its Reddit users (since participants are allowed to upvote their content of choice).

To help you understand how to get some inspirations from Reddit, here are a few examples of discussions that were upvoted by many in the driving Reddit section.

All of the above ideas are interesting and entertaining when compiled into one big content piece.

For serious topic like car driving, you have think outside of the box and see which topic can tap into other industries while still focusing on your niche.

Here is a good example of a great content about road trip planner.

Outreach

The outreach phase starts with finding email addresses of your target linkers.

There are many ways to find an email address, but below are some common examples that you might encounter.

Finding email addresses

Footer

Non-commercial website’s contact form

For non-commercial websites’ contact form, you need to select the web/tech department in the drop down box, as this department is more inclined to reply to your email message once you start reaching out to them.

Multiple emails with no indication of who to contact to

You may encounter contact pages that do not indicate emails to contact to concerning website or technical feedback. In this case, you need to include all the emails listed in the page (but only choose one that you’ll reach out to for promotion).

Admin email

Twitter handle

Another way to find email address of a specific link target is by plugging his Twitter profile to Google search, and adding words like email or [at] [dot].

Link Buzzmaker

If you have a Buzzstream account, then you can use its Link Buzzmaker tool. Here’s how you can use it.

Once you identified the email address of the website or its contact us/form page (when the email address is not available), you can now fill up the details in the outreach section of your broken link building spreadsheet.

If you can’t find the name of the person you wish to contact to, then simply put Admin.

Things you should be looking at aside from contact forms and email addresses:

Link exclusion in email messages

Webmasters especially those that handle big websites add spam filters to their email service providers to filter out any spam messages they might be receiving over time. In the above case, if you happen to include a straight link to your first outreach, your email will be more likely place in the spam section of the webmaster’s inbox.

Links policy

Some authoritative websites have their links policy pages to let users know on which types of websites/pages they would only want to link out to. In the above example, the website would include links from academic, non-profit or private nature sites.

Choosing the email address for your outreach

There are many posts out there that discuss what email address is best for outreach. In my case, I had success with using the following types of email address:

Note: I use female email accounts, as they tend to get more responses than male accounts (see this post).

Researcher’s email

You act as a researcher here, working on your school works. Webmasters are much more responsive to this type of email since they are always concern on the feedback of their visitors/users, especially to those people who’re doing their school research.

Agency partner

You do outreach in behalf of the company, words like I am Venchito Tampon, a PR agency partner of [Company Name].

Since you’re transparent with what you’re doing and you also provide value to your link targets, you can secure feedback from them.

Use corporate email for this one (e.g. venchito@digitalphilippines.net)

In-house marketer

Act as if you’re an employee in your client’s company. Though you’re reaching out as someone promoting a content from your brand, you can still get some responses and links using this type of email address.

Use corporate email for this one (e.g. venchito@digitalphilippines.net)

Schedule emails based on link targets’ time zones

One of the reasons why your email didn’t get opened by your recipients is that they receive it during non-peak hours.

If you’re sending your pitches at the time they don’t intend to open and read emails, your email is less likely to be replied.

I send emails on Tuesday and Thursday of the week, at 7am on respective time zone of the target.

How can you know the country of a link prospect?

Simply look at the TLD of the website (if it is www.example.com.au, then you should send your email in Australian timezone).

If the TLD is not country-specific, you can still figure out the country of the link prospect by simply looking at the Rapportive feature (right side bar) of your screen. See the example below.

There are many tools that you can use for outreach management but I personally like RightInbox, for the primary reason that it allows payment from paypal subscribers.

To set schedules, you first need to identify timezones that you will use for the outreach.

Here are my three chosen timezones:

7 AM Sydney
7 AM London
7 AM New York

You can still add more options but the above is already enough to start your outreach.

When you reached out to one target, go back to your spreadsheet and choose Yes in the Outreach column.

You also need to add the date of your follow up (i.e. one week after you send your email).

Increase agility and effectiveness with tools

There are three common tools that you should start using for your outreach campaign.

Undo send

It is a life-saver tool in outreach since you will be able to edit your email even after you send it.

Canned responses

Canned responses will help you include a certain text/template to your email message right in the Gmail platform.

Here’s a quick guide on how to add Undo Send and Canned responses.

Labels

If you’re using one email account for outreach, then you need the Labels feature of Gmail to identify if the link prospect belongs to your specific client.

I normally use acronyms to set identity for my clients. For example, South Side Auctions can be shortened to SSA.

To see the progress of my outreach campaigns, I labeled the email that I received into three categories:

Ongoing Conversation (OC) colored green – when we’re still negotiating for a link.
Live Link (LL) colored yellow – the recipient accepted our request to add a link to his resource page.
No Reply or No Link (NR) colored red – when there are signs we can’t get a link.

When you add your client’s name, it will now be:

OC – SSA
OC – LL
OC – NR

How to create and manage your labels

So when you get a link from your target, you will simply label it as LL – Client’s Name.

Outreach templates

Here are examples of email templates that you can add to your canned responses and use for your outreach campaign.

Note: Email templates below are designed for researcher type of outreach person.

Template #1: For resource pages with broken links and no indication of person to contact to

Subject: Found a problem on your site

Hi there,

I was searching for references for my school work when I found one of your pages. It seems like that there are links listed in the page that have no content in them. I don’t know if they were moved or just errors.

Would you want me to tell you which pages are those? There might be other researchers that are looking for the content and might encounter the same errors.

Are you managing the website? If not, could you please refer me to the right person.

Thank you,

[Your Name]

Template #2: For resource pages with broken links and with indication of person to contact to

Subject: Found a problem on your website

Hi [Name],

Would you want me to tell you which pages are those? There might be other researchers that are looking for the content and might encounter the same errors.

Thank you,

[Your Name]

Template #3: For resource pages without broken links

A good resource for your visitors, [Name]!

Hi [First Name],

I was checking out some of the resources listed in the [Page Title] page of your website, and I knew of a couple resources that might be worth adding. Would you be interested if I sent them over? If not, I totally understand, just thought it couldn’t hurt to ask.

- Your Name

Template #4: Providing broken links

Thanks [First Name],

I’m happy to send them over. The ones I encountered in this page - [Linking from] were here:

1.[Broken Link 1](Anchor Text 1)

2.[Broken Link 2](Anchor Text 2)

3. [Broken Link 3](Anchor Text 3)

Hope that helps. Also, is there any chance I could make a quick suggestion? I'd like to suggest a few resources that might be worth adding to your page.

Well, if I come across any other website errors, I’ll be sure to reach back out.

- Your Name

Template #5: Suggesting your resource

Hi [Name],

Thank you for considering my feedback.

Happy to help!

Anyway, here are a few resources that you might consider to add to your resource page under [which category/section]:

[Content URL 1] (Page Title)
[Non-competitor URL 2] (Page Title)

Thank you,

Your Name

Approaches to make your broken link building campaign work more effective

Second-tier link building

Building links to pages that linked to you is a good off page SEO strategy if you want to empower your first tier/line of links.

Here are a few ways to increase links to your first tier links pages:

Include your resource page (where you get a link from) in your content contribution efforts (i.e. guest post) only if the resource page didn’t include any of your primary competitors.
Participate on forum discussions and include the resource page when it makes sense to be added to the forum thread. The resource page will act as a recommendation to your brand, services or content.

Misspellings

If you can’t find a broken link in a page, you can find misspellings in the context of the page by using this tool. Since you’re still adding value to the potential linker, you have high chances of getting the link.

Monitoring resource pages that recently linked to your competitors

If a link in a resource page is freshly acquired by your competitor, there is a high possibility to also get a link from that page.

You can use Monitor Backlinks, CognitiveSEO’s competitor link research tool or Ahrefs’ New/Fresh Links.

To secure a more positive response from your outreach, you can add this section/part in your email template:

I noticed that you recently update your [Resource Page Title]. Great job in adding new resources for [category/section].

Is there are a chance I can suggest a new [content/brand/page] to your resource page?

If not, we’re happy to just share your page in our office.

Finding niche businesses that closed their operations

There are businesses related to your industry that closed their operations due to certain issues like bankruptcy and incapacity to continue operation.

Businesses like this that have websites are good targets for broken link building.

You can find them by doing Google searches for terms like (“closed business” “niche” “city”) and populate your list by using Yelp’s site search (site:yelp.com intitle:closed “city” “niche”).

If you already have a list, then you can now identify if there are pages (e.g. resource pages) that are linking to them. Reach out to webmasters of those resource pages.

Even if you don’t find any broken links in those resource pages, you can use the closed business as your add-in value to your outreach template.

Add this section to your outreach template.

I stumbled upon your [Resource Page Title] and saw that you listed down [Closed Business Name]. I recently read a news that tells that [Business Name] has already closed their operations due to [describe the reason], more info here – [URL of news].

I’m just concern with visitors who’re visiting your resource page. They might clicked on a [Business Name’s website] that are not operating anymore.

Just dare to ask if you want me to suggest a few brands that are worth consider adding to your [Resource Page Title].

301 redirect link building

Providing broken links to a link target should not only be the value that you should include to your outreach template. There are cases that you might encounter a 301 redirect link in a resource page that points out to a different domain which is unrelated to the page it was listed in.

In this case, you can add this section to your outreach template:

I was searching for references for my school work when I found one of your pages. It seems like there are links listed in the page that are redirecting to websites that are not related to the theme of your page.

If you liked this post, you can subscribe to this blog or follow me on Twitter and Google+.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

11 Profitable Backlink Sources

Building backlinks in 2014 has been tougher than pre-penguin years and will be more difficult in the years to come. Seeing that a lot of webmasters already knew common link building tactics we SEOs are doing, it’s easy for them to detect pitches/outreaches that only aim to get links that we want from websites we’re reaching out to.

That kind of scenario only shows us that we need to look for new strategies in link building, strategies that would give real value to our clients.

We are real marketers, not just SEOs. We should make sure that all our campaigns as well as our actions are profitable to the business of our clients.

In this post, I’d like to share 11 profitable backlink sources that will surely give you links that you need for your website.

User-generated content

There are so many user-generated websites that you can take advantage of to promote your existing content/page.

Slideshare is one of the websites that you need to start leveraging for content promotion because it can give highly targeted visitors to your website.

This is an example of how slideshare can drive relevant visitors to your site through a link/mention on an influencer’s slide presentation.

There are several ways to get visibility through links/mentions from popular slide presentations on Slideshare. Here are a few that you can consider:

Build relationships with influencers in your space through blogger outreach and link inclusion in your site’s internal content (round-ups).
Invest in building your brand on Slideshare by adding more highly valued slide presentations that are actionable and provide real insights to your community.
Optimize your distributed content by targeting long tail keywords people are searching for to find information about your brand. Ranking for keywords using your visual content can help increase your chances of earnings/links from influencers, bloggers or speakers who are doing their research on the subject matter.

Customize your Slideshare profile by adding eye-catching images to attract new subscribers as new brand followers.
Link to your social accounts from your Slideshare profile (applicable for premium users) to pass link juice to your social accounts and to help grow your brand’s social following.

Capitalize on ranking forum pages

Forum marketing is one of the under-utilized content promotion techniques these days but if you will only look at the value that it provides to site owners or business owners, you would really want to invest in participating on industry-related forums.

This is an example of how marketing your website on forums can help you increase your referral traffic as well as bring potential customers/clients to your brand (which should be the aim of every link builder today).

How to find profitable forums:

Do a Google search for “your industry” forums query, sort the page results by Domain Authority (DA) and list all potential forum sites in a spreadsheet.
Add to your spreadsheet forums that are found using customer’s search query (e.g. shop [industry] business). Since this type of phrases is what customers are using to you’re your products/services online, they are more likely to buy/purchase from your brand.

Reverse engineer your competitors’ websites and look for niche-specific forum sites where they are actively participating.

Now that you have a list of forum sites, you can now build links using forum marketing. This is doable in two ways:

Complete your branded forum profile by adding important details about your website/brand (never forget to link to your homepage URL and social accounts to get more visibility to those pages)
Answer relevant questions on forum threads that you know you can provide value to (base it on your experience/expertise). Since the more you contribute on forums, there are chances that people would get to notice you and begin to follow your website/brand, leading to more link opportunities.

Industry newsletters

Newsletters from big brands/authorities in your space are good link sources given that they can really provide targeted visitors to your website for the main reason of the relevancy, between the newsletter link and your website.

This is a just an example of thousands of newsletters that people received from brands, some of them could bring traffic to your page/website, some are not. Nevertheless, they are places that can increase the online visibility of your business.

How to find websites that have relevant newsletters:

Use Twitter search to find newsletters that are connected to your brand (do searches for [industry] newsletter)
Do Google search for [industry] newsletter and find pages that allow users to earn mentions in newsletters either through content contribution or simple community participation.
Track upcoming newsletters using Fresh Web Explorer or Talkwalker Alerts.

How to get links from newsletters:

Become a regular contributor for blogs that send weekly/daily listings of articles to their existing subscribers.
Identify the types of content people are consuming in your space, create those content types on your site and heavily promote it (contact the content manager and just simply share your content). Classic example is Moz Top 10.
Submit your content to community sites in your industry and earn a mention from weekly newsletters they’re distributing to their members (e.g. Inbound.org’s Daily Digest). Start connecting with active members in those communities to help your content rank high on the listings through their individual upvotes.

High traffic directories

Getting targeted traffic is one of the best benefits you can get from directories (whether they are local or niche-specific).

The reality is some people are still using directories to research for top blogs/sites in your space, which if capitalized could provide continuous visits to your website (these are visits that are likely to engage with your brand in the long haul).

Alltop is one of the high quality directories that are strictly reviewing site submission to ensure that they only list sites that people could get value from (which are based on the authority and utility of content produced by them).

How to get inks from high traffic directories?

Submit your site to high quality directories with strict editorial guidelines. Usually they accept websites that have regular content (blog posts). So make sure you always keep your blog up to date to get higher chances of getting accepted on those directories).

How to find high traffic and customer-converted directories

Use customers search queries to discover local and niche directories (where to buy [product/service], shop [industry] business or shop [local] business)

Quickly search for curated list of directories in your space (e.g. top car directories), filter out websites that have low Domain Authority, without strict editorial guidelines and would need reciprocal links before being accepted to their listings.

Authoritative curated list

Earning a mention from a curated content adds credibility to your brand and can send trust, relevancy and authority signals to search engines, which makes it easy for your website to rank for highly competitive keywords.

There are so many ways to leverage this content-centric link building method, a few of them are:

Create a spreadsheet of blogs that consistently curate lists of websites, tools, resources or content pages. Find them using Fresh Web Explorer or any other alert mention tools. You can use any of the following phrases to find those blogs:

“your keywords round up”

“your keywords round up post”

“your keywords weekly round up”

“your keywords mash up post”

“your keywords post of the day”

“your keywords post of the week”

See the type of content industry curators are including in their lists. Replicate those content types and publish them on your blog. Reach out to those curators and get links.
Invest in building relationships with industry curators (start with five persons). Incentivize them by giving free access to premium products or offer something that will catch their interests and get them know your brand.
Help the page to get to the top spots of search results by mentioning it from your guest articles and from your other link building efforts like forum marketing and blog participation, to help it earn organic traffic, which can be turned into referral traffic back to your website.

High-tier resource pages

A resource page/post that provides comprehensive information about a certain topic will naturally earn editorial mentions from relevant websites/blogs which helps the content to get more eyeballs from its targeted readers (bringing more traffic to the website where the content is hosted).

I always believe that earning editorial mentions should be one of the link building goals that SEOs should start targeting today, besides the traffic and conversions linking pages could bring to websites they’re handling. Editorial/contextual links could prove the following:

Your content/page is valuable in terms of the message and new information it contains.
Your content/page reveals your brand’s expertise on certain topics.
Your content/page has a story that is educational, humorous or interesting (which is worth sharing to other people).

This is a screenshot of my client’s Google Analytics account that shows the referral visits he earned from an authoritative page (editorial mention).

This could also happen to your website by performing any of the following online activities:

Spend at least 15-30 minutes answering relevant questions on industry forums (show your expertise by adding brief but straightforward and actionable answers).
Optimize your content assets both for search engines and users by adding industry terms/phrases, local and niche entities and maintaining the purpose of each of your asset throughout the process of writing/creating them (check out this post by Distilled about content matrix).
Use content promotion strategies applicable to your content piece to have higher chances of earning links from your target linkers/bloggers. You can follow these actionable tips by Brian Dean.

Always look at the longevity of the information of your content (evergreen), since it always matter if you want to consistently earn links from researchers/bloggers who’re looking for references for their works. If you have timely pages on your website, you can just combine them into one big post, making them more up to date and ultimate resource in your industry (e.g. turn your link building 2014 and 2015 posts into one big resource page).
Identify assets in your website that received a lot of natural links in the past six months using Ahrefs or OSE, then think of ways on how you can add more valuable information to them. By doing this, you’ll get more chances of earning contextual links once your start promoting it to previous and new (potential) linkers in your industry.

One example of this is my updated link building post where I included additional contributions (tips) from 6 link building experts (you can click on the link to check out their contributions).

Contribution request on Twitter

Journalists, researchers or even bloggers today are now using Twitter to find insights or tips from top personalities or influencers that they can include as references or additional information for their works (their own content).

You can find those types of people by manually searching their status updates on Twitter (use #journorequest or #prrequest as your Twitter search terms).

You can also automate this approach by using IFTTT and Twilert tools. Use the RSS feed of Twitter (from Twilerts) and Gmail as your IFTTT options. Make sure that you add your keywords or industry terms to your Twitter alert in Twilerts to generate relevant results.

IFTTT will send you email alerts when there are journo or PR requests found on Twitter. It will look something like this:

When you received this kind of email alert, it is time to approach the journalist/blogger by following this simple step by step guide:

Follow the person’s Twitter profile.
Ask the person if he’d like to give you his email (always direct the conversation to email to easily engage him, especially if you want to build a stronger relationship with that person).
Provide a brief but useful comment/tip/insight about the topic for his upcoming post.
Invest in building connection with that person to earn more mentions/links from his future posts (both internal and external content).

This approach is like pulling attention from people who’re ready to give you links but still want to get your contribution about the topic you’re an expert in. I guess this can be one of your powerful link building techniques that you need to start leveraging today to build authority/influence in your niche as well as to get the desired attention that you want for your brand.

Competitor link building

Competitor link research or reverse engineering is one of the untapped ways to find link opportunities in the early stages of a link development campaign.

You will not only be able to find your competitors’ backlinks but also can help you:

Determine what type of content resonates to your targeted audience and make this as one of your go-to strategies when looking for better content ideas for your website.
Estimate the number of linking opportunities you can prospect on based on the links acquired by your competitors (make sure that you identified correctly your competitors – those that are very similar to your offerings (products/services), market audience and status level).
Estimate the number of linking root domains you need to pursue to rank for a specific keyword (this can be based on the average number of root domains pointing to the five pages ranking in search results for your target keyword).

To get started with competitor link research, you can use any of the following tools (for the link prospecting phase):

Mentions.net (freemium)
Monitor Backlinks (paid)

Mentions.net

Mentions.net allows you to find social and web mentions of your website as well as of your competitors’ sites. The tool will ease your work of finding those mentions since it will automatically provide you a list of web mentions in real time for keywords/sites you’re targeting.

Monitor Backlinks

This tool will allow you to track incoming links to your domain as well as to your competitors, making it easy for you to identify opportunities that are worth pursuing in terms of authority and relevancy of those links to your brand. It also has a feature that will generate the link data of links, such as their page and domain authorities, which if you will sort according to those metrics, you’ll find tons of high quality link opportunities (from guest blogging sites to resource pages).

If you’re still wondering how to use the tool, here is a short step by step guide for you.

Step 1: Login to the tool, add your own domain as well as domains of your competitors.

Step 2: Select your domain and click competitors in the drop down menu.

Step 3: Click View Links on your preferred domain.

Step 4: Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Export button.

Step 5: Do the same pattern to all of your competitors’ links (from Step 1 to Step 4), then consolidate all the links into one spreadsheet.

Step 6: Use Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis to get link data of those links.

Note: You can only generate data for every 200 links (batch basis).

Step 7: Export the list of links with link data from Ahrefs.

Step 8: Remove unnecessary columns and only include Ahrefs Rank, Domain Rank and Domains (All Referring Domains) columns.

Step 9: Include those additional data (Ahrefs Rank, Domain Rank, Domains) to your previeous spreadsheet.

Step 10: Filter your data by ascending Domains (Referring) and Domain Rank or Alexa Rank.

Click Sort & Filter in Excel, then choose Custom Sort.

Click Domainsin the Sort by drop down list, then choose Largest to Smallest in the Order section. Click Add Level, then choose Domain Rank in the drop down list and Largest to Smallestin the Order section.

When done, you now have a spreadsheet of all the links acquired by your competitors, sorted by the highest to lowest Referring Link Domains and Domain Rank.

How to leverage your list of competitors’ backlinks and mentions

Reach out to those brands that mentioned your competitors’ domains/pages and just simply share your own page/post (make sure it is very similar to your competitor’s content).
Determine how your competitors managed to earn/get those links. See if they focus on creating content assets in a consistent basis and replicate that same method to your brand.
Invest in building relationships with curators and influencers who link to your competitors’ domains, as they would naturally link to you as well when you have solid connections with them.
Create another list of link opportunities for roundups/curations (where your competitors get links from). See the type of content those curators/bloggers link out to and create that type of content.
Discover authoritative media outlets that mentioned your competitors’ brands (with or without links). Create another spreadsheet for Press Media or journalists, and reach out to them when you have a new brand story that you want to be covered.

Testimonial link building

If you’re an affiliate in your industry (helping other companies to generate sales through your product reviews), then you can use testimonials as your value proposition in your linker outreach to get links from industry shops.

As an example, I had a client who’s working as an affiliate marketer in the tech industry and one of his main goals is to build links to his website to increase his site’s domain authority and get more traction on other relevant blogs.

So what I did is to create a list of Wordpress shops that have testimonial or press pages that link out to site owners/users that used their products (Wordpress themes) and also those who just want to provide testimonials for those shops.

You can also apply the same approach by first discovering testimonial pages that can possibly link out to your domain. Do Google searches for terms like:

intitle:testimonials OR inurl:testimonials [keyword]

intitle:affiliates OR inurl:affilaites [keyword]

Intitle:what people are saying [keyword]

Intitle:buzz OR inurl:buzz [keyword]

Intitle:press OR inurl:press [keyword]

For the testimonial outreach, you can use the email template below:

Hi [Name],

I’m Venchito J. Tampon Jr., an affiliate marketer at [my blog]. I stumbled upon your product and [say something about their tool…].

I’m wondering if you would be interested for an additional testimonial for your testimonials page.

Please let me know and I’m willing to add one.

Best regards,

Venchito

Don’t stop the connections you started with those Wordpress shop owners, once in a while, reach out to them through email or social accounts to get more chances of earning links from their blogs/pages.

10. Second deep broken link building

Broken link building is one of my go-to link building tactics when new clients come on board, seeing that there are always value this link building tactic provides to potential linkers we’re reaching out to for link inclusion.

There are two ways to perform broken link building:

Suggest link with the link to replace the broken of your similar content (there must be a direct relevancy between the broken link and your content).
Suggest at least two resources to the webmaster (one link of your content and one link of another similar content but not from your competitor).

How to find broken link opportunities

You can use any of the following approaches to find opportunities for broken link building and create a huge list of resource/links pages.

Advanced Search Queries

The first link prospecting approach in broken link building is the use of advanced search queries. An advanced search query is composed of a keyword and a search operator (e.g. inurl).

Following is a good list of advanced search queries that you can use to create your first list of link opportunities.

(intitle:links) OR (intitle:sites) OR (intitle:resources) "keyword”

(intitle:links) OR (intitle:sites) OR (intitle:resources) "keyword” useful recommended helpful

intitle:links "keyword”

intitle:resources "keyword”

So for example you’re looking for resource pages about cyberbullying (or simply bullying), you can add that keyword or use related phrases to the above list of search queries. The end results will be:

(intitle:links) OR (intitle:sites) OR (intitle:resources) "cyberbullying”

(intitle:links) OR (intitle:sites) OR (intitle:resources) "anti bullying” useful recommended helpful

intitle:links "cyberbulling”

intitle:resources "anti bullying”

Use any of the above search terms when doing prospecting for links pages on Google.

Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering is simply digging into your competitors’ backlink sources. This is doable in two ways:

Tracking backlink sources of a specific URL.
Tracking backlink sources of a specific domain.

URL-specific backlink sources

Using again the above example, your first need to find a similar content from your competitor or simply a page that is already ranking in search results (for the target keyword you want to rank for).

Grab the URL of that content, paste it into your favorite link building tool (either Ahrefs, OSE or CognitiveSEO) and discover resource pages that link out to that content.

Domain-specific backlink sources

Find a domain that is highly relevant to the keyword you’re targeting. As for the above example, you can reverse engineer a bullying website to discover more resource pages.

Since that website is directly discussing your keyword (bullying), you could find several pages that link to it.

Using top anchor texts as search queries

This method is doable in four easy steps. (thanks to Garrett French for this awesome tip!):

Step 1: Identify your main keyword

If you’re in the driving industry, your main keyword is driving.

You don’t need very specific keywords in this method since you want to find a huge list of link opportunities (with main keyword, you’ll have chances of creating a bigger list of resource pages).

Step 2: Do a Google search for your main keyword

Search your main keyword in Google and grab the URLs of the pages listed in the top spots of your search results.

Step 3: Grab one URL from your list of pages and identify the top anchor texts used by linkers to link to the page.

With Ahrefs, you can find the anchor texts used by linkers to link to the page by clicking on the Inbound Links tab and choosing Anchors in the drop down list.

Step 4: Do the same pattern to all of the pages you listed in your spreadsheet. Grab each of the URLs and find their most linked anchor texts.

Step 5: Create another list of anchor texts used in linking those pages.

Step 6: Use anchor texts as your keywords and add them to your advanced search terms.

For the above example, you can add the phrase – “country driving tips” to your advanced search query - (intitle:links) OR (intitle:sites) OR (intitle:resources) useful recommended helpful.

Your new search query would be: (intitle:links) OR (intitle:sites) OR (intitle:resources) “country driving tips” useful recommended helpful.

So by using your list of new keywords (anchor texts), you’ll be able to discover new resource pages that link to the pages you listed in your spreadsheet.

What to do with your list of resource pages:

Identify if there are broken external links using Check My Links Chrome Extension.
Reach out to the owners of those resource pages and just tell them that you found error links.
Suggest your content URL as the replacement to the broken link or simply suggest it as an additional resource to their lists of resources.

You may also check out the following posts about broken link building.

The Broken Link Building Bible

Broken Link Building Guide: From Noob to Novice

11. Blog commenters

For blogs that already gained authority in their respective industries, it’s easy for them to build links since they have content (videos, blog posts, images, etc..) that will naturally attract links as well as build a solid community that is willing to support the brand in any of its online marketing efforts.

Relationships matter in link building. It helps amplify the content produced by the brand once the community (brand loyalists) starts to promote the content to their own followers either on their blogs or social networks.

If you don’t want to start from scratch when finding link opportunities for your blog, you can always go back to those who already connected with you in the past. They are the people who spend time leaving comments on your blog posts and are already familiar with your brand.

To find those commenters, you can use SEERInteractive Comment Contact Exporter, which will allow you to export a list of commenters, with their emails, websites and specific posts where they left their comments.

For commenters who didn’t link to their websites, you can still get the URLs of their websites by splitting their emails into Names and Domains.

Step 1: Select the Emails Column.

Step 2: Select the Data menu, then click Text to Columns. Choose Delimited then click Next.

Check the Other check button, add @ then click Finish.

The end result will be a list of blog commenters, with their corresponding emails and websites. You can also add link data to your spreadsheet by using Ahref’s Batch Analysis (follow the steps I shared earlier).

If you liked this post, you can subscribe to this blog or follow me on Twitter and Google+.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

earn-reciprocal-links-google-will-approve-of

How to Earn Reciprocal Links That Google Will Approve Of

A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two websites. It is a link pursued by many search professionals in the past, for their own sake to achieve immediate higher rankings in search results. However, this practice (unethical reciprocal linking or link exchanges) had been disapproved by Google and was already listed in the link schemes page of Google Webmaster Tools as one of the link building methods that can negatively impact a site’s ranking in SERPs.

The question of white hat SEOs today is, “If reciprocal links are voluntary given by site owners whom you had linked before from your own website, do they still count as unnatural ones?”

To answer this question, let’s take Matt Cutts and Bill Slawski insights about reciprocal linking.

Experts take on reciprocal links

Bill Slawski

Chances are that if the links on your blog or site are open and transparent and reasonable (rather than excessive), providing value to your visitors, and reasonably cover similar topics or complementary ones, to sites that might link back to yours, that a search engine might find them to be legitimate. If you include indications on your pages that you will link back to others who link to you to boost rankings in search results, you may have more reason to be concerned. If you engage in link farms or link schemes or reciprocal link programs, a search engine might find your pages to be “suspicious,” and may be taking a closer look.

Source: What are reciprocal links and what do search engines think of them?

Matt Cutts

Use your gut. Trading links is natural and it's natural to have reciprocal links. At some level, natural reciprocal links happen, but if you do it way too often, it looks artificial. My advice is to go with your gut and if you're worried, you can use nofollow.

Source: Reading Between the Lines: Matt Cutts on Reciprocal Linking

The insights given by Bill Slawski and Matt Cutts only prove that reciprocal linking is ethical if it is earned and not intentionally built for search ranking purposes.

Earning reciprocal links from relevant sites/blogs is possible if you can perform any of the following link development methods:

How to Earn Ethical Reciprocal Links

Content curation

Curating internal content pieces from your own website or external content from different domains in one big post had been a common content generation technique in this age of content marketing. Given that content curation will only take 2 to 3 hours to complete (from gathering all the links/URLs of relevant pages/domains to publishing the content asset), many content marketers are using this method to consistently publish content on their blogs and to follow their current blog posting frequency.

Getting trust from influencers or authoritative personalities in your industry (especially if you’re starting out to build your own brand) is much easier when you initiate linking to their websites from your own content (as what content curation really does).

The only challenging part in the content curation process is generating a good topic that best suits the interest of the brand’s targeted audience. People won’t care about the list if it does not attend to their specific need/want.

Here are some ways to help you think of a good theme for your curated content:

Discover popular topics in Reddit. Search for subcategories that are related to your website or content theme (you can also find location-based categories to check out more niche-specific posts).
Automate topic generation from Quora using IFTTT technique. List all relevant questions in a spreadsheet (questions that you received in your inbox) and choose the best topic among all questions for content curation.

If you own a blog, you can start your list of content ideas with the following themes:

List of the most popular/commonly used tools in your niche.
Experts/influencers that are actively participating in your community.
Highly resourceful guides/ebooks that can help your audience learn about new topics (e.g. beginners guide to investing)
Industry-related video/audio content (podcasts) that provides new information to your targeted audience.

Here are a few examples of curated content that managed to earn citations/mentions from relevant community discussions, blog communities and news sources.

How to earn reciprocal links to your curated content

Reach out to site owners/content marketers that you mentioned in your curated content (the law of reciprocity will take place - you don’t need to ask for links).
Cultivate relationships with influencers and upcoming authorities in your niche that are part of your list by sharing their works on your own social accounts, commenting on their blogs or simply sending them friendly emails.
Ask your website visitors to add/submit their suggestions/tips that you can include to your curated content (you’ll get more chances of earning links using this approach given that the contributor would like to mention your content from his blog posts or include it in his website’s brand portfolio to add credibility to his name – this is true if you already have an established authority in your niche).

Another example of this content-based reciprocal link building is my link building resource page (curated content) that helped me earned a link from another curated content (link building resource by Linkarati).

Though there are little chances that the same scenario could happen to your website, content curation is an effective content-based link building method that you can consider for your brand’s content marketing campaign.

Mutual guest blogging

Perform guest blogging with the sole purpose of building relationships with target bloggers/influencers, as this kind of goal will help you get a higher number of links than what you normally expect from a guest blogging campaign.

There are so many ways to start this type of content distribution campaign, but the following step by step process has guided me to take actions in guest blogging (from prospecting to outreach).

Identify your brand’s targeted audience by looking at the unique value proposition of your products/services (asking yourself who are my customers is a good starting point to determine your primary audience).
Create a list (spreadsheet) of all the relevant blogs where your targeted audience/readers reside. Discover them by doing a Google search for queries like “travel blogs” OR “travel blog “submit” OR “contribute” post.
Make sure you add to your spreadsheet the names of your point/contact persons (content managers who’re handling the blogs of those domains)
Pitch point persons with personalized and straightforward emails - asking if they’re still accepting guest posts for their blogs (you can also add to your existing guest articles or blog content to your pitch to prove your writing ability).
Write guest posts with topics that haven’t been covered in your industry (unexpected hook in your guest posts could increase the quality of your posts and could attract more readers; some of them could also become your blog’s regular readers).

Here are a few ideas that you can consider when writing guest articles:

Insights from an active blogger/influencer in your niche about a specific topic (expert interview)
Curated content (list of popular blogs, bloggers or social influencers in your industry)
Your own feedback about the current news happening in your local area or niche
Case study from your brand that will prove your brand’s edges/expertise
A review of a product’s unique selling point (this is applicable for product websites that have blogs as their subdomains). This approach has higher chances of content approval given that the content features the product of the target blogger/brand.

When guest posts are accepted and published on your target blogs, cultivate further your relationships with your target bloggers. Sending emails to them (twice or thrice a month), asking if they have new updates from their brands or if they’re looking for feedbacks about their products is one good way to build long term connections with them.

Mutual guest blogging will help earn additional links on the part of the guest blogger aside from the link from his guest post, when:

His guest post earns links from the readers of the blog where he contributed (citing the post as a reference for their works – second tier link building).
The target blogger includes the guest post as an example of the target blog’s best posts (which can be included in the guest post / contributors page)

On the other hand (on the part of the blogger who accepted the guest post), mutual guest blogging will help him earn reciprocal links when:

The guest author uses the guest post as a reference for his own blogging works.
The guest author includes his guest post in one of his branded pages (e.g. about me page)

Guest blogging will definitely benefit both parties (the blogger who hosted the content and the guest blogger). But aside from links and relationships that are built during the guest blogging process, it could also lead to another form of relationship-based link building technique - content partnership.

Content partnership

Content partnership is simply coordinating with another author/influencer/brand to come up with a new linkable asset that will surely benefit the audiences of both parties involved.

There are many ways to pursue content partnership with a prominent/new author in your industry.

The most common way to do this is to start an outreach campaign that aims to partner with big brands or popular authors for a content collaboration project.

The key to make your campaign successful is to establish first an authority in your industry through publishing highly resourceful content assets on your site in a consistent basis. Since the more you show your expertise through your blogging activities, the more chances of earning trusts from people that you want to engage with for your content partnership campaign.

As an example, I’d like to show you the exact conversation I had with an influencer in the internet marketing industry:

This conversation resulted to a possible collaboration for big content assets that we will launch in the next few months.

You can also make this happen to your industry by first creating a list of all the authors/influencers who are active in your industry’s online communities (forums, blogs, Q&A sites and social networks). It is very important to look only for authors who’re not competing with your brand (e.g. if you’re a service-based company, then look for brands that offer products in your niche).

Then you can separate authors that would need a long period of time to connect with to those who can easily be engaged with.

Finally, it is time for you to take actions that will lead to building strong relationships with those people in your list. Here are some methods that you can apply:

Share their content works on your brand’s social profiles (making this as a regular activity of your brand will get them remember your business).
Invest in participating on offline events that will make them familiar to you as you can easily talk to them personally without any boundaries at all.
Link to their content assets from your site’s blog posts when you find their works relevant and useful to add to your content.

During the process of cultivating relationships with your targets, you can already ask them if they would want to collaborate with you for a content partnership opportunity.

The only intriguing part in this approach is deciding on where you should place the collaborated content (to your website or to your content partners’ domain).

Whichever website you both decided to place your content on, it is best to come up with at least two content assets so both of you will have a chance to host one content piece.

On the part of the author who hosts the content, he can earn reciprocal links from his co-author when:

The co-author link to the collaborated content from his blog post (introducing the new published content).
The co-author contextually links out to the content from his site’s branded pages (about me, press/publications page, etc..)
The co-author includes a link pointing to the content from his domain’s resource page.

Small brands can also take advantage of this approach by just going out from their comfort zones and initiating conversations with people that’ll help them create highly linkable assets that will naturally earn links and increase the online presence of both parties (both brands).

Social networking

Growing your social followers and increasing your social visibility could help you build a small but solid community of interested readers/advocates/followers of your brand.

Leveraging your social activities is also one way of adding natural and high quality backlinks to your website.

To get started with social link building, you can choose the social networks where you want to maximize your brand visibility.

Grow those networks through consistently adding new followers to your profiles (you can use ManageFlitter for Twitter and Circloscope for Google Plus or engaging people who’ve shared posts related to your industry (use Advanced Twitter search for easy discovery of relevant tweets).

When you already have an established Twitter community, you can export your Twitter followers in a spreadsheet (check out this blog post by SEER Interactive) and sort the list by highest to lowest number of followers and remove any profiles that don’t have website links in their Twitter bios.

Think of ways on how you can provide value to your target linkers (followers in your list). You can try any of the following:

Publish a blog post listing down the must-follow Twitter influencers in your niche (make sure you include your targets in the list).
Check out the content published on your targets’ blogs, see if they have valuable content that you can link to from your own blog posts.

You can then reach out to those targets, telling them that you linked to their blogs from your site’s internal content (the likelihood of getting reciprocal links using this approach is higher given that you provided value to your targets even before you contact them).

If you liked this post, you can subscribe to this blog or follow me on Twitter and Google+.

Source: 1

by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Increase Responses from Link Requests (Classic Examples, Recommendations and a lot more)

A link request is an email sent to a prospect with the goal of earning a link back to the sender’s website.

That phrase is now popularly termed as, “outreach email” or “outreach template”, seeing that the value that this approach provides is far better than just earning a link. A single outreach email could also be translated to new relationships, partnerships, engagements and business sales and conversions.

So when we discuss about link request, you won’t just get a link, you build connections.

That is why link request (outreach) when combined with content, is one of the most utilize link building tactics and many internet marketers still believe that it is the most effective link building method that you can still apply to build authority to your pages and to improve your site’s search performance.

Now, the question is how you can write a link request email that will get you results for your website.

To answer this question, I took a few examples of emails that I received for the past three months to show you mistakes that most link specialists/PR managers and the like online marketers are doing and how to make these link request emails effective in getting responses from targets.

Let’s get started.

Example 1: Shopping cart abandonment email

This PR email pitch is almost perfect for an outreach campaign but the sender forgot the first thing people would want to open an email and actually read it – interest.

Yes, I wrote a post about link building for ecommerce and blogs but it doesn’t mean that I’m really looking forward for another post or even a visual content about the said topic. My site covers only link building and content marketing (which you may know already, if you’ve been a long time reader here).

How to improve this email copy?

Include a few personal details of the webmaster/blogger (e.g. name, blog/site name, etc..) to spark a little connection while the recipient is reading the first paragraph of the pitch.
Target tech, SEO and internet marketing blogs that primarily discuss ecommerce topics in their content. This is the first set of linkers that you might want to engage with in your content promotion.
Identify the value that your content is offering. If you go back to reading the pitch, you can think that CRO blogs would be a good fit to target with their approach.

Example 2: Hospitality trends email

How to improve this email copy?

Subjects should be made catchy and is something that the recipient would be able to connect to. Since I’m only interested with SEO, internet marketing and business topics, I will not bother myself replying to this type of email.
Include personal details of the target (again). Take a quick look at the about me page and homepage, you’ll definitely identify the author of this blog. J
Encourage to check out the content first before asking for a link. If I find it useful, I will spend one minute to login to my website, edit my post and link to you.

Example 3: For guest email

How to improve this email copy?

Support your information about your writing experience with proofs of work. If you’re an experienced writer, then why don’t you give me samples of your best articles?
Never ask for a link in your first pitch, it would only give the impression that you’re sending an email to encourage me to link to you (where is the value of your pitch?).
Make sure you have a clear point in your pitch. If you’re only asking the person to check out your content, then that should be clear from beginning to the ending paragraph of your message.

Example 4: Product review email

How to improve this email copy?

State your position in your company (even though people won’t care about your career status, including your company position adds credibility to your pitch).
Provide details about your product (i.e. features and why should I care about it)
Don’t ask for a review if you don’t tell the person the value of your offering.

Examples of good link request emails

Example 1: More link links email from Wordstream

Why this email works?

First name first. Elisa stated my first name and that catches my attention (pretty basic but very important).
The pitch was straightforward and clear (by reading the first few words, I already know what to do).
The branded signature makes me want to check out the brand and personally connect with Elisa.

Example 2: Resource link building

Why this email works?

The pitch is actually what I actually looking for (I stated in my recent post I that I want to receive actionable tips to add to my resource page).
It answers all my questions (what, how, why of the pitch).

Psychology 101 for linker outreach

Let’s get straight. Psychology of persuasion and influence is what we, link builders need to further improve the way we approach link building and outreach today. Because with psychology in mind, we’ll be able to tap into other people’s interests, and get them take any action that we desire for our brand.

Given that we reach out to real people, we should also make our principles and methods real as well.

The Six Principles of Influence were created by Robert Cialdini, Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. He identified the six principles of influence that we can apply to any content and link development campaigns that we’re doing today.Here’s how.

Reciprocation

Link building should benefit both parties (you as the person who wants a link and the person you want to get a link from).

With reciprocation, the first initiative should come from you. The same goes with link building, if you start linking to other relevant sites, people will eventually link to you as well.

Here are some ways to show reciprocation in link building:

Create a resource page for non-competitors’ domains. If you own a service company website, why not publish a page that lists down all the best tools in your industry.

Link to other relevant content sources (e.g. influencers’ recent posts) from your own blog’s content. If your piece is relevant and almost has the value/information similar to your content source, you would have a chance to acquire a fresh link from your influencer’s site.
Share other brands’ content on social media platforms with a mention to the author’s social profile. This would help your brand to tap into other brands/influencers/authors’ radars and solidify the relationships you have with them. This will in turn, entice them to share or even link to your page once you start reaching out to them through blogger outreach and content promotion approaches.
Make other domains’ visible on other blogs by linking to them from your third party content (e.g. guest posts). Reach out to them and tell them that you mentioned their posts in your guest articles. This approach will eventually provide you links in your second layer link building.

Initiating link building activities to relevant blogs/websites in your niche gives you more link opportunities than just simply reaching out to people and asking to view, share or link to your content.

Liking

Finding your common grounds with your outreach targets is one of best ways to get their attention instantly.

Here is how you can find your commonalities with your prospects:

Identify sources/links that they consistently share on social places and see what specific blogs they love to read and share to their followers.
Discover their interests by stalking to their websites, looking at how they respond to their community followers and finding what topic they usually publish on their sites.
See where they publish their content works. Use Reverse Image search and Google search to find pages/blogs where they had their posts published.
Spend 3 minutes finding their best links and analyze how do they get those links, (do they participate in industry-related communities?)

Include details in your pitch that will relate and/or connect you to your outreach prospect.

Commitment and consistency

Commitment is hard to express when you still don’t have any consistent activities on your website. Reaching out to a prospect with the intent of committing yourself for collaboration/partnership activities would need first to show consistency on your content and link development efforts.

Here’s how you can do it:

When pitching a content manager/blogger for regular content contribution, make sure that you include links to your other site’s author profiles where your guest articles are visible. This approach would prove that you have previous commitments on other brands.
When performing broken link building method, you can include a personal commitment to your pitch, telling to the webmaster that you’re willing to make aware of him of any error issues (dead links) that you might encounter on his website. This will show a little interest from your part to provide value to his website and to his site’s targeted audience.

Social proof

One of the effective ways to capture the interests of your outreach prospect is to show social proofs in your email message. There are many implications of showing social proof in your link request pitch:

It exemplifies your authority as a brand/author/publisher.
It makes your recipient feel that you’re capable of providing value for their website and for their readers (if in case, you want to use guest blogging approach).
It humanizes your pitch (impressing others that you’re an engaging person in your industry).
Adds credibility to your content particularly when you show examples of influencers who’d shared your posts in the past.

Social proofs are commonly added to pitches to ask a webmaster to become part of his community (regular contributor), exclusive partner and/or requesting to become an affiliate marketer of his product/service.

Authority

Authority is what most brands would want to achieve in their respective industries, given that it provides them opportunities to easily inculcate their messages/intentions/stories to their communities who already trusted them through the efforts that these brands made in the past (content, partnership, engagement, etc..).

It also makes outreach campaigns more effective in earning responses and mentions from people, seeing that they already know what the brand is all about and what the brand is capable of contributing to the community.

Authority is achieved through many content and link development efforts such as:

Consistently publishing linkable assets that people won’t find from anyone else and are filling content gaps in the industry.
Participating in online communities where expertise and experience could be expressed (interviews/crowdsourcing, taking advantage of journalists asking for free tips/advices, answering questions on forums, Q&As and blogs, etc..)
Building a solid social community on social platforms such as Google+ and Twitter by actively answering questions on social communities where you know you can add value to and consistently adding/following social people who’re actively sharing relevant posts and participating on communities (you can use ManageFlitter for Twitter management and Circloscope for Google+)
Become the go-to brand in your industry by publishing guides, whitepapers, ebooks and podcasts/webinars that discuss questions/topics that are raised by people in your community.

Other resources:

How to become an Influencer through Content and Relationship Marketing

How Being an Authority can Boost Your Online Sales

Scarcity and exclusivity

Taking advantage of the idea of scarcity and exclusivity when offering premium content to your users/subscribers/customers is one of the best ways to promote your offerings (products/services) as well as earn links from your outreach and content promotion campaigns.

Here are some methods where you can apply scarcity and exclusivity to your content creation and link development campaigns:

Provide an exclusive content only to your existing subscribers (e.g. free ebook). This will allow your brand community to give importance to your emails that have information/data that you haven’t been published on your blog.

Send exclusive offers to active bloggers in your industry (i.e. sending them free access to your brand’s new premium products). Allowing this to happen in the first few weeks before your launching campaign could give a boost to the traffic and link opportunities to your product’s page once it goes live (bloggers would be excited to write reviews or add insights to their existing reviews given that they want to become the first few persons to cover your new tool/product).

Actionable tips to improve your link request/outreach emails

Follow any link-request instructions indicated in the page where you want to get links from to have a higher chance of getting response from your target. Contact email, required subject line and name of the person to contact to are a few examples of details that may be added by your outreach target to his resource page.
Spend time writing your pitch to your link prospect. Making your email personalized and straightforward makes it easy for the recipient to understand your main intention/purpose of outreach. You can check out these resources from BuiltVisible and SEERInteractive about linker outreach.

Other resources:

http://moz.com/blog/how-to-write-email-to-get-a-better-response-rate

http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/content-based-outreach-for-link-building/

http://kaiserthesage.com/persona-link-building/

Source: 1

If you liked this post, you can subscribe to this blog or follow me on Twitter and Google+.

by Venchito Tampon Jr

Real Life Examples of Blogger Outreach and 7 Lessons I Learned From It

Creating a blogger outreach strategy has been one of my top priorities in link building since I started to focus on this challenging side of SEO. It is also become one of every online marketer’s arsenals for marketing their content, page or website to let everyone know that their online asset exists and it has something of value to offer.

There are several reasons why blogger outreach has become a normal part of content promotion these days. The most common among them are:

Earn links (since link building today has become more difficult, most of the brands consider outreach as one of the viable techniques to acquire high quality and relevant links).
Build relationships with like-minded people.
Increase visits to a website (direct traffic and referred visits from referring link domains).
Tap into influencers’ radars and make the website known to them.

With so many benefits of blogger outreach, we often neglect the lessons we can learn from it and further improvements we can do to advance our approaches in this aspect of online promotion.

Here are a few real life examples on how I used blogger outreach in some of my content marketing campaigns and provide you tips on how you can effectively use it for your brand. I will also cite lessons I learned from my almost one year experience in doing blogger outreach.

Crowdsourced Content

With three group interviews I already covered on my blog, I realized that the most significant purpose of creating a crowdsourced content (group interview) is not to add more links to a link profile but to actually help spark connections with influencers/top personalities in the industry.

Relationship building will take you into many places and given that this part of marketing is what most brands are not accustomed to, it could bring you an advantage over your competitors. The more effort you exerted on influencer outreach, the likelihood of earning the biggest share in the search market is higher.

Increase in influence could result to increase in brand signals which will associate additional links and shares to your website.

Publishing group interviews will not always be suitable to every industry, based on the following reasons:

Different industries have different levels of competition.
Some industries have high numbers of non-participative brands (there are industries where brands are not willing to participate in any community discussions for some valid reasons – e.g. their own branded information are too confidential).

For industries that have active communities, crowdsourced content would be a good topic idea for a content marketing campaign. To start with creating this type of content, here is a step by step guide that you can follow:

Step 1: Prospect influencers in your niche

There are so many ways and tools that you can use to find influencers in your niche, but the most effective tools that worked for me are Google search and Buzzsumo.

Google search

You can use simple search queries to discover pages/posts that already list down popular websites in your niche.

See if those websites have an active webmaster/blogger that you can engage with for interview opportunities. If there is real person behind that blog/site, you can list down the name and his/her email address in a spreadsheet.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is definitely one of the best places to find popular content as well as influencers and journalists that you can contact for your link development campaigns.

You can use any terms/phrase that are related to your industry to discover the most popular/shared content.

Click “View Sharers” and filter only the results by influencers.

Collect all the names and the URLs of the websites of those influencers in the result and list them all down in a spreadsheet.

Other prospecting tools to find more industry influencers

AllTop
Niche directories
Other sites’ resource pages that list down industry’s popular websites or influencers (do a Google search using this advanced search query - inurl:links OR inurl:resources)
Followerwonk

Step 2: Gather your influencers’ email addresses

There are useful tools that you can use to help you identify your influencer’s email address. A few of my favorite tools are:

Email Permutator + Rapportive
Google search (“*domain.com” full name)

Step 3: Pitch to your influencers

When pitching influencers, the most important thing you must consider is the basis/purpose of your pitch. This should be clear in your entire email message to bait a response from your outreach recipients.

For my first three group interviews, I used two simple email templates to pitch influencers whom I know would be interested to share their personal tips/insights about my content’s theme.

Below are the examples of two email copies that I used for my third group interview (the most actionable link building tip):

For initial outreach:

For follow up:

This approach resulted to:

For the first group interview (creative content marketing):

Target interviewees: 159

# of responses: 50

Earned contributions: 38

For the second group interview (most actionable link building tip):

Target interviewees: 99

# of responses: 52

Earned contributions: 37

For the third group interview (natural link building):

Target interviewees: 108

# of responses: 49

Earned contributions: 28

Just imagine if you have a regular group interview published on your blog every quarter (if one piece can earn an average of 80+ links, then in a year, you’ll have 320 additional links).

Well, if you ask me, the first group interview took only 5 hours to complete (2 hours for prospecting and 3 hours for the outreach).

Since the list of participants from the first group interview could still be used for the subsequent outreach campaigns, the total number of hours consumed would have been lower than 5 hours.

Step 4: Consolidate your influencer’s contribution into one big post and publish it

Once you start receiving responses from interview participants, it is very important to note in your spreadsheet which of them had submitted their contribution, those that would need a follow up outreach and those who’re not really willing to participate. This will help your next outreach campaigns to prioritize interview targets who love to participate in such kind of community discussions – group interview.

Once done, you can now consolidate all of your influencers’ contributions into one big post. You can add a cool design if you want but make sure that texts are readable and easy to digest.

Step 5: Insanely promote the group interview

There are several ways to promote a content asset, and this topic has already been covered on many SEO and content marketing blogs so I won’t need to discuss this in this article.

However, below are a few techniques that you can try to get the word out of your content asset:

Make social sharing buttons visible on your page (this may sound pretty basic, but there are several blogs that haven’t done this yet).
Participate on relevant community discussions (forums, Q&A sites, blogs, etc..) by answering industry-related questions and link to your post
Use linker outreach to promote the page to people who’ve shared similar content and have existing blogs/sites that are relevant to your industry (remember not to ask for a link, if they’re linkers, they already know what to do).
Link your group interview from your third party content pieces (e.g. guest post) to attract more readers to it and increase the chances of earning more links and shares from people who’ve been attracted to your page.

More resources to promote your content

Optional Step: Upgrade your successful group interview

If you have a group interview that had been successful in earning brand signals in the past (shares, links, mentions, news citations, etc.), you can upgrade it to a more comprehensive resource content by adding more useful tips/information from other influencers who haven’t contributed to your interview post. They could be from your past list of link targets/influencers that haven’t replied to you due to personal or work issues or had changed their contact email address, which made it difficult for you to reach out to them.

To get started, you can assess your previous list of influencers by identifying their new websites, and/or personal email addresses, to change those important details in your spreadsheet and increase the odds of getting responses from them in your next outreach.

Case study

I’m doing a simple experiment today and it’s quite getting successful.

As part of improving my brand’s content assets, I am currently working on upgrading my previous group interview – the Most Actionable Link Building Tip.

I prospect for more influencers that I haven’t reached out in the past and those that weren’t managed to respond to my previous pitch.

Before doing the outreach, I think of ways on how I can get more responses from my interviewees.

So I spent at least two minutes to identify the influencer’s current status on the web and include it to my email pitch.

Below are a few basic information I considered to add to my email copies:

The influencer’s latest blog post and my personal take on the article (based on the value that it provides to its readers).
The influencer’s latest status updates on Twitter (I used AllmyTweets or Twitter’s list feature to make this scalable).

These two basic things are enough to evaluate my influencer’s status, which I included to my blogger outreach pitch.

Email to Adam Connell

Email to Aleyda Solis

Spend at least 15 minutes to identify your influencers’ status updates on Twitter in a regular basis. This could help you make your pitch more personalized and catchy to your targets.

Guest Blogging

I already covered this link building technique last month, but just a recap of the process, here is a short step by step guide that you can follow:

Prospect both for horizontal, vertical or local-centric guest blog targets (use advanced search operators when doing Google search to ease the process of finding them).
Qualify your list of domains based on authority and brand metrics (domain authority, ave. # of social shares, ave. # of comments per post, etc..)
Collect important details from the domain (site/blog name, categories it belong, three topic suggestions for the blog, name of the contact person, his/her position and his/her Twitter profile).
Use email templates (one for outreach specialists and one for agency marketers), send three topic suggestions and let them choose the topic that they want you to write for them.
When you get a response, you can now create the guest article based on the level and type of audience, and the type of content that is prominent on the blog.

To make this more scalable and more effective in getting higher response and link acquisition rates, I added a few tips/insights that you can consider.

Ask to whom you should send your topics

The most crucial part of a guest blogging process is outreach, seeing that if you won’t get a response or even catch the interest of the blogger to let you write an article for them, you would need to find another way to engage with him (which will take another minute of your time to reach out to that person).

Perhaps, one of the most common issues when sending emails to outreach targets is not having connections with the right contact person.

When gathering email addresses of bloggers using tools, there’ll be times that the only available contact emails are support/info email addresses (e.g. support@domain.com or info@domain.com)

These email addresses don’t have any specific names attached, therefore, you don’t have any idea of the contact person that you’re trying to reach out. If this is the case, asking to where you should send your email pitch is the best way to do.

Take note that you still need to clarify your intention of your sending your email to get them send your email pitch to the right person (e.g. blog/content manager)

When done right, you should receive a positive response like this example.

Use branded email signature to your email to add credibility to your pitch

Email service providers have their own features of allowing users to change their email signatures. These email signatures are the last few texts that your recipient will read yet it will add credibility to your pitch and to you as the sender.

Here are a few things you can add to your branded email signature:

Complete name
Position and your company
Website URL
Personal picture
Social profile links (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc..)

Providing these basic personal details to your pitch would allow your recipient to know more about you and your brand (which will make it easy for them to know whether or not your pitch deserved to be replied).

Getting interview coverage from relevant blogs

Mentions that describe and discuss more about your brand are probably one of the important links that every brand must be able to acquire for their websites.

Initiating interviews to bloggers who had successfully published individual and group interviews in the past is one effective way to add more branded links to your site’s link portfolio.

A few months ago, I connected to a few bloggers in the internet marketing industry and ask if they would like to conduct an interview with me, ask me questions and publish the interview on their blogs.

The process is simple. I searched for blogs/domains that are regularly publishing interviews with influencers/experts in the internet marketing niche (a simple Google search will do).

You can also reverse engineer your influencer’s website and identify those domains that provide him links through interviews. CognitiveSEO and Reverse Image Search are good link prospecting tools for this activity.

After building your list of prospect blogs, you can now start creating an email copy. Here are a few tips for creating a personalized and targeted email copy for your outreach:

Make your message clear and straightforward.
Ask if he/she is still looking for interviewees coming from your industry.
Provide proofs that you’re capable of answering in-depth questions that are related to your niche (in my case, I used my guest articles).

Below is the exact email that I used for testing this approach:

After sending 10 personalized emails, I got three responses (30% conversion rate) with one that is interested to ask me questions for the interview.

This approach resulted to an interview link from Eric Gati.

Testimonials

Testimonials add credibility to the unique selling point of a product/service, which encourages other potential customers to buy/use it.

Providing testimonials about the products or services of other brands is a good opportunity to build relationships with the owners and net a few links from this approach.

Since I’ve been blogging for the past one year now, I already have a list of influencers, mostly comprised of agency marketers who sell SEO tools in the market. These influencers have their own domains which I already targeted before for content placement and interview opportunities.

So what I did is to assess their domains and look for more link opportunities (either mentions or simple citations on a single page). Then I’ve found out that most of them have press or testimonials pages that have a few product/service testimonials from SEOs and internet marketers.

This mention happened just after I reached out to Razvan (founder of Cognitive SEO), asking if he is still looking for additional testimonials for his product.

You can do the same by creating a list of all the industry tools that you used before.

Populate your list by prospecting for testimonial or press pages on Google search.

Filter the results by those domains that are connected to your business and you know you’re capable of providing testimonials.

Reach out to them and ask if they’re still looking for additional testimonials for their products/tools. There are high tendencies of getting responses using this approach because they themselves will definitely benefit from it.

10 Lessons I Learned from Doing Blogger Outreach

Lesson #1: Spend time in identifying your main audience before performing your outreach

This is the most basic part of blogger outreach but the most overlooked aspect when prospecting for outreach targets.

Highly targeted prospects are people that are capable and are more likely be interested to your pitch. These are the audience that your brand should start engaging with given that there might be some of them who’ll start to follow your brand and become your brand loyalists.

As an example, I had a client where his main business is to offer personal injury services to local businesses in US.

The niche where he belongs is very competitive, meaning that most of the possible linkers in the space are all his competitors (which we know, most of the time, competitors are hesitant or are less likely to link to their competitor’s domain - your domain).

So what I did is to identify the site’s target audience level and type and find the industries where they are actively participating.

Instead of focusing on law-related blogs, I target sports blogs and car driving websites that are definitely part of my client’s target audience (since my client is primarily offering personal injury and auto accident/injury services).

Some actionable tips

Always spend time in identifying your main audience (those that would really convert to customers/clients as soon as they landed on your website’s page).

Widen your reach and tap into industries that might potentially bring you significant traffic if you’ve been participated in their communities.

Lesson #2: Use the blogger outreach tool that are most convenient to you and to your team

Outreach tools could be your life’s saver if you know how to use them to speed up your processes and get more good results for your online marketing campaigns.

So it is very important to take consideration the usefulness of the tool and how it can make your campaigns more efficient.

I personally use Right Inbox as my outreach tool, basically because it has an option to be paid through Paypal (well, I don’t have credit cards. :D). Other outreach management tools like Buzzstream and Yesware don’t yet offer Paypal as payment options.

The main point here is to always consider your budget, your payment system and the utility of the tool before you start purchasing it for your outreach campaign.

Lesson #3: Follow up people to track the progress of your outreach campaign

Performing a follow up outreach to your targets gives you a second chance to receive more responses and achieve the goal that you set beforehand for your blogger outreach campaign.

The main benefit of doing a follow up is that it allows you to identify issues that caused your recipients not replying to your pitch (e.g. problem/error issues in the email service provider).

Another benefit of follow up is that it helps you to filter out prospects in your list that don’t really manage to respond to your first outreach, which will help you prioritize participative recipients in your next outreach campaigns.

Lesson #4: Test other techniques to bait your link targets

We all know that search marketing as well as online marketing in general, is a fast-paced industry, wherein online marketers should be able to adapt quickly to the changes that search engines are constantly doing to improve the search experience for users, and to become more reliant to what users would want to see and consume from various websites and from the web.

Given this, you’ll have to make sure that you always come up with new techniques to capture the interest of your users and your link prospects (if it is for link building). This would not only make your outreach campaign evolve in nature, but actually allows your team to see better results in terms of response and conversion/link acquisition rates.

I’m testing a new link building technique in the law niche, but haven’t been successful in terms of getting responses and links. Though it may seems to be failure at times, it only proves that I really have to think another problem that webmasters or bloggers are facing today and try to come up with solutions to offer to them, which will open doors of link opportunities.

In link building, your aim is to come up with solutions that will help solve other people’s problems. With that mindset, you’ll always come up with new strategies and techniques that will produce links, shares and mentions to your website or to your clients’ domains.

This old post by Jason Acidre is a good list of alternative approaches that you can try for your link development campaign.

Lesson #5: Make your process scalable and easy to understand by your team members

SEO processes, particularly link building processes would always need proper planning and implementation to make everything flow smoothly and to adapt to certain changes Google had implemented and will still launch in the coming days.

Though this topic would need another blog post to cover, here are a few insights that I’d like to share about creating your own link building process:

Start with an end in mind. What are you trying to achieve? Always start your document with objectives that will give proper direction to users who will read it.
Make your tutorial a guide by listing down the step by step process on how to do it. Include screenshots and ensure that it is easy to understand and apply.
Test the process by yourself or look for someone who’re new in the industry and let him follow the process. If he applied it correctly, then it could now be part of your link development documentation processes.

For a more through post about creating business processes, here is an awesome post from Grant Merriel.

Lesson #6: Never forget your past linkers when looking for outreach targets

When starting a new link building campaign, the most common approach is creating a new list of link targets that are relevant and could provide significant value to a certain website (in terms of bringing that website referred traffic, assisted conversions and etc..)

Though there’s no wrong with that approach but it would be much better if you first take a look at your website’s existing referring linking domains and assess whether they would still be open again for link opportunities for your brand.

The main why you need to start first with your existing links is that there is a high potential that you’ll acquire links from your site’s current linking domains given that there is a history of linking and because there is already established connections with them.

Lesson #7: Understand the reason why you’re doing outreach and insanely be good at it.

In every business activity, it is very important to understand first the purpose of performing it than just doing it straight. In blogger outreach, it is very much the same. If you don’t understand the reason why you’re reaching out to a target, you will always come up with sub-par/low quality results.

I’ve been doing guest blogging for a few internet marketing blogs for almost six months now. And my main purpose of doing it ever since is to increase my site’s visibility on the internet marketing niche, SEO in particular, and to establish relationships with authorities and industry influencers.

This led me earned several link opportunities that I only wished way back when I started blogging.

Links from SEMRush resource page:

A link from DejanSEO page

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building Quotes and Ideas from the Experts

Discovering new link building ideas requires creativity. Given that the more problems you encounter in the space, the more you should think outside of the box to constantly provide solutions to those problems.

To solve a problem is to build links.

Broken link building (helping someone’s fix a dead link on his page) and guest blogging (helping someone to provide regular content on his site) are a few examples that directly explains how link building solves other people’s problems.

In this post, I’d like to cover a few quotes and techniques from some of the best link building experts in town and some link building ideas from anonymous people.

Note: If you’d like to add your actionable link building ideas or tips, then you can submit them here.

Jason Acidre – Kaiserthesage

To educate is not just the best way to sell. It’s also the best way to build links.

If you have successful evergreen blog posts (that have natural links), make them a page (pages have higher staying power in SERPs).

How to find pages on your site that have natural links:

Use OSE or your favorite tool to discover your sites’ top linkable assets.

Go to Top Pages tab to see your most linkable assets (use linking root domains as your metric).

You can filter the internal links by http status (e.g. 200) to only find live pages.
Another trick is to filter the results by 400 status to find dead pages on your site. Recreate those content assets and reach out to the past linkers of those dead pages, asking to link to your newly created pages.

Don’t build links to rank for a keyword. Build links to improve domain authority and so as to rank for all your targeted keywords.

How to improve your site’s domain authority through link building:

Pursue regular contribution on two or three authoritative blogs in your industry, instead of doing one time post to almost every mediocre websites. Recurring links from a few websites could help increase your DA, particularly when those sites have high DA, traffic cost (SEMRush metric) and continuous flow of backlinks.
Build links from pages that are already ranking on search results either for informative or ready to buy keywords. Given that the more visibility you earn from already ranking pages, the likelihood of getting new visitors from search and attracting additional links to your site is higher.
Initiate conversations with influencers and top personalities in your industry. Get into their radars through social engagement and influencer email outreach.
Discover dead links on other sites’ webpages and reach out to the site owners and ask if they could replace those defunct links with your relevant and similar site’s content.

Ross Hudgens – Siege Media

When evaluating twitter authority, view recent tweets and if no engagement prob not a true authority

1.Find common website type in your space.

2.Crawl in Screaming Frog.

3.Sort by External Outlinks.

4.Build content for those pages.

Wil Reynolds – SEER Interactive

Link from your main site to your profile pages on yelp, yp, others. Help those other profiles to rank.

Can’t get your clients to write good local content also differentiated by location? Use yelp filtered reviews & repurpose for your site.

Offer your space to host local events, get citations from those organizations, improve local rank.

Places to find local events:

Rand Fishkin – MOZ

Begging to guest blog sucks. Being begged to guest blog rules.

Don’t figure out how to get your post accepted. Figure out how to get asked.

Tips to attract invitations from authoritative blogs to write for them:

Publish expertly-made content on your website that has unexpected hook (information that people aren’t expecting from your site).
Create a press page that includes all the mentions/pages you’ve participated in the past (e.g. interviews) or you can simply include them to your about me/us page. This would prove the authority and trust from your community.
Build relationships with influencers and company sites in your industry via email or social platforms to get into their radars, and probably remember you as an author/expert in your niche.

Larry Kim – Wordstream

Keywords that don’t have much to do with purchasing intent (asking questions) will be a great for match for organic search.

Comprehensive resources about keyword research:

Mike Essex – Koozai

Lists are easiest way to interact with influencers on Twitter. Engagement far more important than followers.

What to do with your lists of influencers:

Check your Twitter list regularly, answer questions your influencer may have and/or engage further by promoting their tweets/posts. This quick answer to Jason Acidre’s question gave me a link from his blog.

Include your influencers’ status updates to your outreach to capture their interests and build stronger connections with them.

Dan Shure – Evolving SEO

Simple content ideation:

1. Search title of main customer in Followerwonk

2. Examine what they share & talk about.

3. Find ways to help.

Ways to help your customer with your content:

Create content that answers to your customers’ deepest questions. It could be in a form of FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) or a simple blog post using their question as your headline.
Identify topics and headlines that captured the interest of your customers. Publish content pieces that directly discuss those topics and make it easy to read or consume.
Add call to actions to your content, encouraging visitors to share or add some comments below your post. When they leave a comment, spend time to thank them and/or answer to their questions.
Make your social sharing buttons above and below the fold of the page to easily get your readers share your content.

Simple prospecting idea:

1. Search similar site in @BuzzSumo

2. Sort content by shares

3. ‘View Sharers’

4. Export/import to Buzzstream.

Jon Cooper – PointblankSEO

1. Find highly competitive industries

2. See how they’re building quality links

3. Apply to other less competitive industries.

4. Profit.

Use Followerwonk to identify influencers & All My Tweets to find out what sites they sharing.

Create a separate “blank” template for link bait without commercial call-to-actions

Anonymous

Segment your email list into those who have a Gmail and those who don’t b/c you can simply send Gmail users a direct link 4 reviews.

Draft compelling content for your site by answering FAQs, repurposing from Facebook, using filtered Yelp reviews.

Find content sites w/ high share of voice for your organic KW targets. Run display, form partnerships, sponsorships, etc.

How to get press quotes 1) get on east coast schedule 2) catch breaking news 3) send reporter a value-add quote 4) get coverage

Have 10 of your employees type your domain name as fast as they can and register all of the misspells.

You can use misspellings to earn branded links to your website. Learn about this link building strategy from this post by John Henry Scherck.

Use Allmytweets to find phrases used by journalists when they’re writing new stories, get alerts through IFTTT for when they use them.

Resources about press release link building:

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Venchito Tampon Jr

1. Insight-driven analysis based on other brands' content assets

2. Focusing on author relationships rather than on hosted domains

3. Identifying commonality in social sharing by popular authors or brands

4. Tapping engagement signals for press coverage

5. Leveraging topical analysis in a regular basis

6. Setting content and link alerts to improve current content strategy

1. Using corporate emails with branded signatures for commercial sites

2. Using top pages to identify link target’s interest

3. Pitching unique ideas not yet discussed in a blog’s existing archives

4. Pursuing commitment to earn trust

5. Improving subsequent pitches by analyzing unsuccessful emails

6. Personalizing pitch based on industry’s needs

7. Engaging early before performing initial outreach

8. Writing more on benefits rather than descriptions

9. Aiming for semantic improvement

10. Including the brand’s latest activity

11. Lending two hands for ongoing conversations

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Dont’s of link building

Beware links you control

Links that scale

Never ask for anchor text

Don’t link externally in footer

Avoid site wide (except for navigation)

Do’s of link building

Do link building

Focus on distribution

Outreach rocks

Must-read link building outreach resources:

Link value = Quality of Traffic

How to acquire high quality links with conversion-led traffic:

Embrace no follow

Monitor incoming links to your domain

Monitor incoming links of your competitors

Getting value from link monitoring

Examples of tactics you can use for each competitor’s linking page/site

Prospecting

Qualification

Broken link identification

Content creation

Outreach

User-generated content

Capitalize on ranking forum pages

Industry newsletters

High traffic directories

Authoritative curated list

High-tier resource pages

Contribution request on Twitter

Competitor link building

Testimonial link building

10. Second deep broken link building

11. Blog commenters

Experts take on reciprocal links

How to Earn Ethical Reciprocal Links

Content curation

How to earn reciprocal links to your curated content

Mutual guest blogging

Content partnership

Social networking

Example 1: Shopping cart abandonment email

Example 2: Hospitality trends email

Example 3: For guest email

Example 4: Product review email

Examples of good link request emails

Example 1: More link links email from Wordstream

Example 2: Resource link building

Psychology 101 for linker outreach

Reciprocation

Liking

Commitment and consistency

Social proof

Authority

Scarcity and exclusivity

Actionable tips to improve your link request/outreach emails

Crowdsourced Content

Guest Blogging

Getting interview coverage from relevant blogs

Testimonials

10 Lessons I Learned from Doing Blogger Outreach