Author: Ajay Paghdal

Link Prospecting Guide

Your Guide To Link Prospecting

A Complex Part of Link Building Process Explained in Simple Words

First of all, let’s explain what link prospecting is.

In short, this is a process of finding relevant websites you would like to link back to your resource. 

Why should you spend your time and efforts on it? 

Because you are dreaming about high Google ranking for your web page, aren’t you? 

So, you should strategically distribute your content and build backlinks raising the authority of your domain.

This article is aimed to help you with one of the first steps of your link building campaign, which is link prospecting. 

Here I’m going to tell you how to qualify a prospect, how to build a prospecting list, and finally how to find the emails of your prospects in order to start your email outreach campaign.

As a rule, link prospecting includes the following steps:   

  • Identifying keywords aka topics you are going to target.
  • Finding websites publishing content on the topics of your interest.
  • Excluding the irrelevant websites from the list.
  • Exploring deeper and prioritizing the relevant websites.   

After you finish to build the prospecting list, you may start to get in touch with them via email outreach.

How To Qualify a Prospect

To make your link building campaign efficient you should qualify your prospects during the link prospecting process. 

You can’t approach each and every person on your list the same. I advise dividing your targets into groups. 

Investigate how influential they are by looking at their audience and achievements.

1. Mega-Influencers

Here you are going to put people with tremendous audience and outstanding achievements like Seth Godin for instance. 

It’s really challenging to catch their attention, they never read messages from unknown people. 

Simply don’t have time for that. 

Your only chance to get in touch with them is personal introduction or doing something terrifically creative and notable. 

It’s up to you to decide whether you are ready to spend time and effort trying to reach the sharks in your business niche. 

If you want our advice, I would not recommend doing it. Save your energy for the next groups.

2. Influencers

People in the second group are not industry celebs like the ones in the first group, however, their audience is still big enough to make a positive impact on your business. 

Now we are talking about entrepreneurs like Noah Kagan for example.

Second group prospects can be reached with a friendly personal email. 

Please don’t try to use a generic template, you will waste your time and never get a reply. 

It’s a good move to ask second group prospects for comments on your ideas. 

Don’t ask them for links and tweets, if they like your work, they will link and tweet it without any request. 

This group of prospects is worth reaching out to because either a link or a tweet from them will bring value to your business.

3. Micro-Influencers

Prospects in the third group don’t have a big audience at the moment.

They are actively promoting their websites participating in niche communities, publishing guest posts, and taking part in all kinds of events. 

They will respond to your personalized, polite outreach email that adds value. The message may be template-based.

Are you wondering whether you should reach out to them?

Definitely. 

The third group of people is open to building relationships, which is good even though a link or tweet from a group representative won’t bring your business as much value as one from a second group.

4. Grinders

The fourth group are startups. They are newbies in the industry and don’t have a substantial audience yet.

They will reply even to a bulk templated outreach email. 

But we don’t advise you to reach out to them. 

A link or a tweet from one of the fourth group prospects won’t bring your business much value, so don’t bother.

Well, now you know how to qualify your prospects in order to reach out only to those who are powerful enough (yet accessible) to bring value to your business. 

You can save your time by removing the first and the fourth groups from your list. 

You can easily identify which group a person belongs to by analyzing their domains authority in your favourite marketing tool. 

Please note that people from the Influencer group are more valuable for your business, so reaching out to them must become a priority. 

Free and Paid Ways To Build a Prospecting List

The first step in building a prospecting list is finding prospects. Herein under we are going to cover four effective ways of doing it.

1. If you feature somebody in your article, let them know

When creating an awesome piece of content we frequently provide readers with links to other useful resources inside it. So, if you link to another blogger why not let them know about this mention? 

All you need to do is just look through your content and find all mentions of the bloggers in your niche. 

If you are not a fan of manual work, try to automate this process with the help of the tool that extracts all external links from a web page – URL Extractor. 

Please choose “External” from the drop-down as you don’t need internal links in your list and uncheck “Image” and “Meta tag” boxes. 

Then export the results you’ve got to CSV and sift them deleting the irrelevant prospects.

2. Search for people writing articles on similar topics 

If a person is writing articles on topics similar to yours, they are clearly interested in those topics. There are a couple of ways to find these people you are interested in.

Go to Google, type main keywords related to the topic of your content and study the results of the search (articles list).

Let’s imagine that we are looking for prospects for this post. We should put some keyword like “link prospecting” into Google. 

Do you agree that people care about the recent blog posts much more? 

They don’t miss the chance to update and improve them. Because of that you can filter for recently published content only. This is simple, just click the Tools tab > Any time dropdown > and choose recent dates.

If you want to get more relevant results, you can use advanced Google search operators. I.e.: “search term”, “or”, “and”, “-”, “*”, “()”, “$”, “define:”, “cache:”, “filetype:”, “site:”, “related:”, “intitle:”, “allintitle:”, “inurl:”, “allinurl:”, “intext:”, “allintext:”, “AROUND(X)”, “weather:”, “stocks:”, and others.

Here is an example for you. 

This guide on link prospecting contains a section about free and paid options to find people’s emails. 

This means that we can use search operators to find blog posts about link prospecting that don’t cover the techniques. 

It will be easy to compose a good outreach email as well. 

You can start like this – “Came across your article about link prospecting and noticed that it doesn’t tell anything about email lookup services, which I highlighted in my article…”

Please note that you can involve scraping tools (like Screaming Frog) if you have a basic knowledge of XPath/CSS/Regex to speed up extracting data from any web page.

Decent paid SEO and marketing tools provide data on keyword mentions on web pages across the Internet. 

They let you apply different filters (show websites that have never linked to you before, etc.) to make your results more specific. 

When you get the result you are happy with, you can export it to CSV.

3. Find people who already linked to articles dwelling on the same topic

Look for blog posts closely related to the topic of your article. 

You only need the ones with lots of backlinks. 

Please check the number of backlinks in the marketing tool you are using. 

Filter the articles you’ve got by referring domains putting the ones with the highest authority at the top of the list.

4. People who tweeted articles on the same topic

Frankly speaking, searching for people who tweeted articles on the topic similar to yours is not the best way to find prospects, however, you should know about the option. 

It’s easy to find people who tweeted this or that writing.

Put the article URL into a Twitter search and you are done. 

If you are making a default search, Twitter shows you the “Top” tweets, which is good for outreach prospecting. 

But you can go a little further and click the “Latest” tab.  

Why should you care only for the latest tweets? 

Because people tweet a lot. 

Sometimes they don’t even read the content they tweet. 

They just don’t remember what they tweeted a few months ago, so opt for the last 24 hours – last 7 days tweets.  

Is There Any Way To Automate the Process of Finding New Prospects?

Actually, there are a few ways to find new prospects on a regular basis without doing much.

1. You can monitor mentions of your keywords

Use Google Alerts or similar tools. 

They work like this – you insert a few keywords associated with your piece of content, then you are notified every time someone mentions these keywords on the net.

You take a look at the mentions and decide if you want to reach out to the author and show your content or not. 

2. Monitor new links to relevant articles

The top articles on Google get new backlinks consistently. 

So, if you monitor the top-ranking pages for your target keywords, you’ll get the prospects delivered straight to your email box. 

You can do this with your marketing tool if it has the functionality of generating new backlinks reports (to a certain URL) and sending them to your email.

3. Monitor new tweets of similar articles 

If you track the tweets that link to the articles written on the same topic as yours, you will get approximately one prospect from one article every few days. 

If you start practicing this technique, you will notice that your prospecting list increases by 50-100 new people every month. 

That’s not bad. 

Do you know how to monitor tweets? 

It’s not rocket science. 

Try the “New tweet from search” function for Twitter on IFTTT.

How To Find the Emails of Your Prospects - Free & Paid Methods + Best Practices

Paid Options

Do you like shortcuts and automation? 

Then you definitely should give email discovery tools a try. 

Below we have listed 8 of the handiest email lookup services.  

  • The first tool on our list is Clearbit Connect. You can access it for free and perform 100 searches per month. 
  • With Hunter you can perform 100 searches per month for free. If this is not enough, their paid accounts start at $49/month for 1,000 searches.
  • The next email discovery tool is toofr. You can make 30 free trial searches with it. Then you need to pay a minimum of $19/month for 2,500 searches.
  • Findanyemail 2.0 service provides 100 free searches per month. Their paid accounts start at $49/month for 5,000 searches.
  • Voila Norbert allows 50 free searches as a trial. If you like the service, you can buy an account with them starting at: $49/month for 1,000 searches.
  • You can use Emailmatcher for unlimited free searches.
  • Anymail finder lets you start with 20 free trial searches. Then, their most affordable account will cost you $18/month for 200 searches.
  • Find That Email allows 15 free searches per month. Their paid accounts start at: $29/month for 500 searches.

Unfortunately, sometimes the above listed as well as other email discovery tools available on the net don’t meet your needs. 

They turn out to be expensive or just unable to find some email addresses you need badly. 

Please read on to know some free ways to find the desired email address when email discovery tools don’t work. 

Free Options

1. Guess it 

You have surely noticed that there are several formulas most of email addresses follow. When you know First Name, Last Name, and Domain of your prospect, you can guess their email address.

Here is the list of these most common name@domain.com email address formulas. 

firstname_lastname@company.com

firstnameLastname@company.com

firstnameinitial_lastname@company.com

firstnameinitiallastname@company.com

firstnamelastnameinitial@company.com

lastname@company.com

firstnameinitialmiddlenameinitiallastname@company.com

firstname.lastname@company.com

If manual matching the emails seems too time-consuming to you, give a try to the tools like these – Email Permutator+ and Email Permutator spreadsheet. All you need to do is just fill in the necessary fields and get your list of email addresses. Not all of them will be real, so please make sure that you checked the suggestions in LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lite for Chrome.

Then you can click “Compose” in your Gmail box, copy and paste the email permutations you’ve got into the “To” field and move the mouse cursor through the email addresses to see if they are associated with a Google+ account. 

At the same time LinkedIn Sales Navigator extension will show if those email addresses belong to LinkedIn profiles.

In case neither Sales Navigator nor Gmail give you relevant information, you can just google for the exact match of your guesses and check if they were mentioned somewhere on the www.

2. Involve Bing search engine 

If you put “@domainname.com” in Google, the result will be disappointing because it uses “@” symbol for social tags. 

But if you try the same trick in Bing, it will be another ball game. 

The search engine will fetch all publicly available email addresses related to the domain you are interested in.

3. Look for email addresses in LinkedIn Connections

This is simple, an email is visible for your direct connections on LinkedIn. You can easily check this, view the profiles of your connections and see their email addresses in the ‘Contact Info’ section.

4. Hunt for email addresses on Twitter

You are collecting emails to deliver some important info to people, aren’t you? 

And your message will probably be longer than 280 characters. 

In this case you can find a person on Twitter and ask them for an email address. 

If you have a decent Twitter profile that clearly explains who you are, you are likely to get what you want.

5. Advanced Twitter Search is also worth a try

Sometimes people state their email addresses in tweets replacing “.” and “@” symbols with “dot” and “at” words. 

What you can do is go to Twitter Advanced Search and search for the words “at” and “dot” in tweets of a person you are interested in. 

Use words email, contact, reach and others to narrow down the search results.

6. It’s a good idea to subscribe to a prospect’s email list

Most of your prospects run personal blogs. 

You can find an email newsletter subscription form there and start to get newsletters that most likely will come from their personal email addresses. 

Please note that you can comment on one of the newsletters and start a conversation. 

Sometimes bloggers use addresses like newsletter@domainname.com, news@domainname.com or similar for their newsletters. But if you reply to one, you will get the answer from personal email address.

7. You can ask for a personal email via inquiry form

Every corporate website has a contact form or general email address stated in their contact information section. 

You can write via this inquiry form and ask for the contacts of the person you would like to get in touch with. 

8. Check WHOIS Data to See the Owner of a Domain

Sometimes you can find the domain owner’s contact email address in who.is data. 

The hack works well for one-owner websites who don’t hide their contact information, though, this info is available for bigger sites also. 

Over To You

You have just read a step-by-step guide on link prospecting. 

Hope the above info clarified many aspects that seemed confusing to you before. 

You know, we believe that the quickest way to get a deeper understanding of something is starting to do it. 

So, we wish you the best of luck in qualifying prospects, building your prospecting list, finding their emails, and outreach campaigns.

Have any questions/thoughts/suggestions on the topic? 

Please drop them in the comments section below. 

Found this guide helpful? 

Don’t forget to share it with your friends on social networks. 

Link Prospecting Guide

Posted by Ajay Paghdal
Your Guide To Link Prospecting A Complex Part of Link Building Process Explained in Simple Words First of all, let’s explain what link prospecting is. In short, this is a process of finding relevant websites you would like to link back to your resource.  Why should you spend your time and efforts on it?  Because … Continue reading "Link Prospecting Guide"Read More

SEO Affiliate Programs That Have Recurring Commissions

Today, I’m going to show you 15 of the top SEO affiliate programs.

If you have an audience or are building one in the SEO and digital marketing space, these are proven programs that will help grow your passive income. 

Here they are, broken down by types for your convenience.       

Services

OutreachMama – Yep, shameless plug. We provide link building services for agencies and brands. Our clients get high-quality links, premium content, and great project management from an easy to use dashboard. 

How much can I earn?

It’s 10% lifetime commissions on the blogger outreach service. In other words, you’ll keep getting commissions as long as your referrals need links.

How do I apply?

No application is required to join the program. Create your affiliate account for free here. 

180Fusion – The company is SEO services provider. On top of the common scope of SEO services, they offer digital marketing and advertising.

How much can I earn?

This information is undisclosed. But you will receive a commission for all sales that you have referred.

How do I apply?

You can sign up for their affiliate program through the affiliate page.

The HOTH – The company provides link building and content creation services along with SEO tools.

How much can I earn?

Everything depends on the program you choose. You can get from 25% to 70% commission. 

How do I apply?

Please go to the HOTH’s affiliate page for more information.

SEOReseller is a US-based digital marketing solutions provider, offering various SEO, content and marketing services.

How much can I earn?

You can get 6% per sale.

How do I apply?

If you are interested please join through the affiliate page.

Tools

Linkio – Another shameless plug here. Linkio is a SEO tool that monitors your backlinks and rankings and provides anchor text suggestions.

How much can I earn?

You can get a 40% recurring commission.

How do I apply?

You can visit affiliate page to learn more about their affiliate program. If you want to promote this SEO plugin you need to join the ClickBank network. 

SEOPressor – This is a powerful popular SEO plugin. It can boast cool features like semantic and machine readability analysis tools.

How much can I earn?

You can get a 50% recurring commission.

How do I apply?

You can visit the affiliate signup page to learn more about our affiliate program.

SEMRush is a worldwide known brand among SEO and marketing pros. The company started back in 2008. Today, they are one of the leading providers of SEO services like backlink analysis and keyword research. SEMRush offers advertising and marketing services as well.

How much can I earn?

You can get as much as 40% of the recurring commission.

How do I apply?

Click here, BeRush is the SEMRush affiliate program.

Traffic Travis – Traffic Travis is an awesome SEO tool that can help with keyword research and improving on-page SEO.

How much can I earn?

You will be paid $44.36 for each sale.

How do I apply?

Sign up through ClickBank or read more about the program on the Traffic Travis affiliate page. 

Twinword Ideas is a keyword tool that offers a great affiliate program. This smart keyword tool is powered by AI and has several nice features like user intent filter, popular topics filter, and search volume data directly from Google.

How much can I earn?

You can earn 30% recurring commission rate for each referral that subscribes to Pro or Agency Plans. You get paid each month they renew the subscription.

How do I apply?

Follow this link to register or activate your affiliate account and start earning money for talking about this decent tool. Find out more about the affiliate program.

Netpeak Software including Netpeak Spider (a desktop tool for fast and comprehensive technical audit of the entire website) and Netpeak Checker (a desktop tool for bulk URL analysis and comparison of websites based on a wide range of parameters) offers an Affiliate Program that is worth to check.

How much can I earn?

You can get up to 30% commission.  

How do I apply?

Click here to know more about the affiliate program and to create a free affiliate account.

Courses

Affiliate SEO Mastery is one of the most talked-about SEO training courses of 2018. This is a great affiliate program for every affiliate marketing/SEO websites that cater to beginners.

How much can I earn?

Affiliate commissions make 50% of the $97-course fee. 

How do I apply?

Here is an affiliate signup link for you. 

SEO Affiliate Domination  has more success stories, from real people all over the world than any other course that teaches you how to build a full-time income with affiliate marketing using SEO.

How much can I earn?

Your affiliate commissions on this fantastic SEO course will make 50%.

How do I apply?

Use this affiliate signup link to apply.

SEObook was launched in 2003. It is one of the oldest standing SEO sites that is still regularly updated. The site was originally designed as a blog that offered DIY SEO tips and helped sell the leading SEO ebook, which had sold well over $1,000,000 in volume.

How much can I earn?

Affiliate Commissions start at 20% and go up 10% after every 5 sales, offering the top tier affiliates a 50% commission rate. They offer a $20 signing bonus as well. 

How do I apply?

Please use this affiliate signup link to apply.

Hope my list of the best SEO affiliate programs was useful to you.

Do you know of some others or want to submit your own? Use this link to submit a new affiliate program (wait for the pop-up).

We’ll review and add it to the list below.

Create Your Own Affiliate Program

If you’ve thought about creating your own affiliate program, use a tool like OSI Affiliates to make it happen.

List of User Submitted Affiliate Programs

Search By:
Sort by:

Linkody


Votes: 5

Linkody is a backlink monitoring tool that helps you find, monitor and track backlinks 24/7.

How much can I earn?

30% monthly recurring commissions.

Want to be added to this list? Click here to bring up our submission form. We will be in touch shortly with feedback.

Over To You

Are you ready to try one of them?

Which one seems the most appealing to you and why?

Maybe you are ready to share your personal experience of getting passive income promoting one of the above services/tools/courses.

Please do it in the comments section.

 

SEO Affiliate Programs That Have Recurring Commissions

Posted by Ajay Paghdal

Today, I’m going to show you 15 of the top SEO affiliate programs. If you have an audience or are building one in the SEO and digital marketing space, these are proven programs that will help grow your passive income.  Here they are, broken down by types for your convenience.        Services OutreachMama – Yep, shameless … Continue reading “SEO Affiliate Programs That Have Recurring Commissions”

Read More

Link Builders Have Ruined Everything (Again)

So this just happened…

Gary Illyes of Google dropped a link building bomb on Twitter.

It looks like he received an unsolicited link building email and went nuclear on the guy – making sure Google’s algorithm considers his list of 700 sites worthless (allegedly).

Have you ever received an unsolicited email like the one Gary received?

Here’s an example:

“I will post your article in the world top level sites! This is (name). I will provide you the high quality contents and will post it in my high quality genuine blogs. I have more than 5,000 high quality sites.

Here I’m sending to you my some high quality sites please look at them choose the sites in my list and send a trail order.”

This sender is mass spamming 1000’s of people with his/her list of sites with all metrics, prices and domain names fully visible, like this:

I remember a time when link building vendors protected the identities of their blog partners at all costs simply to avoid giant fuck ups like the one above where the 700 blog partners are screwed and everyone who purchased a link from those 700 sites are screwed.

These days, vendors are more brazen and careless than ever, putting the ease of getting the initial sale over protecting their blog partners and clients who already paid them money.

This should definitely have your attention.

It’s 2019, and the SEO industry is changing again fast.

Just 5 years ago there was a massive change with Penguin where PBNs were much easier for Google to detect and penalize.

Since then, guest posting has become the new buzzword, because that was the easiest way to get a link on a site that you don’t own.

Just recently, guest post became a more popular term than pbn.

I think Gary V said it best: “Marketers Ruin Everything”.

At it’s core, guest posting is an incredibly viable and useful way to secure quality, niche relevant backlinks.

Then former PBN sellers joined the guest posting service train, gathered up a bunch of connections and started indiscriminately cold blasting everyone (even Gary Illyes, a VIP at Google).

If you get such an email, you can be sure that the sites fall into one of these 3 categories:

1. PBNs with a makeover masquerading as real sites you can guest post on

Random blog topics, no footer, no favicon, no real author and bloated DA/DR metrics without organic traffic numbers to back it up.

2. Websites that got started with good intentions but got seduced by the “Unmarked Sponsored Post with a Dofollow Link” money.

Building a profitable blog is hard, and many people start their blog with great intentions, great content and are super careful about protecting their brand.

Then a link builder comes along and offers $100 for the blogger to click the Publish button. No social media sharing or newsletter promoting necessary. About 10 minutes of work and $100 out of it is very enticing.

They may start off with just accepting the most relevant posts but fast forward several months, they are on “Site lists” for 15 different vendors, getting new articles to publish every day, and raking in the cash.

These type of sites could have easily been on that list of 700 that Google just devalued.

3. Writers for authority sites that can include your link

Vendors come to an agreement with third party writers of well known blogs and pimp out the connection in unsolicited cold emails for link building.

These are usually the safest, most valuable and expensive links but in some ways, it’s also become a short-term tactic as high-end publishers like Forbes and Huffington Post ended up no-following all links due to this type of abuse.

So that’s the landscape here in 2019.

– “guest post” has eclipsed “pbn” in search trends, and
– link builders are fully in “ruin everything” mode, and
– Gary from Google showed just how easy it is for them to make these sites worthless

It sounds like a really good time to review your own link building strategy and stay ahead of the game.

If you were to ask me, I’d say custom blogger outreach is the way forward.

In fact it’s always been the right way to do it, but real outreach is incredibly difficult so it’s remained far under the radar.

If you’re looking for a vendor that can help you with real blogger outreach and deliver links that won’t show up on site lists, check out our blogger outreach service.

It has all of the service ingredients necessary to avoid falling into the mess I covered above:

1. It’s a monthly service that delivers quality, niche relevant links from pure outreach

2. Each month, we devise a new pitch, prospect 300-500 bloggers, prepare email sequences and make contact

3. A certain percentage of bloggers respond positively and we work with them to publish content on their site or update an existing article with our client’s link

4. The cost per link ranges from $125 to $280 depending on the Domain Authority. All prospects are reviewed to make sure Ahrefs Traffic is healthy before pursing the link.

5. We work together with you on deciding the target pages, and even though we don’t like adding a content approval and website approval step into the workflow (slows things down so much), we work together with you to ensure deliverables are up to your standards.

6. We monitor rankings and report on links and changes frequently.

If you’re interesting in getting more links and our service sounds interesting to you, you can create a free account here and request sample links, book a strategy call with me, or make an order.

If you have any questions, just shoot us an email at orders@outreachmama.com.

Cheers,

Ajay

 

 

 

Link Builders Have Ruined Everything (Again)

Posted by Ajay Paghdal

So this just happened… Gary Illyes of Google dropped a link building bomb on Twitter. It looks like he received an unsolicited link building email and went nuclear on the guy – making sure Google’s algorithm considers his list of 700 sites worthless (allegedly). Have you ever received an unsolicited email like the one Gary … Continue reading “Link Builders Have Ruined Everything (Again)”

Read More

20 Ways to Build Links Using Blogger Outreach

You probably know that an optimized website and great content are an important part of SEO and they can help you get found in the search engines.

At this point in 2019, you’re probably no stranger to the other massively important ranking factor either.

I’m talking about link building.

Why Link Building?

Link building, or gaining backlinks, is the process of getting other sites to link to your site.

Google loves quality links. The more credible sites you have linking to you, the better you look to Google, boosting your site in the search engine results.

But there’s a catch.

Building these links isn’t an overnight thing. Especially if you want to ensure only quality sites are linking to you.

So are you wondering how to do blogger outreach? Here are 20 blogger outreach strategies to build quality backlinks.

#1 Expert contributors. One topic, many experts. Get multiple experts to contribute their input and compile a blog post, ebook or physical book. Let all your experts know when and where your big piece of content is accessible; they’ll be thrilled to be featured as an expert and many of them will link to your blog or your website when sharing the good news.

Want more? Many of these bloggers will reciprocate, and ask you to contribute when they compile something similar, giving you more opportunities to have your link shared on other websites.

#2 Putting an embed code within an embed code. When you create a valuable infographic, others are going to want to use it. So you typically create an embed code to make it easy for them. But what if you tweak that embed code so that when anyone embeds it on their site, they are actually linking back to your website? Use this form to create your unique embed code.

#3 Add your link to shared photos. Do you have a photo that seems to be getting shared often? Do a Google search, or even set up a Google alert, and find out exactly who is using your photo. Reach out to them and ask if they can put the credit link in the photo’s meta field so any time the photo is clicked, people end up back at your site.

#4 Guest post on turbo. You already know that guest posting helps build backlinks. But here is another way to discover even more places to guest post. Start by finding a guest post done by one of your competitors. When businesses guest post, they typically use the same byline each time. So copy a piece of that byline and use it to search Google. You will find other places your competitor has guest posted, giving you lots of blogs you can pitch as well. Then you can even take it to the next level and scale your blogger outreach.

ahrefs

#5 Research competitor backlinks. Use Ahref’s Site explorer to find a competitor’s backlinks. Plug those links into an Excel sheet, upload it to Google Custom Search to help you find where they have guest posted or had sponsored posts written about their business. Use this data to find your own guest post or sponsored post opportunities. Even if it’s not guests posts,

 

#6 Find emails for outreach faster. The first thing you need to do when reaching out to bloggers is find those email addresses. There’s tons of email finding tools out there. We use Email Hunter a ton. You can also use ToutApp for Chrome or try Rapportive. It’s an add-on that gives you LinkedIn profiles right in your Gmail. So how are we going to use it to find e-mails? If you have a company name and a person’s name, you may be able to figure out their work email. Keep plugging in tentative emails until you find on that pops up with a real LinkedIn profile.

#7 Hack your blogger networking. If you have created a network around your business or your blog, create a badge for members to use on their site that shows they’re a member. Then Google reverse search the badge image and see who is using it. Reach out to those people and ask them to embed your link into the badge image.

#8 Create expert infographics. Similar to an expert blog post or book, you’re asking multiple bloggers to contribute to one infographic. Make the infographic using a tool like Venngage, quote the bloggers in the image, make sure your URL is embedded within the infographic embed code, and have the bloggers share it.

twitter#9 Reach out on Twitter. Follow writers and bloggers from your industry on Twitter using best practices. Start interacting and building a relationship with them, that will turn into something more. They may start including your link in their posts, or even agree to let you guest post.

 

#10 Go a step further on Twitter. Check your mentions to see who has tweeted your content. Now reach out to them, thank them for sharing, and let them know they can link to your post. Not everyone will, but you will find that some people will add your link to their posts, their newsletters or other content. Sometimes it just takes a little nudge to get them moving.

#11 Use IFTTT to find PR opportunities. IFTTT (If This Than That) is a site that lets you create “recipes” that trigger one thing when something else happens. So use it to find PR opportunities on Twitter. Set up a recipe from Twitter to email (or even text if you’d like) so that any time the journalist hashtag #pprequest and your niche is used, you get an email alert.

#12 Use HARO. On the same note, use HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to get more press and links to your site. Sign up for free alerts for your industry and search through them daily to see if any fit your niche and your business.

#13 Run a blogger competition. Bloggers like to one-up their fellow bloggers, but they’re also extremely helpful and cooperative. And they gladly share each others’ posts and blogs, because they know other bloggers will do the same. So make use of this sharing tendency. Create a blogger competition where bloggers must write on a certain topic to enter. But here’s the catch! They also need to spread the word and nominate other bloggers for the competition. It’s a great way to get other bloggers involved, and spread the word about your competition and your link. Leverage technology with a competition engine like Gleam.io to make the process easier.

#14 Remedy broken links. But on other sites. If you come across a broken link on a website, reach out to the blogger. Let them know they have a broken link, and suggest one of your similar posts to replace it with. Chances are they will be so grateful that you pointed out the error in their site, that they will gladly replace the broken one with yours. They have commercial grade tools available to scale this type of outreach but be prepared to kiss a lot of frogs before generating a decent amount of links.

#15 Broken links on turbo. Don’t just stop there with the broken links. Toss that broken link into Open Source Explorer and find other sites that have linked to it. Now reach out to those sites as well, suggesting one of your links to replace it. Make sure you pick one of your links that fits the website or blog post to really boost your chances that they will accept your link.

#16 Get your customers to link to your site. If you have an intake form for your business, include a spot for them to leave their website URL, if they have a site. Keep track of these customers, and create a separate mailing list for those with a website. Send this list links to your most valuable content, free stuff, useful infographics with your link embedded, etc. and let them know they are free to share or use it in their content. You already know they have website, so the more valuable the content you share, the more likely they are to use it on their own site.

#17 Find who is linking to your competitors. Use the Clique Hunter tool offered by Majestic SEO. Plug in competitor URLs to help you quickly and easily find who is linking to them. Use this information to reach out regarding adding your own link, guest posting opportunities, collaborations and more.

#18 Beat the competition. You have an idea of who is linking to your competition. Now, use a tool like BuzzSumo or Ahrefs to you find posts that have a lot of links. Your job is to create a piece of content that is similar but better! We call this the SkyScraper technique. If a post is a top 10 post, create a top 25 list. If a post states some facts but doesn’t back it up properly, create way that is packed full of researched statistics and case studies. Now reach out to the sites that are linking to those other posts and see if they would consider linking to your new article.

comment#19 Comments on other blogs. It may sound simple, it may even seem like an afterthought. But commenting on competitor blogs is a great way to not only gain backlinks but to gain traffic. Many blog commenting systems allow you to put your website URL into their fields, along with your name and e-mail address. So whenever you leave a comment it automatically links back to your website. Sure, it’s usually a No-Follow link, but this could lead to a more referral traffic, awareness about your product and potentially inclusion in a future article.

#20 Mention bloggers in your posts. When writing a blog post, mention other bloggers, or use their site as an example of something great. You may already do this, but the step you could be missing is letting them know. Reach out through email or Twitter with a simple message saying you mentioned them in your post and your link. They will do the rest. They may share it on social media, on their newsletter or even keep you in mind for future linking to return the favor.

Building quality backlinks via blogger outreach that actually raise your status with Google is no easy feat.

To help give you some more perspective, we posed this question to SEO agency experts:

How do you go about your blogger outreach? Please share any favorite tactics, tools or partners you use to attract quality links for your clients.

Here is how the experts weighed in.

Digital Agency Approach (Ecommerce Development / Website Development)

As far as blogger outreach is concerned, we would like to mention that over the years there has been a drastic change in the way bloggers outreach has been done. For us blogger outreach is not just another SEO activity rather we consider it an opportunity to get connected with your audience in a substantial way.

We do Blogger Outreach considering the number of SEO and Social factors and our major parameters are:

Understanding the Need of the Bloggers and users
Domain Authority of the Blogging Website
Exploring the most followed social influencers and opinion leaders of the industry
Setting Goals
Finding the Relevant Bloggers
Collaborate with the Top Bloggers

Though, there are now many tools available for doing Blogger Outreach however we mostly trust the following tools in order to get deeper into the Blogger Outreach:

BuzzSumo – For checking the most trending content topics
SEMRush/Moz – For knowing the domain authority and other SEO parameters
UbberSuggest – For finding the best keywords
Hashtagify – For finding the most trending and popular #Hashtags

by Blake Nolan, Chief Strategy Officer at Storm Brain

Don't Let A Mention Go Unlinked

Ahrefs has a great feature that will alert you to potential client brand mentions. We set this up for our sites as well as for our clients, and we check out the ones that look promising.

When you do get an unlinked mention – reach out politely to ask if they would consider turning it into a branded link back to your site.

by Chris Sloane, Owner at Heaviside Group

Unlinked Mentions

Unlinked mentions (AKA Link reclamation)

Using advanced searches to find online mentions (citations) of a specific brand—or anything directly related to it without links.  There are several ways to find these opportunities whether using Advacbed Google operators or using tools like Moz or Ahrefs. Once you’ve compiled a list of potential targets its time to do outreach. The key to success with this tactic is to keep at it and getting in front of the right person who can help.

by Ilan Shabad, Head of SEO at One Egg Digital

Simple and Effective Blog Outreach Tips

Create Truly Exceptional Content.

Identify Influencers and outreach website Using Search Operators, it should be industry-relevant.

Develop a Powerful Pitch and send a request.

Draft content according to their guidelines and include author details in every post with your brand link.

Try to mention your blog link related to the topic as a reference in the body content.

Be genuine and use your real profile for blog outreach.

by Matthew Fritschle, Content Strategist at Aumcore

Graphic Design Partnership

Creating custom graphics for posts and pages requires a lot of work and it’s often something bloggers either struggle to do or would happily have taken off their hands. There are a lot of different online graphic design agencies out there like Design Pickle or Flocksy that can create designs for you at scale. I use one of these services myself. It not only meets the design needs of my clients, but can also be leveraged as a resource for link building. I’ll offer a blog or business a certain number of graphic design deliverables a year in exchange for a partnership link. The unlimited graphic design service I use handles all of the work, so I don’t really have to do anything and I earn a link in return. This process is scalable and can be used with dozens of sites, because these graphic design services come with the bandwidth to increase production. This link building tactic is a great way to get local links, because local businesses and non-profits often have the greatest need for design help.

by David Kranker, Owner/Digital Marketer at David Kranker Creative

My 8 Rules for Outreach

1. Read the about me page.
2. Create a network instead of running a campaign.
3. Be specific.
4. Try reaching out to the little people.
5. Create linkable assets with the bloggers’ audiences in mind not yourself.
6. Create a multi-channel plan before reaching out.
7. Create audience personas.
8. Connect with your bloggers on a personal level.

by Kristen Matthews, Director of Digital Marketing at GroupHigh

Don't Be a Jerk

Personalized outreach is amazing outreach. Make sure your initial email contains these elements:

1. Evoke curiosity with your subject line
2. Show them you know them
3. Avoid fake flattery
4. Explain why you’re contacting them
5. End with a clear call to action
6. Only use your best work

by Joshua Hardwick, Head of Content at Ahrefs

Want to be added to this list? Click here to bring up our submission form. We will be in touch shortly with feedback.

 

There you have it.

Questions?

Comments?

Leave them below.

 

 

20 Ways to Build Links Using Blogger Outreach

Posted by Ajay Paghdal

You probably know that an optimized website and great content are an important part of SEO and they can help you get found in the search engines. At this point in 2019, you’re probably no stranger to the other massively important ranking factor either. I’m talking about link building. Why Link Building? Link building, or … Continue reading “20 Ways to Build Links Using Blogger Outreach”

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SEO Or Content Marketing: Which Is The Best Strategy?

I have a lot of experience in this area. I’ve been running an SEO agency for a number of years now and I’ve had a lot of success with content marketing and SEO for myself and my clients.

2-seo-vs-content-marketing-which-is-the-best

SEO vs. Content Marketing: Which Is the Best?

This is actually a really good question.

I think many business owners are confused about the differences between the two.

For starters, they don’t know which one to use. They don’t understand the benefits or the downsides either.

At other times, they wonder whether or not they are mutually exclusive. And business owners often wonder if they can combine the two to achieve better results.

There are many different factors to consider for sure.

At times, SEO is definitely going to be the gold standard. And there are also times when content marketing is going to be the gold standard.

Guess what? Have you figured it out yet?

Sometimes a hybrid approach is the gold standard!

We’ll take a look at some examples below.

An Example of SEO as the Gold Standard

Without a doubt, most local businesses will do fantastic with just using SEO.

However, SEO has become increasingly competitive.

At this point, every business owner understands SEO. And many businesses have a lot of money to invest in this opportunity.

They recognize the value of spending big bucks for high quality SEO.

As you have probably noticed, Google has raised the bar for SEO over the past four or five years.

You know what I mean: Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird. Everybody’s favorite animal updates! I’m surprised Google hasn’t opened up a petting zoo! LOL

What this means for local businesses is most of them can probably still get the job done with just search engine optimization, and most local businesses are not investing in content marketing.

A successful content marketing campaign that really drives a bunch of traffic and many backlinks will absolutely annihilate anybody that’s still stuck in the SEO paradigm.

As a local business, you have the opportunity to decide to just stick with SEO and do nothing more. And more than likely, you should be fine.

Or you have the opportunity to get ahead of the competition.

Not only will you take advantage of SEO, but you can also apply the best content marketing practices to SEO for that added extra something that will help put you over the top.

3-how-local-businesses-should-focus-on-content-marketing

How Local Businesses Should Focus on Content Marketing

And when I say content marketing, I don’t mean writing content specifically for your neighborhood.

I mean create content so that you become a national thought leader. You’ll become a true authority in your market.

Just trying to tell people about your local community or the few things that you do in your business, it’s just not big or compelling enough. And the honest truth is that nobody is really going to care.

But they do care about certain things.

Your potential customers want to see that you’re an expert in your market. And by teaching your expertise to other people, you will show your target audience that you absolutely know what you’re talking about and you’ll become a true asset in your field.

And let’s not forget about the huge SEO bonuses that you’ll get when you share quality content.

When other websites find your content – by you sharing it with them or if they come across it on their own – they may find it very valuable and even link to you.

And before you know it; your website gets attention from national websites. And as you start driving more links, your domain authority goes higher and your search rankings improve tremendously.

Meanwhile, your biggest competitor has focused on only building citations and some cheap, crappy private blog network (PBN) postings while you’re getting links from some of the top publishers in your industry.

Which scenario do you think is going to be better for SEO? You already know the answer, right?

SEO is still the gold standard for many local businesses and content marketing isn’t cheap, but if you’re willing to invest a little bit more in content marketing chances are you’ll cement your place in your local community on Google for a long time.

SaaS: An Exploding Industry

Okay, right now we’re going to talk about SaaS. This stands for software as a service.

It’s a monthly subscription software model, and they are popping up everywhere as this business model is continuing to grow.

In general, most SaaS companies do better as they niche down.

They are catering to a specific type of audience that has a specific type of need.

For these types of companies, doing straight SEO is usually very difficult because there are already tons of competitors that are established in this market.

They have really high domain authority. They have many referring domains. And it’s hard to bridge that gap.

It makes more sense sometimes to do content marketing, although I would never say to just do that as a search engine optimization expert because I’ve seen the power of SEO when it comes to SaaS.

And this holds true even in hypercompetitive spaces. So it would really be a travesty to just recommend straight content marketing.

Truth be told, content marketing just isn’t that powerful for driving up domain authority.

4-content-marketing-link-building-a-hybrid-approach

Content Marketing & Link Building: A Hybrid Approach

For most SaaS companies, this is the strategy that I would recommend.

On the SEO end, after you’ve optimized the site, you should begin building links to the company’s homepage and the company’s service pages.

Your goal is to power of the main internal pages of a website.

As far as content marketing goes, your focus is to expand the size of your website. You’re adding relevant content that your audience wants to consume.

And if you’re doing content marketing the right way, you are also promoting this content in the right channels.

To help you with your content marketing efforts, I wrote another detailed post on the anatomy of content marketing. I highly recommend checking it out.

How Do You Get Good Quality Content?

When it comes to content promotion, I use a six point blogger outreach program that has been incredibly effective. It converts like gangbusters.

To learn more about that, please click the following link:

https://www.outreachmama.com/6-step-guest-post-outreach-template-that-converts/

The Overall Benefits of the Hybrid Strategy

After this whole content marketing and SEO ball gets rolling, you’re now building authority to your main pages. Plus, you’re increasing the size of your site with relevant, high quality, unique long form content.

And you’re promoting many of these new blog posts amongst other bloggers in your industry and on social media. You’re even starting to generate some social traffic, your content is generating some buzz, and because of this you’re getting more backlinks to your blog posts.

Meanwhile, while all of this is happening, hopefully this content topic is compelling enough that people are beginning to sign up to your email list. Because as we all know, a huge part of content marketing is list building.

One of the key indicators of the success of content marketing is how quickly you grow your list.

You put a lead magnet on your page – the more irresistible the offer the better – and you use it to build your email list. This is another powerful metric to track.

The nicest thing about content marketing is that it’s very flexible. You can have different goals and different objectives.

As you do all of this, your domain authority becomes higher and you become more relevant in your industry.

Your thematic relevance gets a boost and you become a brand name and a major player in the space. And before long, you even become somebody that’s recognizable and become somewhat of a celebrity in your industry!

5-when-is-local-seo-the-better-play

When Is Local SEO the Better Play?

If you are a local franchisee, SEO is more than likely the better play.

Remember, you still have to rank locally, so local SEO definitely plays an important role in your overall strategy.

Yet again, you can compound your efforts with content marketing.

What about E-Commerce Sites?

With e-commerce, Onsite SEO is huge. And link building to your product pages is also huge.

If you build a high quality blog that drives a lot of traffic and backlinks, and then you add internal linking going to your product pages, it’s going to be huge too.

You are establishing thematic relevance for certain terms, and really, that’s the name of the game.

Conclusion

That’s about it for this topic. I gave you a lot of information, so take some time to digest it all and see how you can incorporate it into your own personal strategy or for your clients.

I hope you find value in my answer.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask them here.

Good luck!

SEO Or Content Marketing: Which Is The Best Strategy?

Posted by Ajay Paghdal

I have a lot of experience in this area. I’ve been running an SEO agency for a number of years now and I’ve had a lot of success with content marketing and SEO for myself and my clients. SEO vs. Content Marketing: Which Is the Best? This is actually a really good question. I think … Continue reading “SEO Or Content Marketing: Which Is The Best Strategy?”

Read More