Linkbuilding: can't do it alone, can't not do it! While some people may prefer to avoid interaction with people they don't see every day, others flourish when communicating with strangers. The field of SEO is flush with both of these personality types, though to an outsider it could seem like SEO is an inherently non-social career. It's not! In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Tom Critchlow, head of search marketing at Distilled, shows us just how important interpersonal interaction is in SEO land. More importantly, he shows us some tips on how to reach out to webmasters and online marketers and more easily get the links we so badly want. All it takes is efficient contact-gathering, enthusiastic communication, adamant (but not overbearing) follow-up, and, well... maybe a little bit of hustle.
Check out Tom's slick resources:
- Followerwonk is an awesome tool for running queries across Twitter profiles to find influential people in a given niche. You can filter by location or by keyword in users' bios, which is a great way to find contacts.
- Alltop is a great place to artificially get the breaking news in a given niche. It's no replacement for actually living and breathing a given niche but it's very quick and easy to use.
- The Distilled Linkbuilding Conferences are taking place in London on March 18th in New Orleans on March 25th. Check it out!
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Tom Critchlow, and I'm here in Seattle helping out with some SEOmoz SEO bits and pieces. I'm sharing Whiteboard Friday because Rand is out of town.Today I'm going to be talking about outreach for link building. There's a lot of talk online about how to get links, creating great content for links, but a lot of focus goes on creating the content rather than actually doing the outreach for the content. So, I thought I'd do a video on how you can actually get links from your content.
There's an assumption here that you've already created some great content and that that content is targeted to a particular niche. Obviously, great content works much, much better when it's targeted to a particular community that they can be passionate about, they can comment on, and so on. The really broad content doesn't typically do so well.
So, let's assume that you've created some great content, whatever it might be, whether an infographic or a competition or a video, etc. Then there are a few tips that we've used in doing outreach that I just want to share here.
The first thing that I've noticed when doing outreach is that you want to have efficient contact gathering. There are lots of ways of getting bloggers in a particular niche or getting Twitterers in a particular niche, but the more that you can make that process quick, scalable, and efficient, the better the whole process is going to be.
There is the usual stuff that you can do. You can run some Google searches for things like top ten blogs about your niche. So, let's say it is photography. You can run, "top ten photography blogs." Run a search like that and you're going to end up with lots of blog posts and articles talking about what the top blogs are in that niche. You can go through and you can find those. That is obviously a great source. One thing that I really love to do is go find these top blogs that get talked about individually and then go through their blogs rolls. A lot of blogs will have a little blog roll or recommended blogs or friends section. Those kind of talk about all the people that they read, that they subscribe to. In fact, Rand wrote a post about all the blogs that he subscribed to at one point. That might be a list that you might find if you were searching for SEO blogs or recommended SEO reading, etc. Go find the influencers, find who the influencers link to and who they recommend.
You also want to find Twitter followers or rather influential Twitter accounts. And Follower Wonk, which I have written out here, FollowerWonk.com is a fantastic tool that will do this. They've indexed a whole bunch of Twitter accounts, and you can search through all of the bio text. So you can search for Twitter accounts that have a particular follower count and are interested in a particular niche. So, let's say it's photography, you can go through and you can find a whole bunch of people that are interested in photography. You can also search by location on Follower Wonk. This is a great way of finding niche accounts in a particular area that you can then go out and you can contact.
One of the key points here that I love to do is actually categorize these people as I am finding these contacts and finding these blogs. Go through and categorize them depending on what kind of outreach you're going to do to them. Some people you might find and you might think, well, they've got a pretty mediocre blog. It's all right. They have semi-interesting content. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time personalizing my response to them or sending a really detailed email. I'm just going to send them something pretty standard. Some people you might find, however, might be journalists or they might have a really popular blog or it might be somebody that you found Twitter that doesn't have a blog but they maybe own a forum or an email newsletter, something like that.
So categorize these people into broad buckets. The buckets I like to have are your standard contacts, your extraordinarily contacts, and kind of left field. That kind of separation means that you can quickly and efficiently send your mass email to all the standard contacts. The extraordinarily contacts you can go through and you can say, "These people I'm going to really craft an email to. I am going to send something specific and personalized and fun and creative to these people." The left field contacts are those that you might not want to send an email to. Maybe they're left field because they live near you. Maybe they have an email newsletter and you want to subscribe and send them an email dedicated to that. So, something maybe a little bit different. With that categorization, I find really useful when I am going through my contacts so that I can save time later.
That is the first thing. The second thing, being enthusiastic I find is more important than being unique. So when you're doing outreach, everyone will tell you to find something personalized to that person that you're speaking to and put it in the email. Say, "Hey, I read this blog post you recently read and it's really awesome." That will somehow make the outreach more effective. In my experience, I find that being enthusiastic trumps that every time. Even if you don't put much in the email that shows that you've read their site or that you've really tried to engage with them, rather just write an email that's awesome. Right? Take a leaf out of the SEOmoz newsletters that go out and so on. Put some personalization in there. Put some fun in there. Talk about maybe you're a really small company, maybe you're a startup, maybe you've got some exciting tools or content. Whatever it might be, tell people about that. Come across as genuine.
The trick here is that people control links. Websites don't link to people, people do. You want to reach out to people and make them like you. You really want to get on their good side. In my opinion, always write an enthusiastic email over a unique email. And what's your USP? Maybe you're more fun than people. Maybe you're more creative than another company. Many you're smaller. Maybe you have content that is more interesting. Whatever it might be, leverage those things when you are crafting the contact.
I'm going to switch over here, now, to the purple section. The other thing here is that when you are doing outreach, not everyone is going to respond to you. In fact, anyone who has actually tried outreach will know that not that many people respond to you, which is kind of unfortunate, but you want to make sure that anyone who does respond to you, even if they come back and say, "Ah, I'm not interested right now. You're content was okay, but it doesn't really fit with my audience." Really make sure that you follow up with those people. In the same way that you would have a sales channel and a sales funnel, make sure that you really cultivate these people. Go back to them and say, "Hey, why didn't you like it?" Or, "What can we do better next time?" Or, "Maybe next time we're doing this, we'll include you in the content that we're writing." So, really, anyone that responds to you, you really want to cultivate a relationship there. At the end of the day, outreach is all about getting relationships with people whether they have a blog, a forum, or they're just an influential Twitter account. You really want to create a relationship, because those relationships are worth so much more than the individual outreach that you're doing. They can be useful for future pieces of content that you're releasing. You can get them involved in things like surveys that you do and things like that.
If they do come back and they're really positive, then you still want to cultivate that relationship. If somebody comes back and says, "Great. Sure. I put it on my blog," don't end there. Find out if where else they blog, for example, is a great one. A lot of people that blog online will have multiple blogs. I think I have about 17 last time I counted, not all of which are recently updated. Do they have any friends? Find out who else they know in the blogging space that might also want to post your content. Anyone that responds to you, really, really go after them really strongly.
Then the final thing is hustle, which is a really hard thing to define. When we've been doing outreach, the most effective thing that we've done is just think laterally. It's all very well building the contact list, sending email to all these people, but actually, at the end of the day, the thing that gets you the results is usually either a random contact or it's leveraging some kind of hot news. Something like that. It's really hard to come up with a process that will get you those things. In my experience, there are a few things that you can do to give you a greater chance at success.
The first thing is, make sure you follow all of the Twitter and RSS feeds in that niche. A lot of people will think, this is a niche I'm engaging in. I'm doing research. I'm trying to find good bloggers. But they don't actually bother living and breathing the niche. You have to go in. You've got to actually engage these people. Read their blog posts. See what gets them riled. See what gets them hot. Really engage with them. That's where you can really win above and beyond just doing the kind of outreach. If you actually understand what this community is about, you'll have a much better chance at success. So, go through and actually follow a lot of these people, and actually see what makes them tick.
Watch forums as well. I think forums are massively underrated when you're doing outreach because that's where a lot of the people that are really passionate about the niche hang out. You can actually capture them in their natural environment so to speak. When you go to forums, you can actually see, you know, what do they chat about that's not in their niche? People are in that niche just chatting. Just shooting the breeze, right. See what they're interested in. See what they're passionate about. You might spot opportunities there that you might otherwise miss.
I find Alltop is a great way of very, very quickly and easily finding a particular niche and then looking at all of the top news in that niche. So, you kind find out what's hot. Alltop has kind of categories all over the place so that it kind of aggregates Twitter users and blogs in a particular niche. You can very quickly see if there is breaking news or if there is a hot topic. Alltop will show that up quite nicely. That's a great way of kind of artificially getting yourself embedded in a particular niche. At the end of the day, don't forget that this is where a lot of the success comes from is that kind of extraordinarily luck basically. You stumble across somebody talking about something or you happen to be doing outreach at the same time as some hot news. You need to give yourself the best chance of success with that kind of activity. These are some good tips to get that.
Those are my main tips. There is one thing here, which I have kind of put in very light blue that you probably can't read up here, which is that you need to manage expectations. Whenever you're doing outreach, there is a tendency to think that every single time you do outreach for content, you're going to get amazing results. That is simply not true. What you can do with outreach is even the failed outreach, even the outreach that you've done that resulted in zero links, that will still build your relationships. When you're doing this whole process again, when we come back to efficient contact gathering, don't forget the people that you've reached out to previously. Don't forget the people that you reached out to that were semi- lukewarm leads last time, but this time maybe it is a different piece of content. Or maybe you took in to account some of their feedback. Make sure that when you're doing outreach, even if you are not getting links, you're building relationships.
That's a great way of kind of managing expectations. Whether it is your boss, maybe you're an agency and you've got a client, when you're positioning the outreach work you're doing, don't just report on the links, also build a rapport on the relationships you've built. They can be really, really useful. This particularly applies when you're doing the really high- level outreach to people like journalists and your high-level bloggers. You're not going to get in the first time most of the time with these. You want to build a relationship, get an email conversation going, and then you can get some really great content that they're going to link to.
I think those are my main top tips. I've probably said, as I just said right now, about a million times, and again, because I am kind of new at this. But that's fine. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to learn more about link building, we're running some conferences in London and New Orleans in March. There will be a link so you can find out more details. Sign up to that. I'll see you there. Thanks, guys.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
I ask myself one question all the time "why influencers or anybody will link out to my sites". They won't link out because i have great contents, i called them or sent them a nice email. I get such mails all the time and i ignore them. Sure some mails are so well written that they get my attention and i read them to the last word. But after reading it i think for a split second who will take the pain to link out. Sending recommendation, waiting for approval, getting time from developers so that they can do testing (to make sure that link works well and the site is not invloved in black hat etc)..... Bigger the website more the issues. And all of these tasks require allocating extra time. And when each and every hour is billable, i need to think twice before i send any recommendation.
I think there are many web managers/webmaster out there who think like that. So when i have to outreach for link building i have to be absolutely sure who i have to approach and what benefit the potential linking partner is going to get. The benefit should be strong enough to link out. I really don't have time to build relationships though it is the best strategy for long term returns. So i pick up handful of potential linking partners (the one who can benefit me the most), come up with a give and take proposal and then e-mail them followed by an call. I don't expect any response from the email but still send it out to make the linking partners aware of my intentions and to give them enough time to think about my proposal. If you are not a people's person, i would highly recommend to leave the implementation part to someone who is a good talker or directly deals with clients all the time like customer care people, PR people etc. The way you approach the linking partner can make the difference between success and failure.
Just my two cents.
"If you are not a people's person, i would highly recommend to leave the implementation part to someone who is a good talker or directly deals with clients all the time like customer care people, PR people etc."
Definitely seems like linkbuilding is mostly a social game, especially for very large clients that might need a large percentage of weekly time devoted to linkbuilding. Great point!
I get seeral email per week from webmasters asking to link to me. Some of them put a link on their website and then want me to link to them just because they linked to me. I'm not going through the effort to see if they are a legit site. I think I'll follow that othe psot from a few weeks ago about sending out a letter through snail mail in addition to the email.
what would be an example of a benefit that you would offer if it's not a secret. Are we talking money or link from another site?
Errr-mazing advice Tom. I'm drunk now and it's on 9am. TC Hammertime FTW!
Remember Kids: "Don't drink and link build".
Advice to live by. ;)
Ahhh, it's Linkbuilding *not* Drinkbuilding. That's what I'm doing wrong.
Another great WBF, as usual:) . Thanks for the tips and the resources. I didn't know about followerwonk. Another great tool for searching on twitter is tweepz.com, which has a lot of great filters and stuff like that: you can filter by the number of followers, language, you can search in bio and all kind of things. BTW, I like your enthusiast;) Thanks again for the tips shared.
Agreed, the resources in the post (and the comments!) are very useful. - Jenni
i agree. thanks for those resources. It's a 100% chance I will learn to use them.
I was really glad when you mentioned reporting on relationship at the end of the video. Keeping records of who you've reached out to, why, and the end result is hugely important. Over time such efforts result in the creation of a great network for future marketing initiatives. Moreover, they allow us to gradually craft our message from introduction to casual 'hello'.
Here are a few other ideas that popped into my head...
Great WBF topic as this type of work can be really challenging and slumps can quickly erode confidence.
Hi Tom,
Seems like you adjusted well to Seattle already!
I love your systematic and rather scalabale approach to reaching out. Do you ever use Mechanical Turk or similar to collect information, or is it better to do it manually?
Thanks!
Ps. I expected more Uhms in this WBF :)
Ha, I was expecting some more uhms. I threw a few in :)
We've tried using mturk to collect data (contact info) before but not with great success unfortunately. I think it's still best to do it by hand - that way you spot the opportunities for hustle when they arise.
great "uuuh"..WBF ;) bookmarked to my delicious :)
Hi Tom,
very good WBF and I am sure your contribute to SEOmoz in the months you will be there in Seatlle will be a great one.
Coming to the topic of your WBF, I think that, generally, all the best practices that we were using in order to contact and create relations with the Linkeratis are still good. At the end, what changed are the way to contact them and now we call those same persons Influencers.
Personally, what I do is always to establish a conversation with those ones I want to share ideas, project, websites and, finally links. That means that the conversational approach is something that can give you results on the middle/long term, if you don't already know the Influencers for other reasons.
Especially important is to know who already is in a conversation with them. In fact, the endorsement/six degrees of separation factor is a side effect that can give you very good results for your linking campaign.
It's a time consuming job, but it can give you those links that can make the difference between the link profile of your site and the one of your competitor, especially on the Trust side of links, a side that is gathering more and more importance lately.
See you soon on this screen.
That's a great point, that it is important to know who is already in a conversation with the people you try to reach out to. How do you do that? It seems like everyone is just overwhelmed with outreach - I know that at the Help Team, at least 5 linkbuilding requests actually make it through our spam filter a day - so it would be hard to know who is talking to who. How would you go about researching that? Start out at backlinks?
Very interesting!
Social is my answer.
When I look to an influencer one of the first things I do is to check out what are his/her social profiles. Then examine the list of the people they follow (in order to see if becoming her friend I can start a new conversation with others influencers who can be interesting) and the list of their follower (to see if some of the competitor are there, but also to discover hidden gems... as it was a scouting job).
That way I can draw a relationships map and use that map in order to plan my contact strategy.
Honestly, it is nothing so revolutionary. If you think well it is how us humans create our circle of friends. I know you, you present me a friend of yours and so on.
The secret, if you want to call it secret, is what Tom call enthusiasm. That has to walk with honesty, because the online world is just a representation of the offline world, and without honesty you cannot create any real connection. And it's that kind of connection, and a great content, that can produce great links too.
Great points well made, put the work in upfront at the opening and have an easier close - just as with sales.
People buy from people, and as Tom says in the video - people link to people.
The secret is, there is no secret - just hard graft!
Great WBF! I like most on item 3 that impulse you gave us to keep up the contact with that person which even gave a negative response. It never came into my mind to ask back why etc.... great idea!
Regarding building up relationship I just can agree. In our company link building is only a small task but has to be done, too and it happened to my twice that I got really great backlinks "only" because of that personal e-mail writing we had before regarding some business items.
Also recommend looking into different ways of reaching the influential. Go and meet them in person - you get to see peoples reactions to your ideas and suggestions, and whilst it doesn't necessarily give them the thinking time over whether to build a link or not, in terms of building relationships, its unmatched. My top tip...
Don't limit yourself to email. Send a purple cow.
Wonderful WBF - I really enjoy when SEOMoz has "special guests".
Link building is getting more and more difficult, but more and more innovative as the day's go on. I mean we've already seen 2 examples of google cracking down on bad link building, on fortune 500 companies this week alone. And now they're changing their algorithim to also foreclose on content farms.
I find that this personalization you're preaching is the best way to get good quality, outstanding, white-hat links. The enthusiasm is an absolute necessity when sending these out. Because, I know that every day i get link requests, but I usually only end up linking back to those that have already included a link to the site they want to exchange with, and have written an email that isn't copied and pasted.
This is my way of knowing that they are legitimate.
I am grateful for your tips. Have a safe flight back Tom.
Edit: Forgot to link stories.
I've seen the enthusiastic approach works incredibly well when I already did something to compliment the 'linkerati". Perhaps I tweeted about their new product or wrote a blog post and give something a great review. Linkbuilding has been growing (from my perspective) from adding to directories to using core fundamental marketing strategies.
excellent WBF Tom. patience and perseverance is they key (as is time!).
Thanks for the tip on followerwonk it's a nice find. Jean Madden
Top tips Tom. Ta. T'ra. Tim.
I've been looking around blogrolls ever since so guess I'm on the right track. It's a lot of work but I'm pretty sure there's no other way around it.
Hey, great tips! I've been looking for something to put me over the edge with my link building efforts. This video takes something that is seemingly mundane, and puts some life into it. Thanks again!
I'm currently working on linkbuilding and this i missed this WBF when it had benn published...I had completely forgotten the power of the blogroll, thank you the reminder
Brilliant talk. I always appreciate an email back passing on my content and, as you highlighted, try to keep the conversation afloat. Thanks for these great tips!
Follwerwonk is a great tool. Thanks for the well-organized and sensible advice. Viva WBF!
Excellent video. Definitely a useful perspective in being more engaging and enthusiastic in my email than being verbose and explaining all the intricacies of what I do. I'm gonna give it a try, hopefully, I can gain some more clutch links.
Thanks,
Laki.
great article! i agree, nobody can't do it alone. be social to get more links for seo :)
Link building is always about building a relationship. Its never about the classic definition of link building. Especially with social signals being incorporated into search,
All in all, an awesome post.
Hey Tom, some great tips here! Thanks for spelling it out well. Alltop is really is a great resource.
I'm looking for some recommendations about how to scale this relationship building. I work on a large site and we have many different niches that the site covers, so it is difficult to really build relationships within all of those specific niches. The general niche is not a relational one.
Any resources that can help with scaling contact lists? My Excel sheets aren't really cutting it anymore...
Cheers,
I've heard good things about the CRM link manager in buzzstream and raven but have little experience with them personally I'm afraid.
Hey thanks Tom, I appreciate the feedback. I'll check them out and see if they meet our needs here.
Cheers.
I'm one of the co-founders of BuzzStream, and we designed it first and foremost as a CRM for managing the outreach process.
One of the tools that saves a TON of time is our BuzzMarker. It's a bookmarklet you install on your browser and when you're looking at a page you want to convert into a prospect, you click the BuzzMarker and it automatically identifies email addresses, phone, address, twitter, linkedin, facebook, and other social profiles (and not just on the current page but through some unholy magic, on common places contact info tends to appear) and saves this all to your account. It also captures PageRank, SEOMoz metrics, Alexa, and allows you to tag the contact (which is invaluable later for scoring prospects and organizing your outreach).
One of the really smart things some users do is add a custom field for contacts so when they BuzzMark a link prospect, they can write their email opener right then and there, while it's fresh, (e.g. "wow, such a funny post about your overweight cat! My dog lost 10 lbs last year, and I'm not sure who was harder for.").
There are a slew of other features, but the newest one that is chock full of awesome is email outreach. All you have to do is select the contacts you want to email (did I mention you can sort and filter by tags and metrics...), write a standard outreach email template, and then insert your custom field at the beginning. You can send off your emails or you can view each message and add further customization.
I know I'm biased, but it's truly an awesome tool for link prospecting and outreach, and there NOTHING else like it on the market. Also, it's built for teams.
If you like AllTop, you should also check out:https://www.postrank.com/main
https://www.scribnia.com/
Awesome WBF! Thanks Tom!
My personal point about outreach is that it should be mostly natural, rather than generic. When you try to contact too many people who you don't actually care about and have nothing in common - you'll waste your time and fail. But if you see some bloggers who you're really interested in, you can put some effort and make friends with them.
Nice work Tom, I particularly liked point 4. A bit of luck and hustling can go a long, long way!
Hey there ,
Thats some pritty helpful stuff mate ...
keep doin the good work .
Great video Tom, and I didn't notice you used "ah" too much ^^
I totally agree with the relationship concept: the more you know the people you're talking too, the better. From my own experience, I never answer email about linkbuilding when I see from the beginning that it is broad/mass email with topic not even related to the websites I work for.
Otherwise, you give an advice that I did not think about: keep a relationship despite any previous refusal. Now that you said it, it sounds obvious, but in real I did not take the time to do it: thinking this might be a loss of time. I am really going to rethink my point of view about that now, thanks :D
The timing on this subject couldn't be better. I'm getting ready to ramp up more elaborate link building efforts for my clients. I agree with another commentor, the idea of content partnerships is a no-brainer.
Everytime somebody asks me to post content on my sites I generally say yes. As long as it is relevant than there is no harm. I have had a lot of guest bloggers write content. It gets me more indexed pages and they get a little bit of link juice. win win
Guest blogging is so big! It's beneficial for both parties.
Also, what Tom mentioned about posting on your blog about the blogs you read every morning, is a great way to develop relationships with people in your niche. They all get promotion, you're helping your readers understand you better, and in the end they won't forget that. But also, it's fresh content.
Hey Tom, really good tips on guest posts. Pretty much I've been doing everything you said, but there are some pros and cons of guest posts.
You get good results and link juice when your post is on a home page. If you post on popular blogs, in a really short time your post is going to end up on a second page, then thrid and eventualy who knows where. You don't even know if your post will be indexed by SE after a few months.
On other hand, when you post on blogs that don't get many visitors and guest posts, there is a big chance that your post is going to be on a first page for a long time. So you do get a link juice for quite some time. Which one you should go for?
I would think that a post on a popular blog would still be more valuable. Even if it goes off the front page quickly, it still has a good chance of being indexed by search engines if the blog is popular enough and if the post is good enough that it gets shared and linked around. Sure, a post on a less popular blog might stay front page for two months instead of two days, but how much value does that lesser page link have anyway? And six months from now when they're both off the front page, which one is going to have more and better inbound links to it? Just my two cents, due to the many nuances there's probably no real right answer here.
Great subject. FollowerWonk is pretty cool too.
Interesting that you mention using sites like Alltop to find out what the "hot news" story of the day is. My problem is once you find out what that story is, then what do you do? How do you capitalize on moments like that? I've been able to make gains off of news stories but it can be tough - guest posting for someone on the subject, for example, takes time. And with a news story, you are working against time. A news story can last for about 2-3 days, and you can only generate so much commentary or content in that time.
A lot of taking advantage of news stories seems to be about positioning yourself as an authority in your niche, which you should be doing anyway. Any other tips on turning the morning headlines into SEO gold?
Solid advice, Tom. And don't worry, I don't think anyone even noticed the "Uhs" until you said something...
Great WBF Tom! I've done a few years of outside sales in my previous life/career and found that experience helpful as I do more SEO and linkbuilding now. Cultivating relationships is crucial, even if they are not a direct person you want to be in contact with, they can always lend a helping hand to get you in touch with someone you want. The idea of viewing your linkbuilding campaigns as a sales lead bank is crucial in cultivating leads and contacts and being able to priortize your efforts.
Thanks for the tips!
Matt
Thanks so much for these outreach tips Tom. I think the key thing is to remember the purpose of your link building and to treat the process seriously. There are way too many people spamming blogs and forums for "links".
Check out my post about Link Building Through Clever Content Creation - https://www.seomistry.com/2011/02/24/effective-link-building-through-clever-content-creation/
I'm glad there was a transcript as I didn't have a clue what the dude was saying. He was a weird accent. Good info though...
Weird accent... no: just brit one.
Clearly, you've never watched any good films in your life.