Promote your content to your link prospects

Find link prospects in your target market’s online community

Make friends and build lists of link prospects. There are many opportunities for this as we show below. But you must record your prospects’ details either in a spreadsheet or in specialist link building software like Wordtracker Link Builder

Find link prospects in the following places …

Check your own site’s inbound links and referrers. Use your site’s analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Wordtracker Link Builder

Find relevant blogs. Study, start commenting when confident, don’t mention your own products until you are trusted.

Monitor news sites. Make sure you know what’s going on. Comment, be supportive and helpful, make friends.

Build press lists. Contact journalists, make yourself available as an expert and show your pedigree.

Join forums. Register, use your signature, be more helpful than promotional, earn community trust.

Look for specialist sites that accept article submissions. Contact any specialist sites and bloggers and ask if they want guest content written by you.

Take part in specialist social sites. Here’s a list of 193 of them.

Look for specialist groups on big social sites. On Facebook, StumbleUpon and Twitter search for groups and lists.

Look for local sites and small news sites. Make contact, offer help, stories and content.

Join trade associations. Be active, look for contacts and linking opportunities.

Check out chambers of commerce. They are there to help and that includes mentions and links.

Look for relevant libraries. Great resources for communities and quality links.

Approach your suppliers. They have websites, right? If you’re giving them business, they’re highly likely to link to you.

Watch competing websites. Study inbound links, press releases, successful content and tactics.

Speed up your link building with Wordtracker Link Builder

We’ve already mentioned that link building is one of the most difficult aspects of SEO.

Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool can simplify and speed up your link building.

With Wordtracker Link Builder you can start a link building campaign by entering a single seed keyword.

Link Builder will then find thousands of link prospects for you.

Those prospects will be organized into 11 categories to match different link building strategies, including: blogs, news media, social media, trusted sites, directories, shopping sites, business sites and job sites. See the ‘Strategies’ menu on the report on the following page.

Link Builder checks which of these prospects already link to you. See the ‘Linking to me’ column on the report below.

Link Builder continues looking for new link prospects. Any it finds will be added to your prospects lists and you’ll receive an email to let you know about them.

Manage contacts with your link building targets

With hundreds of prospects for your different strategies, you need to:

• Choose which prospects you will target.

• Get to work building relationships with your targets.

• Make notes about any contact with your targets.

• Record when you have ‘contacted’ targets or are they are ‘linking to you’ (everybody’s favorite, of course).

You’ll have guessed by now that Link Builder will help you do all this too. Here’s how …

Your prospects will already be in Link Builder, sorted by the number of sites that link to them.

This is a good way of sorting the prospects to help you choose which ones to target.

But to really know if a link prospect is worthy of being a target, you are going to have to click through and visit the site.

If you like a site then you can mark it as a target by clicking its target icon. See below.

You can also make notes about the site and any contact you make with it.

Once you have made contact with a target you can change its status by clicking the ‘contacted icon’ (it’s an envelope).

You can now sort your prospects list (for each of your campaigns) by those which:

• You’ve chosen as targets (or not).

• You’ve contacted (or not).

• Now link to you (or don’t).

Lovely stuff. But wouldn’t it be nice to see graphs that illustrated this and you could use for reports? Actually …

Report on campaign progress

Link Builder gives you a collection of smart graphs to help you visually monitor and report on your campaign’s progress. (You can download these reports as PDFs too, of course.)

The image below shows a campaign’s number of target sites, those contacted, not contacted and linking back:

Your clients (or boss) will love seeing your progress.

You can also see how your site’s inbound links are increasing over time:

And how many links your site is getting each month:

A spider graph shows you how your site’s links are spread across different link types:

Such spider profiles immediately show you where you’re weak and where you need to take action to improve. (A few too many directories for our example site’s report above, I think.)

Report on competitors’ link building strategies

As well as reporting on your own site’s inbound links, you can report on and study your competitors’.

You can see your competitors’ number of cumulative links over time: You can also see the number of new links your competitors are gaining each month:

The ‘spider profile’ reports show you how well your competitors’ links are spread across different types of sites. This highlights your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.

In the spider graph above we can see that Montblanc.com (in red) get many of their links from Shopping sites, News media and Directories. And Cross.com are strongest in shopping sites too but are relatively poor in news media.

Promote your content to your link prospects So you’ve researched and established yourself in your market’s online community; and are creating quality content. Now what? You’ve got to let people know, of course. It’s time to promote and here’s a list of methods to consider: Create RSS feeds. Try registering with Feedburner Publish free newsletters. Recruit site visitors to your free benefit-packed newsletter and you are building an emailing list. Use your newsletter to promote your content. Post on your site/blog. You’re doing that anyway, of course. But it’s amazing what people forget if it’s not on a checklist. Submit content to generic social sites eg, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and now Google +. Submit to your specialist social networking sites Use your specialist contacts by email, direct tweets and even telephone. Contact journalists you know personally. Don’t just issue press releases - get to know them, chat and build trust. Buy and use a list of relevant journalists’ details and get to know them. Contribute with guest posts and articles on specialist blogs and sites. Issue press releases to online and offline specialist distributors (like PRWeb and Press Dispensary). Submit to site-of-the-day sites Consider Eric Ward’s URLwire It’s a paid-for service but is top quality. Buy PageRank links (or not). You can buy links without a nofollow tag. But, if Google works out that you’re buying links you’re site may be penalized. Take the risk if you must, but I certainly don’t recommend it. Buy promotional links (adverts) on generic sites like StumbleUpon and Facebook; specialist sites; and Pay Per Click (PPC). The links won’t directly help your SEO but others might share your content and those links will. If your content is good and your network strong then you will get links from your immediate contacts. Then their readers and others will find your site, visit and perhaps link to it. You’ll be getting links without asking. Success.