Biz Tips: How to Find Great Websites for Link Building Using Social Media
GROWTH:
How to Find Great Websites for Link Building Using Social Media
Social media platforms can send traffic your way, allow for direct customer feedback, and help your marketing efforts in a number of ways, not the least important of which is link prospecting. While competitor research and advanced operator-aided Google search can be prolific enough on their own, using social media for this purpose ensures that you’re getting relevant results, that you don’t have to worry about whether the sites you come across accept guest posts, and that you know that they have passed the quality control of those you’ve found them through.
Consistent, high-quality link building is an extremely time-demanding activity, which is why being able to save time on prospecting and to instantly reach the prospects you found through this method might be just what you need to ensure the success of your promotional efforts. Here are some of the most efficient ways to find sites that might be prepared to link back to you.
Where They Blog
Each serious blogger will be eager to share their work with their audience, other bloggers, and the online community in general. Their posts and accounts can be useful to you in a number of ways.
The first part of the process requires you to find influential bloggers covering the subject matter relevant to what you have to promote. The more followers, friends, or other platform-specific associates they have, the better, not only for the promotion you are likely to get, but because they are also likely to have some investment in the subject, and may prove to be just as interesting as the bloggers you’ve reached them through, but more on that later. For now, let’s just say that bloggers often follow other bloggers.
So, apart from finding more of them, some of the things that you can get from a blogger’s social account is the address of their blog, other blogs they might be posting on, their email address and additional information you can use to tailor a much better outreach email than after just stumbling on them through Google search. In other words, you’re not only saving time on the prospecting part of the equation, you are also significantly streamlining your outreach.
Where You Blog
Who are the other people you’ll find in the friends lists of the bloggers you come across? Well people like you, looking to get a link back. While you can also occasionally recognise them on the blogs themselves, locating them through social media is often easier and more scalable.
Regardless of how you discover your colleagues, they are a real treasure trove of information. For instance, what do you do when you publish a guest post? Share it on social media, of course. Who makes up the majority of your friends on social networks? Either other people working in your industry, or bloggers publishing their posts. So, not only are you getting a steady feed of new prospects (accounting for the overlap) with each new blogger you come across, you are also able to find more link builders as well as bloggers willing to cooperate with them.
If that’s not enough, it doesn’t take more than seeing just a couple of their posts to easily recognize which client they are promoting, and then, by checking those clients’ backlinks, find all the other link builders working for them and add them to your list. After a while, you’ll start associating certain link builders with different clients, niches, and even the quality level of the websites they guest post on, meaning that you can simply track the ones that suit you the most and get a consistent stream of relevant, high-value prospects without even lifting a finger.
Where Are They Signed
Going through the list of influential bloggers, their friends and link builders working with them can take a while, especially if you insist on going through all of their posts. However, if you have been compiling a list, and didn’t keep track of their new posts, you don’t have to manually go through each of them and scrape the content. All you need to do is get the links to their Twitter accounts, pull them through Ahrefs, and get the link of every page where they posted which is decent enough to have made it into Ahrefs’ index — they are, after all the only ones you’re interested in. Naturally, every new blog you find this way should be checked for other, similar guest posting link builders, which you should then add to the rotation.
What Attracts Them
Despite the somewhat cyclical nature of the process, i.e. one blogger leading to numerous others, at times you’ll find yourself starved for ideas. If you’ve reached that point, do not despair, there are plenty of ways to find new ones.
Starting with a typical hashtag search targeting the phrases relevant to what you are promoting, through using tools like Followerwonk for advanced Twitter analytics or BuzzSumo to find the influencers with the largest audience, social networks are made to be searchable and finding the exact people you need shouldn’t be difficult even without specialized tools.
What Makes Them Tick
Apart from ‘content is king’, there’s probably no other adage as overused in the context of digital marketing than the one connecting relationship building with link building. As annoying as it can get at times, just like with all the other clichés, there is a reason for its excessive popularity, namely, it’s largely true.
This is not to say that you should go around pretending to like people that you don’t or fake being their friend; it only means that social networks are there for you just like they are there for everyone else, to facilitate communication and make it easier for you to get connected with people sharing your interests, goals or, like in this case, profession.
Engaging influencers, bloggers and other interested parties in conversation, which doesn’t have to be profound but needs to be open and honest, will open you up to a range of new opportunities. Not only will you improve your chances of being published with the people you’ve already found, these relationships are likely to expose you to a range of new prospects you may not have reached otherwise.