Finding Link Targets

The first thing you need to think about is what types of people you should contact, as you want to make sure that you are contacting people who are likely to be interested in your content. If you contact people randomly, your response rate will be a lot lower, and you're likely to give yourself and your website a bad reputation.

Ideally, before you actually start a link building campaign, you should have a rough idea of who you think will care about what you're doing. If you create a piece of content that you want links to, such as an infographic, you should ask yourself right at the start of the process who will care about it. More importantly, who will care enough to actually link to it?

This last bit is crucial. While you may find it quite easy to get people to look at your content, it’s a whole new level of engagement for them to actually link to it. Linking to something requires a bit of effort and time, so you need to make someone care enough for them to not mind doing this. The barrier for getting your content shared on social networks is much lower. More people have a Twitter or Facebook account than a website or blog, making it easier for them to share.

So how do you make people care enough to link?

You need to find a hook that makes people care. You need to work this hook into your content right from the start. If you put off thinking about your hook until the moment you begin your outreach, you may discover that no one cares about the point of your content, the result being that you will have devoted a lot of time to crafting content no one wants to link to.

Some hooks that you can think about may be:

• News

• Funny

• Controversial

• Data visualization

• Competition

• Ego-bait

• Long-form, detailed content

There are many kinds of hooks, but the ones above should at least get you thinking about what you can offer to people that will make them link to you.

There are a few simple ways to start working out what works and what doesn’t within your industry. Starting with the basics, just begin searching for topics that relate to your industry and let yourself get lost a little. Note down things that are interesting as you go and bookmark engaging content.

You can even use the MozBar to see how many links interesting content has as you search Google, as seen in this example:

There are also research tools such as Google Trends or Buzzsumo that allow you to dive deep into what’s trending and what's being shared or linked to in your industry.

Once you have your idea mapped out, it shouldn't be too hard to find out who will fall within your target audience. Generally, you just need to brainstorm subjects related to your content. Let's take a look at an example.

Imagine you’re putting together a piece of content entitled, “The Definitive Guide to Baking the Perfect Cupcakes.” You’re producing this content because you own a local bakery that sells cupcakes as well as many other lovely baked goods.

Who would be interested in this guide?

• Food bloggers: The obvious choice!

• Parent bloggers: They may want to teach their kids how to make cupcakes and your guide will show them how to do this.

• Recipe websites: Because your guide will contain great recipes for different types of cupcakes.

• Party websites: No party is complete without a plate of cupcakes!

With just a minute or two of thinking, we've easily come up with four types of websites that may be interested in your cupcake guide. Now you can start researching these in more detail to get a better idea of whether or not you stand a good chance of getting a link from them.

In this section we’ll outline a few simple techniques that you can use to turn your idea of "food bloggers" into a full list of websites that you can contact.

Find lists of bloggers

By far the most simple place to start is a search on Google like this:

This single search gave us several great lists to search through. The big advantage of using this technique is that someone else has already done the hard work for you by curating the list.

Once you've found a list like this, you can quickly grab all of the URLs from the page using a tool like Scraper, which is a Google Chrome plugin. You simply right-click on one of the URLs and click on "Scrape similar."

You can then copy the list into Google Docs or your own spreadsheet. From here, you can copy and paste all the URLs into a tool like URL opener, which will open all the URLs for you with one click. You can then go through them all, find out if they're relevant to your content, and if so, find their contact details, which we’ll talk about shortly.

Advanced search operators

There are a number of ways to search Google that are not immediately obvious to us as users. We’re accustomed to searching for strings of keywords and this is how 99% of Google users search too. But, there is a set of search tools available to us that can make our results much more focused and specific to what we need: they’re called advanced search operators.

For link building, this means we can filter out websites that may not be useful for us and spend our time looking through ones that are. Here are a few examples using different advanced searches:

Notice the "inurl:resources" bit? This tells Google to only show results that have the word "resources" within the URL. Here is an example of one result that Google gives us:

https://findyourcakeinspiration.com/cake-resources/

This is a good potential link target, because your definitive guide to cupcakes is a resource that could be of interest to visitors to a cupcake blog. Therefore, contacting the owner of this blog and asking them to list your guide as a resource could result in a link for you.

Let's take a look at another example:

We have combined two advanced searches here.

First, we used the "intitle:resources" modifier, which tells Google to only show results that have the word "resources" within the page title. This is useful because sometimes the word may not be used in the URL, so our previous advanced search (with inurl:) wouldn’t find them.

We have also used quotation marks around the word “cupcakes.” This tells Google to only return results that mention the word cupcakes on the page. This is useful in this case because searching for food bloggers would probably be a bit too broad, and we'd have to dig through a bunch of websites that may not be relevant to the topic of cupcakes.

Now you have three solid methods for finding relevant link targets and, at this point, you’ll probably have a nice big list of them in a spreadsheet. But, you need to do a bit more work before contacting the site owners.

If you want to have a high response rate with your outreach, you need to spend a bit of time making sure that the websites you've found are as relevant as possible.

You can do this by spending time learning about your target bloggers. Visit their websites, read through their content, try to get a feel for what they like and what they don't like. Take a look through their social networks, such as Twitter, to see what links they’ve shared recently.

In particular, pay close attention to whether or not they share other people's content or if they only promote their own. Ideally, you want to find some evidence of them sharing external resources, because that's what you'll be asking them to do.

As you go through each website, make some notes about what they've shared and what interests them. This is crucial because you'll need this information later when you contact them. Otherwise, you'll just be sending them a generic, templated email that won't be personalized to them at all.

A nice little trick you can use here is to put the blog's URL into a tool like TagCrowd, which will analyze the content of the page and show you which words are mentioned the most.

Once you've decided that the blog is within your target audience and seems relevant, you'll need to find contact details. This is usually pretty straightforward, but here are a few tips that may speed things up a little.

Check the header and footer first

Most of the time, you’ll find a link to a contact page in the header or the footer of a website, so check these areas first. If you can't see a contact page, try an "about" page, which often lists contact details.

Check social media accounts

Bloggers will often have their social media accounts listed somewhere. Click through to them and see if they have contact information listed at all. Some will have their email address in their bio.

You can also take a look at this guide to finding anyone’s email address.

By this point, you probably have a big list of link targets, and you need to prioritize them and group them into buckets so that you can customize your message to them with the greatest efficiency.

There are many ways to prioritize link targets for outreach. Here are some examples:

• By domain metrics, like Domain Authority

• By blogger influence, like number of Twitter followers

• By the likelihood of linking, like a cupcake blogger vs. a generic food blogger

Let's look at these in more detail.

Domain metrics

We'll talk in detail about domain metrics in Chapter 6. For now, all you need to know is that these metrics can measure the value of link targets just as well as they can measure the value of individual links.

You can use Domain Authority to gauge how strong a particular domain is and therefore, how likely a link from it helps influence your organic search rankings. The MozBar can give you Page Authority and Domain Authority very quickly, and also allows you to compare them to each other in search results if you want.

Once you have these metrics, you can do a simple sort in Excel or Google Sheets from highest to lowest and, if you choose, you can remove link targets that don’t have high enough DA. This particularly helps if you have a very large set of websites and you don't feel that you have the time to contact them all.

I sort by Domain Authority and will generally get rid of anything below DA30 or DA35, if I have a very big list. This isn't an exact science, however, because a new website that may be very good and relevant may not have accumulated enough DA yet.

However, if you have a large list of potential link targets, you do want to be quite aggressive in narrowing it down so that you have a good quality set of remaining websites to work with. You could also decide to keep the lower DA websites but come back to them later once you’ve completed outreach on the higher DA websites.

Blogger influence

A crucial part of getting as many visitors to your content as possible is getting influential people to share it. Getting just one influential person to share your content can lead to a big ripple effect, as many of their followers will also share it. So, even if a blogger doesn't appear to be associated with a particularly strong domain, don't discount them before you've checked to see how influential they are on social networks. You can simply go to their social profiles one by one to find out how many followers they have.

The same goes for journalists at well-known, top-tier newspapers or magazines. Getting one link from a high-traffic, well-known newspaper can sometimes lead to other websites picking up on the article, too, which leads to more links. Therefore, prioritizing these can give you more bang for your buck.

Likelihood of linking

This is where your manual research comes back into play. As you browse the potential link targets, you should try to assess how likely they are to link to your content. There isn't a tool that can do this for you and you’ll need to come up with your own way of defining this. One simple way could be to score them on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being not at all likely to link and 5 being very likely to link.

Questions you should ask yourself when giving them a score are:

• Have they shared external content before?

• Are they super relevant to my content (e.g. a cupcake blogger should score higher than a generic food blogger)?

• Is their blog active, i.e. have they written a new blog post within the last month?

These questions should give you an indicator of how likely they are to link to you.

Once you've gathered all this information, you should sort it all so that you have a list of bloggers who:

• Are likely to link to you

• Have high domain metrics

• Have good social followings

These are the websites that you should contact first and with messages that are highly customized and tailored to them. Take another look at their website and try to pick up clues that can guide you in what to include in your email. This will help your message look genuine and avoid coming across as just another outreach email that isn't personalized.

These websites also have the power to "seed" your content, which means that they link to it from their website and share it with their audiences. This can lead to other websites becoming aware of your content and perhaps also linking to it, without you having to speak to them directly.

At this point, you should have a nice list of quality websites that are likely to be interested in the content you've created or the campaign you're running. You have their contact details and have prioritized which ones are most important. Now it’s time to start contacting them.