We just made another free tool available on our link building tools page to help you build outreach lists. Pretty simple tool to use…just plug in a set of URLs and this tool will look for any blogrolls on the pages you’ve entered. Here’s how you use it…
Paste in a set of blog URLs that are related to the category you’re focused on:
Click “Go” and the tool will populate a table to the right:
You can also save it to a CSV file by clicking the link below the table…one thing to keep in mind is that the link is visible while the list is still getting built, so make sure that the full list has been generated before clicking the link.
I’ll write a follow-on post that walks through how I’ve been using this tool to help me find the most influential blogs when I’m researching a community that I’m not yet familiar with.
If you have any questions or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you!
A couple of weeks ago, we released our first set of free link building tools, and we promised that more were on the way. Shortly after announcing the tools, we started getting “you know what would be a cool tool” emails from our customers. Well, one came up repeatedly…we liked the idea and so we rolled it out.
This new tool is pretty simple…paste in some HTML and it will generate a CSV file that includes each link in the HTML, the domain for each link and the anchor text. There’s lots of ways you can use this, but I’ve found it particularly helpful for building outreach lists. For example, suppose I’m trying to build a list of SEO bloggers for a campaign I come across TopRank’s Big list of SEM and SEO blogs.
This is a great starting point for my list building, but manually cutting and pasting all 400 of these blogs into a spreadsheet would be a pain. Instead, just do the following:
- Select the content that includes the links you want
- If you’re in firefox, right click and select ” View Selection.” In chrome, select “Inspect Element.”
- Copy the text into text box in the “Extract Links” tool and click “Create CSV”
Now you have a CSV file that looks something like this:
That’s all there is to it. Once I have this list, the next step I’ll want to take is to collect information about each of these blogs to help me prioritize my efforts. If you’re a BuzzStream subscriber, here are a couple of additional things you can do to help with this effort.
- Import the file into BuzzStream. If you’re using projects, you might want to create a project that’s simply called “Opportunity Research.” If you’re not using projects, you can either include a tag in the import file or create a custom field.
- Sort by metrics. BuzzStream will collect metrics for each domain and you can utilize this to help you prioritize them. Once you’ve decided on the priority, select the contacts you want to prioritize and click “Edit>Overall Rating.” The Rating will be set for all of these contacts at once.
