BuzzStream

Today’s guest post comes from one of our favorite customers, Jon Quinton of SEOGadget.  You can follow Jon on Twitter or Google Plus. 

High level strategic direction is all well and good; however sometimes before you can ‘sell’ a client (or your boss) on something bigger you need to prove you can get results right now.  If you need results right now – chances are you need links right now.

But getting links right now is hard work. One of the biggest barriers for successful link building is lack of drive.

There’s a big difference between churning out crap at a rate of knots compared to having a desire to win and being the kind of person that grabs hold of opportunities before it’s too late. It’s the latter that makes me excited, and time and time again I find it’s this characteristic that makes someone great at link building. This requires having your ear to the ground at all times and being in a place where you find opportunities before they’re gone; that takes hard work and commitment.

A strong list of link prospects that you can update quickly should be your weapon of choice.

Finding people who are likely to link

There’s not much point in spending time promoting your content to people who are never likely to link to you. Some contacts are going to take a greater time investment and this is fine, but don’t waste time on sites that won’t be interested in what you’re doing.

So how do you go about finding sites and authors that will be into what you’re doing enough to link to your work? Trawling through competitors backlinks one by one can be time consuming, dull, and seeing that this is a post about getting stuff done quickly, let’s look at a faster way to work.

As some of you may know, we recently launched a tool that uses a bunch of APIs that can, amongst other things, pull contact details from linking sites and export that data into Excel. The idea here was to aid people with link clean up, but it’s also very handy for link building too! The way I’d use this to speed up prospecting is to throw in a bunch of backlinks from sites in a similar space to yours, export the data and combine into one master sheet:

Assuming you’ve got rid of the poor quality sites and those that have no contact details, by using the COUNTIF function you can pretty easily add a column to show the number of occurrences a particular person appears as a contact across a variety of your competitors linking domains. If your aim is to find people that are happy to link to content in your space, this will do the trick pretty quickly! 

Using the BuzzStream ‘People’ function is a great way to store this data and manage your contacts on an ongoing basis; it’s something we’ve found really useful especially as the team grows. The beauty here is that your list of people will grow in time. Imagine spending 30 minutes a week repeating the process?

(more…)

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.