Outreach for Linkbuilding with Tom Critchlow - Whiteboard Friday

Key Takeaways

Oh how do I see almost fans welcome to another edition of whiteboard Friday I'm Tom Critchlow and I'm here in Seattle helping out with some sem was SEO bits and pieces and i'm shooting whiteboard Friday because rams out of town today you're going to be talking about outreach for link building there's a lot of talk online about how to get links creating great content for links but a lot of focus goes on creating the content rather than to actually doing the outreach for the content so I thought I'd do a video on how you can actually get links from your content so there's an assumption here that you've already created some great content and that that content is targeted to a particular niche obviously it's a great content works much much better when it targeted to a particular community that they can be passionate about and can comment on and so on the really broad content doesn't typically do so well so let's assume you create some great content whatever it might be whether an infographic or a competition or video etc and then there's a few tips that we've used and doing outreach I just want to share here so the first thing that I've noticed when doing outreach is that you want to have efficient contact contact gathering so there's lots of ways of getting bloggers in a particular niche or getting Twitterers in a particular niche but the more that you can make that process quick and scalable and efficient the better the whole process is going to be so there's a usual stuff that you can do so you can run some google searches for things like top 10 blogs about your niche so let's say it's photography you can run a top 10 photography blogs run a search like that and you're going to end up with lots of blog posts and articles talking about what the top blogs are in that niche you can go through and you can find those that's obviously a great source one thing I really love to do is go find these top blogs they get talked about individually and then go through their blog roles so a lot of blogs will have a little blog roll or recommended blogs or friends section there's going to talk about all the people that they read that they subscribe to in fact a rand wrote a post about all the blogs that he subscribe to or one point so that might be a list that you might find if you're searching for SEO blogs or recommended SEO reading etc so go find through the find the influences find who the influencers link to and who they recommend you also want to find Twitter followers or rather influential Twitter accounts and follow a one which ever written out here follower want calm is a fantastic tool that will do this they've indexed a whole bunch of Twitter accounts and you can search through all the bio text so you can search for Twitter accounts that have a particular follow account and I interested in a particular niche so let's say it's photography you can go through you can find a whole bunch of people are they're interested in photography you can also search by location on follow along so this is a great way of finding niche accounts in a particular area that you can then go out and you can contact one of the key points here that I love to do is actually categorize these people as I'm finding these contacts on them finding these blogs guys who hasn't categorize them depending on what kind of outreach you're going to do to them so some people you might find and you might think well they've got a pretty mediocre blog it's all right they've got so many interesting content I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time personalizing my response to them or sending a really detailed email i'm just going to send them something pretty standard to these people some people you might find however might be journalists or they might have a really popular blog or it might be someone you found on twitter it doesn't have a blog but they may be owned a forum or an email newsletter something like that so categorize these people into broad buckets and buckets i like to have our your kind of standard contacts your extraordinary contacts and kind of left feel and that that kind of separation means that you can quickly and efficiently send your mass email to although the kind of standard contacts the extraordinary contacts that you can go through and you can say these people i'm going to really craft an email to i'm going to send something specific and personalized and fun and creative to these people and then the left-field contact to those that you might not want to send an email to maybe the they're left field because they live near you or maybe they have an email newsletter and you want to subscribe and send them an email dedicated to that so something maybe a little bit different so with that categorization I find really useful when I'm going through my contacts so I can save time later so that's the first thing second thing is being enthusiastic I find is more important than being unique so when you're doing outreach everyone will tell you you know find something personalized to that person you're speaking to and put it in email say hey I read this blog post you recently read and it's really awesome and that will somehow make them outreach more effective in my experience I found that being enthusiastic Trump's that every time so even if you don't put much in the email that says that shows you've read this I or you really try to engage them rather just write an email that's awesome right right take a leaf out of the SEO and was newsletters that go out and so on right but put put some personalization in there put some fun in there talk about maybe maybe you're a really small company maybe you're a startup maybe you've got some exciting tools or content whatever it might be tell people about that right come across as genuine and the the trick here is that people control links right websites don't link to people right web sites that link to people people do it right so you want to reach out to people and make them make them like you you really want to kind of get on their good side so in my art in my opinion always write any enthusiastic email over a unique email and watch your USB you know air maybe you're more fun than people maybe you're more creative another company maybe you're smaller or maybe you've got more interesting content whatever it might be so leverage those things when you're when you're crafting the contact going to switch over here now to the purple section so the third thing here is that when you're doing outreach not everyone is going to respond to you in fact anyone who's actually tried outreach will know that not that many people respond to you which is kind of unfortunate but you want to make sure that anyone that does respond to you even if they come back and say I'm not interested right now your content was okay but it doesn't really fit with my audience really make sure that you follow up those people so in the same way that you would have a sales channel and sales funnel make sure that you really cultivate these people you know go back to them and say hey well why didn't you like you or what could we do better next time or maybe next time we're doing this will include you in the content that we're writing so so really anyone that responds to you you really want to cultivate a relationship there because at the end of the day outreach is all about getting relationships with people whether they've got a blog or forum or whether they're just an intellectual Twitter account you really want to create a relationship because those relationships are worth so much more than the individual outreach you're doing because they can be useful for you know future pieces of content that you're releasing that you can get them involved in things like you know surveys that you do things like that and if they do come back and they're really positive then you still want to cultivate that relationship so if somebody comes back and says great sure it put up my blog but don't end there right you know find out with a wealth they block for example is a great one you a lot of people that blog online will have multiple blogs I think I've got about 17 last time I counted not all of which are recently updated did I have any friends right find out who else they know in the blogging space that might also want to post in the content so anyone that responds do you really really go after them really strongly and then the final thing is hustle which is a really hard thing to define when we've been doing outreach the most effective thing that we've done is just think laterally right like it's all very well doing building the contact list any emails to all these people but actually at the end of the day the thing that gets you the results is usually either a random contact or it's you know leveraging some kind of hot news there's something like that and it's really hard to come up with a process that would get you those things but in my experience there's a few things that you can do to give you a greater chance of success and the first thing is make sure you follow all of the Twitter on RSS feeds and that niche so a lot of people will think well this is a niche I'm engaging in I'm doing research and trying to find good bloggers but they don't actually bother living and breathing the niche right you've got to go in you've gotta actually engage these people read their blog posts see what they see what gets them riled see what's get some hot and really engage with them and that's why that's where you can can really win it will be above and beyond just doing the kind of outreach if you actually understand what this community is passionate about you'll have a much better chance of success so so go through and actually actually follow a lot of these people and actually see what makes them makes them tick watch forums as well I think forums are massively underrated when you're doing outreach because that's where a lot of the people that are really passionate about the niche that's what they hang out right so you can actually capture them in their natural environment so to speak when you go to forums you can actually see you know what are they chat about that's not in their niche you know people are in that niche just chatting you're shooting the breeze right you see what they see what they're interested in see what they're passionate about and you might spot opportunities there that you might otherwise miss and I find all top is a great way of very very quickly and easily finding a particular niche and then looking all the top news in that niche so you can find out what's hot and all top has kind of categories or all over the place so it kind of aggregates Twitter users and blogs in a particular nation you very very very quickly see it as breaking news or there's a hot topic all top will show that up quite nice so that's a great way of kind of artificially getting yourself embedded in a particular niche but at the end of the day don't forget that this is where a lot of the success comes from is that kind of extraordinary luck basically right let you stumble across somebody talking about something or you happen to be doing outreach at the same time there's some hot use and you need to give yourself the best chance of success with that with that kind of activity and then these are some good tips to get that so those are my main tips but there's one thing here which I've got kind of put in very light blue that you could probably can't read up here which is that you need to manage expectations whenever you're doing outreach there's a there's a tendency to think that every single time you do I reach for content you're going to get amazing results and that's simply not true but what you can do without leash is that even the failed at reach even the outreach that you've done that resulted in zero links that will still build your relationships so when you're doing this whole process again when we come back to efficient content gathering or contact gathering sorry don't forget the people that you've reached out to previously don't forget the people that you reach out to the word there were semi luke warm leads last time but this time maybe it's a different piece of content or maybe you took into account some of their feedback so make sure that when you're doing outreach even if you're not getting links you're building relationships and that's a great way of kind of managing expectations is when your ways your boss maybe you're an agent see and you've got a client when you're positioning the outreach work you're doing don't just report on the links also built the report on the relationships that you've built because they can be really really useful and this particularly applies when you're doing the really high level outreach to people like journalists and your kind of really high level bloggers is that you're not going to get in first time most of the time with these right you want to build a relationship get an email conversation going and then you can get some really great content that they're going to link to so I think those are the main top tips I probably said earth as I just said right now about a million times and again yep because I'm kind of new at this but that's fine i hope you enjoyed it if you want to read which you want to learn more about link building we're running some conferences in london and your leans in march w link so you can find out more details so sign up to that and i'll see you there Thank guys you