Link Campaign

There are two paths you can take when conducting a campaign. The first is
competitor research, or reverse engineering, and the second is starting from
scratch by link prospecting.

Competitor Research

One place to start your campaign is from competitor research. Go to Google and
type in your head keywords. The different sites that show up are your
competitors. Throw the URL of one of these sites into Open Site Explorer.

Next, look at the 4 drop down menus in the middle of your screen. In this
particular campaign, I’m looking for links that pass value, so let’s exclude nofollow
links from our reports by selecting “followed + 301”. Go to the next drop down
menu and click “external link only”. We could choose to see all links to these
domains, but in this case, I’m just looking to obtain links to my homepage. Here’s
what it should end up looking like:

Now hit filter.
Next, you want to export these results to Excel, so click “download as CSV” on the
right of the screen. Do this for each competitor. Once you’re done, go to the top
of your screen and click on Recent CSV Reports. You can now download all of the
CSVs individually, and once you do so, combine them all into one spreadsheet in
Excel.
You’ve now got a list of all your competitor’s top links.

Prospecting

Competitor research can only take you so far. You’re going to eventually have to
find new opportunities on your own. This is where that list of prospecting tools, as
well as Google, comes in handy.

Prospecting with Google deals with constructing search queries to narrow down a
list of sites to those that you can get links from. You’re going to be using a combination of your keywords and operators (qualifiers). For example, if I wanted
to find guest blogging opportunities in the home improvement vertical, here’s a
query I might use when prospecting:
Home improvement “write for us”
This would find home improvement pages that include the phrase “write for us”.
When I type it in quotations it means that the page needs to include this exact
phrase, and not just those 3 words scattered on the page, otherwise it doesn’t
qualify for my query.

Here are some other helpful operators:
Site:ehow.com – only show results from the eHow website
Site:.edu – only show sites that are on .edu domains
-website.com – don’t show any results from website.com
gold OR silver – include results that are about gold or silver, and not
necessarily both
allintitle:“chicken soup” – The phrase “chicken soup” has to be in the title
filetype:pdf – only show results that are PDF files
ext:html – only show HTML web pages (i.e. abc.com/example.html)
inurl:links – the word “links” has to be somewhere in the URL of the page
link:competitor.com – show pages that link to competitor.com. Note
however Google never shows more than a small percentage of
competitor.com’s links.
~food – searches for the word “food” as well as any synonyms of “food”,
such as “nutrition”.

These are the main operators you’ll be using, although there are a few others.
Before you start prospecting, you have to understand what type of campaign
you’re conducting. Are you looking for directories to submit to? Links pages?
Guest blogging opportunities?
This is because different campaigns require different queries. Here are a list of
queries for different types of campaigns (replace keyword with your
keyword/niche/vertical):

Directories

Keyword “submit”
Keyword inurl:submit.php
Keyword “add url”
Keyword “suggest website”
Keyword “suggest site”
Keyword “submit website”
Keyword “add website”
Keyword “listing”
Keyword “add site”
Keyword “recommended sites”
Keyword “favorite sites”
Keyword “favorite links”
Keyword “recommended links”
Keyword “favorite websites”
Keyword directory
Keyword * directory
directory * Keyword

Resource Pages

Keyword inurl:links inurl:lib*
Keyword inurl:resources site:.gov
Keyword inurl:links library
site:.edu
Keyword inurl:resources site:.edu
Keyword inurl:resources inurl:lib*
recommended sites Keyword
Keyword inurl:links site:.gov
Keyword inurl:links site:.edu
Keyword favorite links
Keyword “related sites”
favorite sites Keyword
Keyword inurl:links
list * Keyword sites
Keyword related urls
Keyword links
Keyword inurl:resources site:.org

Forums

Keyword forum
“Keyword forum”
intitle:Keyword forum
inurl:Keyword forum

Guest blogging

Keyword guest blogger wanted
Keyword guest writer
Keyword guest blog post writer
Keyword “write for us” OR “write for me”
Keyword “Submit a blog post”
Keyword “Become a contributor”
Keyword “guest blogger”
Keyword “Add blog post”
Keyword “guest post”
Keyword “Write for us”
Keyword submit blog post
Keyword “guest column”
Keyword “contributing author”
Keyword “Submit post”
Keyword “submit one guest post”
Keyword “write for us”
Keyword “Suggest a guest post”
Keyword “Send a guest post”
Keyword “contributing writer”
Keyword “Submit blog post”
Keyword inurl:contributors
Keyword “guest article OR post”
Keyword add blog post
Keyword “submit a guest post”
Keyword “Become an author”
Keyword submit post
Keyword “submit your own guest post”
Keyword “Contribute to our site”
Keyword magazines
Keyword “Submit an article”
Keyword “Add a blog post”
Keyword “Submit a guest post”
Keyword “Guest bloggers wanted”
Keyword “guest column”
Keyword “submit your guest post”
Keyword “guest article”
Keyword inurl:guest*posts
Keyword Become guest writer

Content Submission

Keyword submit content
Keyword submit article
Keyword submit post
Keyword submit blog post
Keyword add article
Keyword add blog post
Keyword add content

There are two tools that can help with this process. Just input your keyword, then
they creates links to each of the different Google results pages for each query. The
first is SoloSEO’s, and the second is Ontolo’s.

Finding contact information
Once you’ve built up a list of prospects, you need to start looking for contact
information. Your goal is to find as many email addresses as possible. If you can’t
find an email address for a prospect, then a contact form is fine. Phone numbers
are also OK if you’re willing to call them.
When looking for email addresses, always avoid catch-alls if possible, and always
try to find the person that can actually put up a link to you. For example, avoid
emails like links@website.com or contact@website.com. Instead, look for the
webmaster or the blogger’s personal email address (webmaster@website.com is
OK).
One last thing to note is that your success rate will be much higher if you do
outreach by phone. I personally haven’t tried it, but the numbers some agencies
have shared with me on this is staggering.

Here are some of the different ways you can find that info:

Look for a Contact Us page – Most reputable sites will have a Contact Us page
somewhere in their navigation. Look at the top, bottom, and each side of the site
for a link to their contact page. If you’ve found one, look for an email.

Look for contact info in the sidebar or footer – Some blogs put their emails in
the sidebar, and websites like universities put the webmaster’s email in the footer.

Look for an About Us page – If you can’t find a Contact Us page, then there’s a
good chance their contact info will be on their About Us page.

Use Google – If you can find the name of the person you’d like to contact, use
name queries life “John Doe”, “John Doe profile”, or “John Doe email”.

Outreach

Now it’s time to actually contact these people.

Names are important

One of the first things you should do is to find any names that are associated with
the email addresses. Starting an email off with their name makes it more personal,
and as result, your response rate is much higher.

The subject line
Just like a headline on a newspaper, the subject line is essential to getting your
email opened in an overcrowded inbox.
Because the subject line determines whether or not the email is opened, it has a
direct impact on the success of your campaign. That’s why it’s worth taking at least
a few minutes to come up with the perfect one.

You want to grab their attention, because since you’re emailing them personally
for the first time, they might automatically trash your email. Here are some tips to
do so:
Avoid promotional, cheesy, and sales-like phrases – if it looks like an
email sent out to 10,000 other people, it probably won’t get opened.
Avoid words like “reminder”, “free,” and “help” – they tend to trigger spam
filters, thus losing the battle to get it opened before it even begun.
Consider using their name – In certain cases, starting the subject line off
with their name & a comma can have a huge, positive impact.
What’s in it for them? – try & show how the email will benefit them. For
example, “New tool to help you fight comment spam”.
Urgency plays a role – give them a reason to open your email before the
20 or 30 others. For example, “Here are some broken links you need to fix
ASAP”.
Keep it simple – You don’t have many characters, so keep it simple and get
to the point.
Creating a subject line from scratch can only take you so far. You need to be able
to test them. If you’re doing bulk outreach, I recommend you split test the first
25% of prospects. Send one subject line to half and the other to the other half. Use
the one that got the most responses for the final 75%.
As you do more outreach, you’ll start to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Always make sure you’re keeping track of response rates. These are essential to
helping you continuously improve.
One last thing to note is that be careful of your word choice. For example, “I found
a few broken links” sounds like you were searching for them; rather, say
something like “I stumbled across a few broken links”.

The content
Before I say anything else, understand that the goal of the content of your
opening email is to get an engaged response, not a link.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s decide what the content of the email is going to be.
You can personalize each one, use a template for all of them, or go somewhere in
between.
For some campaigns I use the same template for each opening email, while for
others I personalize each one. It really comes down to what you’re trying to do.

Acquisition
If you’ve just shipped out a product for review, or if you’re waiting for the
webmaster to put the link up, make sure you keep track of this final step. Links can
be lost if you don’t check back in with your prospect in a timely manner.
Once the link is acquired, there are a number of tools that you can use to keep
track of any changes to the link or page.