SOCIAL LINK BUILDINGHow to increase the effectiveness of outreach using social data and channels

MICHAEL KINGDIRECTOR OF INBOUND MARKETING

@ipullrank

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DOWNLOAD THIS DECK: http://slidesha.re/social-lb

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BUILDING LINKS IS TOO HARD.

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WHY CAN’T I GET ANY RESPONSES

TO MY LINK REQUESTS?

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IT WOULD TO BE GOOD TO KNOW IF

I’M DOING THIS SH*T RIGHT!

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LINK BUILDING SYNERGY

Effective Link Building is done at the intersection of budget, content and outreach. We will be discussing effective outreachVenn-Diagram: http://wiep.net/talk/link-building/link-building-styles/ (@wiep)

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WE’RE THE BEST BUT WE WANT TO BE BETTER

Combining the iAcquire iRank and Buzzstream datasets we analyzed the features of 297,791 emails to develop definitive insights on outreach link building. Download the study: http

://www.iacquire.com/resources/quantifying-outreach/

GenderOpening SalutationDay of the WeekHour of the DayNumber of MailsMessage LengthFirst Touch on TwitterEmail Trust Signals

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THE IACQUIRE PROCESSWE ARE THE BEST AND THIS IS WHY

 RANKING RESULTS

 

DIRECTORIES & LINK DB’S

VETTING PROCESSTechnology Driven

 

VIEWING PROCESS OUTREACH PROCESS

 QUALIFIED PAGES

 

POTENTIAL FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES

 NEW Content & Link Partner

12,558,303PAGES

REVIEWED

BLUELIST FILTERING

TOP 5,000amazon.com, apple.com, wikipedia.org, etc

BLACKLIST FILTERING

“DO NOT CONTACT” LIST(internally established)

BAD NEIGHBORHOODS(link network & spam)

647,631OPPORTUNITIES

11,487,318PAGES

REMOVED

SEO METRICS FILTERING

Client Specific – Filtering out data based on IBL, Moz-Rank, OBL, PR, etc.

MANUAL VIEWING

CLIENTREQUIREMENTS

• Relevancy Guidelines

• Content Guidelines

• Legal Requirements

QUALITY CONTROL• Full-time Highly-trained Team

• Multi-layered Review

• Evolving Quality Guidelines

112,569OPPORTUNITIES

535,062UNQUALIFIED

PAGES

OUTREACH3-4 attempts made

POTENTIAL PARTNER

“NO”NO RESPONSE

“YES”

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SO WHAT, MIKE? I CAN’T DO THAT!

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IT WON’T BE AS IN-DEPTH, BUT YES YOU CAN

Download Screaming Frog: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Download Niels Bosma’s SEO Tools: http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/

Read: https://seogadget.co.uk/links-data-excel-seomoz-api/ @seogadget

Crawl prospects in list mode

Pull any other metrics you care about

Pull Open Site Explorer metrics

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2011 OUTREACH RESULTS

Our 40 people in-house outreach team gets results through contacting publishers at a volume.

216,554 emails70,393 initial emails

3,319 QUALITY ASSURED LINKS

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FIRST TOUCH IN TWITTER YIELDS HIGHER RESPONSE

While the dataset is limited Buzzstream’s data backs up my own personal experience in that there is was a 37.5% response rate from outreach that began in Twitter.

Tweeted first

Tweeted before emailing

Did not tweet first

Tweeted first

Got a Response to Email After Tweeting First

Did not get a response

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LINK BUILDING IS ABOUT PEOPLE

Link Building Is NOT about getting a link. It’s about convincing someone you don’t know to take a real world action that benefits you.

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HEY I’M AWESOME

LINK TO ME!

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BUILD RELATIONSHIPS NOT LINKS

Tailor your link building efforts to your audience and your business goals for more effective results.

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EAVESDROP ON YOUR AUDIENCE

Scout Labs

Social Mention

Lithium SM2Radian6

Topsy Amplicate

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USE QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS TOOLS

Invest in sites like Doubleclick Adplanner, ComScore, Compete or Quantcast to identify a demographic

by industry and to get a preview of their search behavior.

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USE FACEBOOK AD CREATOR

Use the FB tool to see how many people fall into an audience by interest and

demo. This tool is the Adwords Keyword Tool of Personas http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/

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USE QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS TOOLS

Personas help you identify how to find your link prospects and how to start a conversation with them once you do. Read: http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/content-based-outreach-for-link-building (@justinrbriggs)

Curious GeorgeThis group represents people considering buying a 3D TV

GamerGamers talk about their 3D gaming experience and the components and games they use.

Film PuristThis conversation revolves around use of 3D in film. They talk about 3D in a broad way, and occasionally touch on 3DTV specifically.

Tech GeekThis group talks about the technical details of their AV setup. They treat their TV’s like a racecar driver treats their car.

INFLUENCERSTARGET

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EXAMPLE PERSONAS

Search is about needs and the standard keyword classifier are not enough to understand a searcher’s intent.

Music MomsTypically uninformed gift givers looking for information on the right guitar for their happy hobbyist or raging rockstar. These people enter the conversation when they are looking to make a purchase.

Happy HobbyistsTypically students or amateur musicians looking for the latest tips and tricks for playing their guitar. These tend to be the most active content creators in the acoustic guitar conversation.

Raging Rock starsTypically professional musicians at various stages of their careers that tend to spend more time creating content with their guitars only consuming content as new guitar technology is released. These are the influencers of the happy hobbyist group.

Involved InstructorsTypically professional musicians and thought leaders/content creators who talk about new techniques and have strong opinions about instruments and brands. These tend to be quite active in the acoustic guitar conversation.

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SEARCH AND SOCIAL WILL CONTINUE TO INTEGRATE

I predict that Google will use rel-me and rel-author as ways to connect people to content and apply a sliding scale of value to links based on algorithmically determined authority of the writer to help solve search quality issues.

Read: Google’s Heading for Life after Link Trust – Here’s How to Prepare by @simonpenson - http://seogadget.co.uk/life-after-link-trust/

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LINK BUILDING GOLDEN RULE

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THE SEER METHOD – QUICK HITS

Pull your Twitter followers using SimplyMeasured then pull your Link Profile. Contact users that follow but don’t link.

Use it: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/using-twitter-and-backlinks-to-build-links/2011/07/28/ (@ethanlyon)

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ISSUES WITH THE SEER METHOD

The Simply Measured tool gives you URLs with shorteners and Open Site Explorer exports only give you up to 10k links.

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MY FIX FOR SHORTENED URLS

ProTip: Use =DownloadString(CONCATENATE("http://ipullrank.com/tools/expandurl/?url=",[CELL NAME])) to fill cells

=DownloadString(“http://www.ipullrank.com/tools/expandurl/?url=[INSERT SHORTENED URL HERE]”)

Step 1Download SEOTools for Excel by Neils Bosma http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/

Step 2Use my simple ExpandURL tool with theSEOTools DownloadString function.

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HAVE A PERSONA FOR LINK BUILDING

People will most likely check out your timeline so fill it with cool relevant content and conversation. Build an authentic separate persona and use it for your link building.

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USE FOLLOWERWONK WITH SCRAPER

You can find Twitter users by keyword or search for users associated with a given site but FollowerWonk’s export feature is not free so install Scraper for Chrome

Read: http://justinbriggs.org/quick-link-prospecting-with-scraper-extension (@justinrbriggs)

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USE ZERPLY, ETC

There are many sites like Zerply, and About.me where users input their interests and social profiles. Use them to identify prospects

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USER MENTIONMAPP

You can find Twitter users by keyword or search for users associated with a given site but FollowerWonk’s export feature is not free so install Scraper for Chrome

Read: http://justinbriggs.org/quick-link-prospecting-with-scraper-extension (@justinrbriggs)

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DO YOUR RESEARCH (ACT ONE)

ProTip: A lot of people use the same username for many different social networks. Put it in Knowem and find out what they are about.

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DO YOUR RESEARCH (ACT TWO)

Analyze Words tells you about a twitter user’s personality based on the words they use. http://analyzewords.com

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LINK PROSPECTING BY PERSONA

Building links by persona helps measure the effectiveness of efforts on business goals

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SITESKOUT

SiteSkout allows you to quickly identify popular content and topics of sites by pulling the social metrics of all the URLs on the site and the main idea using natural language processing.

Read: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/speedy-site-prospecting-using-social-metrics-natural-language-processing

Use it: http://ipullrank.com/tools/siteskout/ Note; Requires an API from http://www.textwise.com

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TALK TO PEOPLE LIKE PEOPLE

Outreach Link Building should be fun. If you approach it with a genuine interest in people you will increase your hit rate and not think of it as such an fruitless task by having actual conversations.

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MAKE YOUR MESSAGE STAND OUT

Use Short Subjects

Use Natural Subjects

Do NOT Use “Link Request”

Send Emails as an Actual Person not a Company or Team

Include a Natural Salutation

Converse with Context

Do NOT Just Tweet a Link at a Prospect

Escalate Quickly (“Follow So I can DM”)

Participate in the Subject’s

Conversation

Ride a Relevant Hashtag

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OFFER VALUE

Value does not mean always mean incentives. Show the person that it interacting with you is valuable by being entertaining or a resource by sharing other relevant content or information.

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DON’T BE THIS GUY

Don’t send the same exact message to everybody, they will look at your timeline and disregard you as a spammer.

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SCHEDULE TWEETS TO BUILD YOUR PERSONA

At the beginning of the week schedule regular tweets with awesome industry related content using HootSuite, SocialOomph, FutureTweets, Twuffer, etc

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USE IFTTT TO BUILD YOUR PERSONA

Use ifttt to setup automatic tweets whenever a certain RSS feed updates or user tweets to fill your timeline with relevant content

Tool: http://www.ifttt.com

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DANGLE THE CARROT

If you have nothing more to offer or can’t spend the time use incentives. Couple incentives with campaigns to draw links in a one-to-many fashion.

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USE FACEBOOK ADS TO PROSPECT

Put your blogging contest right in front of the exact people you want to enter without having to do super broad PR campaigns to get the word out.

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FOLLOW ME

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MAINTAIN THE RAPPORT

After you close a link continue to engage with your link prospects over time on Twitter or G+. Add them to private Twitter lists and Google Plus Circles.

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ONE MORE THING

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ZEMANTA

Zemanta is a content network that integrates with a free Wordpress / Movable Type plugin that suggests related articles and images to bloggers as they write. Place your content for contextual links. http://www.zemanta.com

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MEET GARY & COGSWELL

Gary & Cogswell are the stars of a new SEO comic strip that I write on the iAcquire blog. They will be dropping link building tips! Check them out! http://blog.iacquire.com/

Hi, I’m Gary!

What’s up Sydney?!

I’m Cogswell!

MICHAEL KINGDirector of Inbound Marketing

THANK YOU / Q&A

@iPullRank

mike@iacquire.com

www.iacquire.com