Once you have identified your goals and KPIs and created your list of 100-250,000 targeted, rank-influencing link prospects (we crawl to build our large scale link prospect lists) you must further analyze them to identify those that will help you meet your link building goals. Remember, the criteria you set for qualifying link prospects must follow from your goals.

Even if you don’t create link prospect sets in the hundreds of thousands you may find our qualifiers useful. At the end of the article you’ll find all 55.

We recommend a 2-step approach in the qualification stage. First, use automated methods to focus on easily measurable factors to cull the list down to those urls most beneficial to your goals. Then use a by-hand, human review to further qualify and segment the best link opportunities.

Read more…

Setting clear goals enables you to focus your efforts on influencing search rank, your market’s media (including social), or both. Consider these link building goals as you go about setting your own:

Examples of Clear Link Building Goals:

1) Increase conversions through targeted search traffic
2) Increase conversions through targeted referral traffic
3) Increase positive mentions from influential media

Once you’ve decided on your link building campaign goals – and set both target dates and target numbers – you must identify their key performance indicators. Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are measurable results that demonstrate movement towards or away from your goals. KPIs enable you to communicate the value of your link building campaign to everyone in your organization.

Here are examples of some key performance indicators based on the goals listed above.

Read more…

The data produced by large-scale link building research can provide invaluable content strategy insight. By identifying and targeting agenda-based segments within your link prospect list you can drastically improve your link acquisition rates. Further, you set the stage for long term conversation-based relationships with these segments that provide value far beyond influencing the search rankings.

Read more…

When qualifying link prospects you inevitably find a segment of people who influence purchase decisions as well as the search engine rankings. Their ability to sway opinions – and search rankings – within your market makes them a highly valuable link target. Simply writing an acquisition email that makes a link offer leaves a great deal of value on the table in B2B and B2C markets with long and research-intensive buy cycles.

Influencing the Purchase Influencer Link Prospect Segment
Ideally you ally with this influencer segment and provide them with ongoing data, research and expertise access that aids their agenda and educates them about your products and services. You do this in the effort to influence their recommendations and build a sales referral stream, as well as a feedback channel for new business directions.

Read more…

Once you’ve gathered and qualified your list of link prospects you must segment them according to the offers of exchange you’ll make. For some of your link prospects these offers will be quite simple – an attractive badge, a tshirt or a discount coupon. For other segments of your link prospect list you’ll have to expend more resources.

This list of 12 link exchange offers provides a starting point for strategically aligning your offers with the segments you’ll find in your link prospect list. It’s ordered by our assessment of resource expenditure, from least to greatest.

1) Offer Visually Appealing Link Badges
Sometimes the offer of an attractive, appealing logo badge will be enough for your link prospects to add your link to their site. Include the badge in an html email, as well as on a page of your site. Ideally this is a unique badge you can offer exclusively to the people in your outreach campaign.

2) Offer an Exclusive Coupon or Cost Reduction on Next Purchase
Savings can be a powerful incentive to some segments of your link acquisition group. Whether it’s free shipping on the next order, a month of free service or percentage discount never underestimate the power of offering savings in exchange for a link.

3) Offer Exclusive Free Tshirts, Stickers, Tote Bags, Etc…
Free tshirts. Free stickers. Free tote bags. These time-tested offers consistently incent people to take action. Send these offers to the proper segment of your link acquisition list and they will link to you. Ideally you offer exclusive schwag to this segment of your link prospect list.

Read more…

During the acquisition phase of your link building project you will receive many rejections. Because the majority of your rejections will occur through non-response, it’s vital that you grow any written “no” you receive by email into an opportunity to educate yourself. These written rejections represent an opportunity for you to improve your site’s content, your future link building efforts and to better connect yourself to your media space influencers.

In the process of uncovering their main objections you will find yourself building a relationship that will help you in earning links in the future…

Read more…

In many cases your cold link request email is an unsolicited criticism of your link prospect’s website.

How so?

It’s unsolicited because your link prospects didn’t seek you out and ask you how to improve the value of a page on their websites.

It’s a critique because you imply that your link prospects’ omission of your link forces their site visitors into a substandard experience.

Read more…

Customer acquisition costs more than maintaining and growing business with customers you’ve already won. The same goes for your link acquisition efforts and expenses.

It’s helpful – and ultimately more profitable – to see any new link acquisitions as the beginning of a relationship rather than the end. Remember – by linking to you they have acknowledged that your site is valuable to their visitors. Exactly how you grow the initial link relationship will depend on how you bring value to the community.

1) Send A “Thank You for Linking” Email
Always send a “thank you for linking” email. Avoid smothering your new linker – a few lines are plenty. Do ask if they can think of any ways that your two sites could benefit each other. Also, consider asking this linker to connect with you on Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc if you operate profiles on these social media sites.

2) Request an Interview That Highlights Their Expertise
If you have writing resources and a publishing platform on your site consider asking for an interview with one of their experts. This quickly puts them in your debt and is likely to secure a link back when they publicize how they contributed to your site.

3) Design Widgets that Target Your Current Linkers
Target your existing linkers with a creative widget (personality quiz, survey, test, etc) that resonates with their passions. When possible, ask them for input on the widget you’re creating. When it’s done send it to your current linkers first.

Read more…

Q1: Why does your link prospect operate a website?

A: He’s providing value to his site visitors either for his profit, his passion or both.

Q2: Why should your link prospect STOP his current task – obviously related to providing value to his visitors – and add your link to a page on his site?

A: Because by including your URL on his page he INCREASES that page’s value to his visitors.

Read more…

Here at ontolo, we have been working for the past several months to solve one of the largest difficulties in search engine marketing and online marketing in general: Link Building.  Some of you know that I have been brainstorming this service for over 5 years and was hoping to one day be able to put something like this together.

Today, after spending the last six months designing and developing this solution, we are making this service publicly available.

This link building service is a large-scale market research tool that crawls the internet based on keywords and industries.  It assigns value to those pages based on the value, relevance, and potential.  It then categorizes approximately 75% of the web pages it finds as blogs, social networks, forums, press releases, etc…any number of over 50 web page classifications.  This makes it not only a link building tool, but also a PR, outreach, news, and social media research tool.

Read more…