“I hate launching. All the stresses of putting yourself out there and bugging people.”
– Stephenie Zamora

I’m guessing a few of you also know that feeling.

Today, I’m showing you how to use the new ontolo for good, old-fashioned link building, using lots of screenshots

By the end, you’ll see how ontolo ran 6,194 prospecting queries across more than 100 sources, and discovered 41,932 link prospects in under 15 minutes.

No only that, but you’ll also see ontolo’s new exports and how ontolo’s search functionality helps you sift through huge lists of link prospects with a fine-toothed comb, all in a split second.

Let’s get started.


Quick note: this week only, to celebrate the launch of this major release of ontolo, I’m offering 10% off all account levels. Details are at the end.


Prospecting for Business Coaching: Stephenie Zamora

For this walkthrough, I chose to use as an example Stephenie Zamora and her newest business that’s set to launch next week, on May 16th, YourPassionBasedBusiness.com, which helps folks connect more deeply into their most meaningful work and contributions.

I’ve known Stephenie for a couple years now and can personally vouch for her authenticity, compassion, depth of caring, her ability to connect deeply with others, and her ability to help others connect with what’s most important to them.

She’s been a tremendous friend and mentor, and today, we’re going to walk through doing some low-level link building to get her new business going. She’s also a prolific writer, writing and publishing almost every day. I touch on guest post opportunities, but this article focuses exclusively on link building.

So let’s get started.


Building Our Initial Keyword List

We’re going to begin with these keywords. Again, these are very broad, and that’s completely fine. We’re going to let ontolo do the work of figuring out how to narrow things down. And the more and broader data ontolo has, the better it will be able to narrow in on opportunities, in the early stage. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but that’s one of the things that sets ontolo apart.

  • self help
  • personal development
  • self improvement
  • personal growth
  • self development
  • self growth
  • personal improvement
  • starting a business
  • passionate business
  • solopreneur
  • coaching business
  • personal coaching business
  • life coaching business
  • business coach
  • business coaching business
  • life coach
  • personal coach
  • business coaching
  • life coaching

I’m going to add these to the broad search prospecting. This *won’t* modify these terms before sending them to the sources. This is a much faster prospecting step, but only because there are fewer total queries behind the scenes. As a result, you get fewer prospects.

With fewer prospects, and because Stephenie writes so much great content, so consistently, I’m also going to add these terms to:

  • Content Marketing > Blogs
  • Content Marketing > Submit Content
  • Content Marketing > Ebooks
  • Content Marketing > Guest Posts

Then, for a pure link building and SEO play, I’m going to also prospect under:

  • Link Building > Directories
  • Link Building > Link Lists
  • Link Building > Blogrolls
  • Link Building > Submit Links

I’m also going to prospect for other expert and authorities, as they would be outlets for her to offer interviews.

  • Experts > Authorities
  • Experts > Interviews
  • Experts > Questions & Answers
  • Experts > Tips & Advice

Initial Prospecting: 12,217 in About a Minute.

By the time I was done adding Prospecting Terms for each prospecting type, there were already 8,694 prospects in her index. By the time I’m done writing this sentence, there are now 12,217 prospects in her index.

I’m going to wait a couple minutes for the sake of this walkthrough and letting the prospecting wrap up. Remember that, on Friday, I’ll be going over more of the behind-the-scenes technical details of how ontolo works, including more about how the prospecting works, what makes it faster, what we do to be considerate of other web servers, etc.


An Important Note on the Speed of ontolo

It’s now less than five minutes from when I began the prospecting, and the prospecting queue has finished up. I want to talk about the speed of ontolo here, because I think this is something that’s important to understand.

When I set out to build this version of ontolo in September of 2014, there were three things I committed to with an unreasonable and deeply-stubborn level of conviction:

  • ontolo must gather an enormous amount of data
  • ontolo must analyze that data with an absurd level of precision unavailable anywhere else
  • ontolo must feel impossibly fast.

ontolo’s crawler is the fastest I know of. I’ve seen moz reports that discuss crawling at about a rate of 25,000,000 URLs per day. ontolo is able to crawl more than 400,000,000 URLs per day, and has even pushed at a rate of more than 500,000,000 per day, with the limit not being the server it runs on, but its gigabit connection to the internet holding it back, as the server is using less than 25% of its resources when running at that rate.

So when you’re waiting on ontolo, it’s not the crawler, it’s the prospector. One of the things that’s important to me is that we’re considerate of the resources of other servers we use for querying. And this is why the *number* of prospecting sources is so important: with more sources, we can get more prospects, faster, while still being considerate of the our prospecting sources. So when I say we have more than 100 sources, it’s not as much so that you can find *more* prospects, it’s that you can find more, *faster*.

I wanted to explain that a little bit. Because behind the scenes, while you’re seeing only the prospect number tick up some amount, it’s actually doing an insane amount of work behind the scenes.


Total Queries Run

So, if I look at how these 19 keywords are expanded, each prospecting type is expanded into this many different *queries*:

  • 22 queries: Content Marketing > Blogs
  • 48 queries: Content Marketing > Submit Content
  • 6 queries: Content Marketing > Ebooks
  • 65 queries: Content Marketing > Guest Posts

  • 11 queries: Link Building > Directories
  • 21 queries: Link Building > Link Lists
  • 16 queries: Link Building > Blogrolls
  • 21 queries: Link Building > Submit Links

  • 32 queries: Experts > Authorities
  • 33 queries: Experts > Interviews
  • 34 queries: Experts > Questions & Answers
  • 17 queries: Experts > Tips & Advice
  • Total queries per keyword: 326
  • x19 keywords = 6,194 queries.

So that’s 6,194 queries that ontolo is performing across a bit over 100 different sources. So that’s over 60 queries per source. And that takes a bit of time to be considerate of the technical resources of sites we prospect from.

So that’s the wait time you’re experiencing, it’s not at all from the technical capacity of ontolo.

The reason this is important to me is because, like you, I’m sure, I don’t like waiting. But I can be pretty ornery and cantankerous, so maybe waiting doesn’t bother you as much as it does me, but I’ll do everything I can to keep you waiting as little as possible.

And with that, back to our regularly scheduled program…


Narrowing in On Prospects

There are now 41,932 prospects in Stephenie’s index, and it’s wrapping up the last bits of prospecting.

To see how much it helps to have your prospects in a fully-searchable index (as opposed to simply having backlink data or csv exports), here’s a screenshot of the social overview *without* a search term:

And now, *with* a search term:

coach | coaches | coaching | “self help” | “personal development” | “personal growth”

To put it another way, when you use a prospecting or research tool that doesn’t have the ability to query the index, you will spend far less time with ontolo in order to find the same number and quality of prospects.

This increase in prospect relevance is a result of the ontolo philosophy that could be said something like, “cast a huge net, then get the fine-toothed comb.”


Finding Link-Building-Specific Prospects

Since this post is about link building and SEO, I’m going to go straight to the “pure” link building and outreach tactics. Then, because Stephenie is such a prolific writer, I’m also going to look a bit into writing opportunities.

Since we’re looking directly for prospects, we’ll skip the overviews and head straight to the results for Directories, Link Lists, Blogrolls, and Link Submissions. I’ll include screenshots for each *without* a query, then *with* a query.


Finding Directories

Prospects: Link Building > Directories


Finding Blogrolls

Prospects: Link Building > Blogrolls


Finding Link Submissions

Prospects: Link Building > Link Submissions


Exporting and Reviewing

Now that we have our lists, we’ll export them and take a look at the exports to get contact information and URLs. I went through the top ten results on each, and spend no more than 30 seconds on each page to see if there were link opportunities. Highlighted pages below are ones where I found opportunities for niche directory submissions, link submissions, and/or blogrolls:

Directories:

Link Submissions:

Blogrolls:

You can see that, especially when you’re able to filter prospects so narrowly, you’re able to much more quickly find highly-targeted prospects.

Likewise, if you prefer to work in a spreadsheet, ontolo exports all the data from the web interface, and does so in a way that makes it easy to filter down more precisely to what you’re looking for.

And, yes, contact emails and contact pages are also included. Here’s a list of the column headers in your CSV exports:

  • Rank
  • Hostname
  • Path
  • URL
  • Title

  • # OBLs: Body: Followed
  • # OBLs: Body: Nofollowed
  • # OBLs: Nav: Followed
  • # OBLs: Nav: Nofollowed
  • # OBLs: Comments: Followed
  • # OBLs: Comments: Nofollowed

  • # Contact: Emails
  • # Contact: URLs
  • Contact: Emails
  • Contact: URLs

  • # Social: Twitter
  • # Social: Facebook
  • # Social: LinkedIn
  • # Social: Pinterest
  • # Social: Youtube
  • # Social: Google Plus
  • # Social: Instagram
  • # Social: Tumblr
  • # Social: Github

  • Social: Twitter
  • Social: Facebook
  • Social: LinkedIn
  • Social: Pinterest
  • Social: Youtube
  • Social: Google Plus
  • Social: Instagram
  • Social: Tumblr
  • Social: Github

  • RSS Feeds

  • # Affiliate Links

  • # Files: PDF
  • # Files: Spreadsheet
  • # Files: Archive (e.g. zip)
  • # Files: Audio
  • # Files: Word Docs
  • # Files: Videos

  • Files: PDF
  • Files: Spreadsheet
  • Files: Archive (e.g. zip)
  • Files: Audio
  • Files: Word Docs
  • Files: Videos

Possible Next Steps

She could then check back at the overview reports, curate the top sites, then head out and get the backlinks from the top sites.

With these lists from moz, AHrefs, or Majestic, she could then upload them and have even more prospects, but now with the ability to quickly and precisely narrow in on specific opportunities.

Because she writes and publishes *DAILY*, she could also research to find more guest post opportunities, which she already publishes on a regular basis. ontolo would let her find new opportunities, and more specific audiences, as well as broader audiences.

Since there are specific needs and goals she’s looking to help folks with, she could research to find sites that have published guest posts about those specific topics. Then, during her outreach, she could reference those other guest posts that have already been published, further increasing her placement rate.

This idea – that a site which has published something about a topic is more likely to do it again – functions on the idea of Commitment and Consistency, from the book Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini…a book I’d recommend to every person in or near the world of marketing.


Sign Up Now; 10% Off, This Week Only

Remember that this week is 10% off all plans, that’s for both Pro and Agency, including an *additional* 10% off yearly plans, which are already discounted by 10%.

Click Here to Sign Up Now


This Week’s Tutorials

I’m walking through various use cases this week. I’m guessing at least one, if not all, would be pretty useful for you. So be sure to read these each day this week.

Here’s the lineup:


And that’s that.

– Ben


p.s. If you feel like it might help to have someone on your side as you’re going through the challenges of growing a business that aligns deeply with your values, I can personally vouch for and recommend Stephenie very highly. She’s not only been a great friend, but also an amazing mentor to me over the last couple of years.

Her newest coaching program is set to launch next week, on May 16th, which you can view at YourPassionBasedBusiness.com.