Social Link Building at SMX Sydney

1. SOCIAL LINK BUILDING
How to increase the effectiveness of
outreach using social data and channels
MICHAEL KING
DIRECTOR OF INBOUND MARKETING
@ipullrank

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

3. BUILDING LINKS IS
TOO HARD.
@ipullrank

4. WHY CAN’T I GET
ANY RESPONSES
TO MY LINK
REQUESTS?
@ipullrank

5. IT WOULD TO BE
GOOD TO KNOW IF
I’M DOING THIS
SH*T RIGHT!
@ipullrank

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

7. WE’RE THE BEST BUT WE WANT TO BE BETTER
Gender
Opening Salutation
Day of the Week
Hour of the Day
Number of Mails
Message Length
First Touch on Twitter
Email Trust Signals
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/
@ipullrank

8. THE IACQUIRE PROCESS
WE ARE THE BEST AND THIS IS WHY
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9. RANKING DIRECTORIES 647,631 OUTREACH
RESULTS & LINK DB’S OPPORTUNITIES
3-4 attempts made
12,558,303
PAGES
REVIEWED
MANUAL VIEWING
QUALITY CONTROL CLIENT
• Full-time Highly-trained REQUIREMENTS POTENTIAL PARTNER
BLUELIST FILTERING Team • Relevancy Guidelines
• Multi-layered Review • Content Guidelines
TOP 5,000 • Evolving Quality Guidelines • Legal Requirements
amazon.com, apple.com, wikipedia.org, etc
NO
“NO”
RESPONSE
BLACKLIST FILTERING
“DO NOT CONTACT” LIST 535,062
(internally established) 112,569 “YES”
UNQUALIFIED
OPPORTUNITIES
PAGES
BAD NEIGHBORHOODS
(link network & spam)
SEO METRICS FILTERING
Client Specific – Filtering out data based on IBL,
Moz-Rank, OBL, PR, etc.
POTENTIAL FUTURE
QUALIFIED PAGES
NEW Content
OPPORTUNITIES
& Link Partner
11,487,318
PAGES
REMOVED
VETTING PROCESS VIEWING PROCESS OUTREACH PROCESS
Technology Driven

10. SO WHAT, MIKE? I
CAN’T DO THAT!
@ipullrank

11. IT WON’T BE AS IN-DEPTH, BUT YES YOU CAN
Crawl prospects Pull any other metrics you Pull Open Site
in list mode care about Explorer metrics
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
@ipullrank

12. 2011 OUTREACH RESULTS
216,554 emails
70,393 initial emails
3,319 QUALITY ASSURED LINKS
Our 40 people in-house outreach team gets results through contacting publishers at a volume.
@ipullrank

13. FIRST TOUCH IN TWITTER YIELDS HIGHER RESPONSE
TWEETED FIRST TWEETED FIRST
Got a Response to Email After
Tweeted before emailing Tweeting First
Did not get a response
Did not tweet first
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.
@ipullrank

14. 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.
@ipullrank

15. HEY I’M
AWESOME
LINK TO
ME!
@ipullrank

16. BUILD RELATIONSHIPS NOT LINKS
Tailor your link building efforts to your audience and your business goals for more effective results.
@ipullrank

17. EAVESDROP ON YOUR AUDIENCE
Scout Labs Radian6
Lithium SM2
Social Mention Topsy Amplicate
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18. 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.
@ipullrank

19. 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/
@ipullrank

20. USE QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS TOOLS
TARGET INFLUENCERS
Curious George Gamer Film Purist Tech Geek
This group represents people Gamers talk about their 3D This conversation revolves This group talks about the
considering buying a 3D TV gaming experience and the around use of 3D in film. They technical details of their AV
components and games they talk about 3D in a broad way, setup. They treat their TV’s like
use. and occasionally touch on a racecar driver treats their car.
3DTV specifically.
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)
@ipullrank

21. EXAMPLE PERSONAS
Music Moms Happy Raging Rock stars Involved Instructors
Typically uninformed gift givers Typically professional musicians at Typically professional musicians and
looking for information on the Hobbyists various stages of their careers that thought leaders/content creators who
right guitar for their happy Typically students or tend to spend more time creating talk about new techniques and have
hobbyist or raging rockstar. amateur musicians content with their guitars only strong opinions about instruments and
These people enter the looking for the latest tips consuming content as new guitar brands. These tend to be quite active in
conversation when they are and tricks for playing their technology is released. These are the acoustic guitar conversation.
looking to make a purchase. guitar. These tend to be the influencers of the happy
the most active content hobbyist group.
creators in the acoustic
guitar conversation.
Search is about needs and the standard keyword classifier are not enough to understand a searcher’s intent.
@ipullrank

22. 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/
@ipullrank

23. LINK BUILDING GOLDEN RULE
@ipullrank

24. 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)
@ipullrank

25. 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.
@ipullrank

26. MY FIX FOR SHORTENED URLS
Step 1
Download SEOTools for Excel by Neils Bosma
http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/
Step 2
Use my simple ExpandURL tool with the
SEOTools DownloadString function.
=DownloadString(“http://www.ipullrank.com/too
ls/expandurl/?url=[INSERT SHORTENED URL
HERE]”)
ProTip: Use
=DownloadString(CONCATENATE("http://ipullrank.com/tools/expandurl/?url=",[CELL
NAME])) to fill cells
@ipullrank

27. 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.
@ipullrank

28. 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)
@ipullrank

29. 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
@ipullrank

30. 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)
@ipullrank

31. 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.
@ipullrank

32. DO YOUR RESEARCH (ACT TWO)
Analyze Words tells you about a twitter user’s personality based on the words they use.
http://analyzewords.com
@ipullrank

33. LINK PROSPECTING BY PERSONA
Building links by persona helps measure the effectiveness of efforts on business goals
@ipullrank

34. 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
@ipullrank Use it: http://ipullrank.com/tools/siteskout/ Note; Requires an API from http://www.textwise.com

35. 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.
@ipullrank

36. MAKE YOUR MESSAGE STAND OUT
Use Short Subjects Converse with Context
Use Natural Subjects Do NOT Just Tweet a
Link at a Prospect
Do NOT Use “Link
Request” Escalate Quickly
(“Follow So I can DM”)
Send Emails as an
Actual Person not a Participate in the
Company or Team Subject’s
Conversation
Include a Natural
Salutation Ride a Relevant
Hashtag
@ipullrank

37. 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.
@ipullrank

38. 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.
@ipullrank

39. 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
@ipullrank

40. 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
@ipullrank

41. 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.
@ipullrank

42. 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.
@ipullrank

43. FOLLOW ME
@ipullrank
@ipullrank

44. 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.
@ipullrank

45. ONE MORE THING
@ipullrank

46. 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
@ipullrank

47. MEET GARY & COGSWELL
What’s up
Sydney?!
Hi, I’m I’m
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/
@ipullrank

48. MICHAEL KING
Director of Inbound Marketing
www.iacquire.com
mike@iacquire.com
@iPullRank
THANK YOU / Q&A