How to Find Sites That Will Link to You
Gettting incoming links to your site is going to be the lifeblood of your blog - second only to good content. It will bring referral traffic, increase your standing with the search engines and help build your blog’s reputation. The trick is to first find sites that you would like to get a link from. That’s when a bit of research is in order.
The Setup
To start things along, get organised and set up a spreadsheet. You can use Excel if you like, but lately I have been using a very cool online spreadsheet service over at iRows so I can save my spreadsheets online and access them from any computer anywhere.
You will need columns for the following categories. URL, Contact Name, Email Address, First Contact, Notes 1, Second Contact, Notes 2, Third Contact and Notes 3. That’s 9 columns altogether. So, if you were contacting Jamdo, the relevant row would be something like:
http://jamdo.com | info (at) jamdo.com | Rob | July 12 | No response | July 19 | Promised a link from his blog. | July 25 | Success!
If one of my contacts in my spreadsheet has taken the action I hoped for, I then give a green background to that row. If they say no, I give it a red background. It’s just an easy visual so I can tell by glancing at the spreadsheet how I am going.
I only put in three potential contacts, because if you haven’t got them by the third contact then you probably won’t get them.
The Research
Now that you have a way to organise your contacts on your spreadsheet, you can start to research sites that you would like to get a link from. At this stage you will want to fill out the URL, Contact and Email columns of your spreadsheet.
Competitors
Most bloggers are a decent people. You should probably have a list of competing blogs in your niche - you know - the blogs that inspired you to get into the same niche. Many of them will probably be happy to give you a link to your site if you just ask them. List all of your competitors in your spreadsheet for later.
Competitor’s Links
If somebody has linked to one of your competitors, then they will probably be interested in the content of your blog too. The trick is finding the people who have linked to your competitors. That’s not really a drama. Just go over to Yahoo! and type in linkdomain:yourcompetitor.com and you will get a list of people who have linked to that website.
Now you need to visit each of those sites and note down the URL, Conact and email of each of those sites.
By now, you should be getting a decent list of sites that will potentially link to your new blog.
Technorati
It is far easier to get links from other blogger than it is to get links from “normal” sites. Blogs should be one of your primary focusses in link building. Luckily Technorati has taken most of the pain out of finding other blogs and lists almost 50 million of them.
Go over to technorati and type in your main keyword. Click on the “tag” option and it will tell you everyone who has tagged a post with that keyword for one of their blog posts. You should have a mamoth list of blogs. Now visit each one and continue filling out your spreadsheet with the relevant information.
Note: You can also see which blogs are commenting on your competitor’s site just by searching their site URL in the Technorati search - another great source of people who might be interested in linking to you!
Getting links from the top ranking sites for your keywords is one of the most powerful strategies for ranking well for those keywords. It’s usually also the most difficult as these sites usually guard their rankings jealously. Even so, it’s worth a try.
Just head over to Google and type in your keyword. That will give you a list of sites to visit and get relevant contact details for. Easy!
Software
If you have some spare coin, then there are a couple of pieces of software that are very good for finding other sites that might link to you. They don’t really do anything you couldn’t do for free, but they do do it a hell of a lot faster. Check out my SEO Elite review or visit their site (aff.) and also take a look at Arelis (aff.) software. Not cheap, but if time is a factor for you then they are worth it.
What Then?
In most niches, just these simple research strategies should give you a list of several hundred sites that might be interested in your blog. The next step is to go out and start contacting those webmasters!
Further Resources:
Where to get Links
7 Tips on Emailing Other Bloggers
SEO Elite (Aff. link)
Arelis (Aff. link)
iRows
Thanks for the article, great post.
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:41 pmgreat info. I was about to research what technorati is exactly and i have found a good introduction here. Various ways to get the contacts of smilar content blogs is well explained here and the article has impressed me very much.
October 9th, 2007 at 12:50 pm