Linkbuilding: can't do it alone, can't not do it! While some people may prefer to avoid interaction with people they don't see every day, others flourish when communicating with strangers. The field of SEO is flush with both of these personality types, though to an outsider it could seem like SEO is an inherently non-social career. It's not! In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Tom Critchlow, head of search marketing at Distilled, shows us just how important interpersonal interaction is in SEO land. More importantly, he shows us some tips on how to reach out to webmasters and online marketers and more easily get the links we so badly want. All it takes is efficient contact-gathering, enthusiastic communication, adamant (but not overbearing) follow-up, and, well... maybe a little bit of hustle.

Check out Tom's slick resources:

• Followerwonk is an awesome tool for running queries across Twitter profiles to find influential people in a given niche. You can filter by location or by keyword in users' bios, which is a great way to find contacts.
• Alltop is a great place to artificially get the breaking news in a given niche. It's no replacement for actually living and breathing a given niche but it's very quick and easy to use.
• The Distilled Linkbuilding Conferences are taking place in London on March 18th in New Orleans on March 25th. Check it out!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Tom Critchlow, and I'm here in Seattle helping out with some SEOmoz SEO bits and pieces. I'm sharing Whiteboard Friday because Rand is out of town.

Today I'm going to be talking about outreach for link building. There's a lot of talk online about how to get links, creating great content for links, but a lot of focus goes on creating the content rather than actually doing the outreach for the content. So, I thought I'd do a video on how you can actually get links from your content.

There's an assumption here that you've already created some great content and that that content is targeted to a particular niche. Obviously, great content works much, much better when it's targeted to a particular community that they can be passionate about, they can comment on, and so on. The really broad content doesn't typically do so well.

So, let's assume that you've created some great content, whatever it might be, whether an infographic or a competition or a video, etc. Then there are a few tips that we've used in doing outreach that I just want to share here.

The first thing that I've noticed when doing outreach is that you want to have efficient contact gathering. There are lots of ways of getting bloggers in a particular niche or getting Twitterers in a particular niche, but the more that you can make that process quick, scalable, and efficient, the better the whole process is going to be.

There is the usual stuff that you can do. You can run some Google searches for things like top ten blogs about your niche. So, let's say it is photography. You can run, "top ten photography blogs." Run a search like that and you're going to end up with lots of blog posts and articles talking about what the top blogs are in that niche. You can go through and you can find those. That is obviously a great source. One thing that I really love to do is go find these top blogs that get talked about individually and then go through their blogs rolls. A lot of blogs will have a little blog roll or recommended blogs or friends section. Those kind of talk about all the people that they read, that they subscribe to. In fact, Rand wrote a post about all the blogs that he subscribed to at one point. That might be a list that you might find if you were searching for SEO blogs or recommended SEO reading, etc. Go find the influencers, find who the influencers link to and who they recommend.

You also want to find Twitter followers or rather influential Twitter accounts. And Follower Wonk, which I have written out here, FollowerWonk.com is a fantastic tool that will do this. They've indexed a whole bunch of Twitter accounts, and you can search through all of the bio text. So you can search for Twitter accounts that have a particular follower count and are interested in a particular niche. So, let's say it's photography, you can go through and you can find a whole bunch of people that are interested in photography. You can also search by location on Follower Wonk. This is a great way of finding niche accounts in a particular area that you can then go out and you can contact.

One of the key points here that I love to do is actually categorize these people as I am finding these contacts and finding these blogs. Go through and categorize them depending on what kind of outreach you're going to do to them. Some people you might find and you might think, well, they've got a pretty mediocre blog. It's all right. They have semi-interesting content. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time personalizing my response to them or sending a really detailed email. I'm just going to send them something pretty standard. Some people you might find, however, might be journalists or they might have a really popular blog or it might be somebody that you found Twitter that doesn't have a blog but they maybe own a forum or an email newsletter, something like that.

So categorize these people into broad buckets. The buckets I like to have are your standard contacts, your extraordinarily contacts, and kind of left field. That kind of separation means that you can quickly and efficiently send your mass email to all the standard contacts. The extraordinarily contacts you can go through and you can say, "These people I'm going to really craft an email to. I am going to send something specific and personalized and fun and creative to these people." The left field contacts are those that you might not want to send an email to. Maybe they're left field because they live near you. Maybe they have an email newsletter and you want to subscribe and send them an email dedicated to that. So, something maybe a little bit different. With that categorization, I find really useful when I am going through my contacts so that I can save time later.

That is the first thing. The second thing, being enthusiastic I find is more important than being unique. So when you're doing outreach, everyone will tell you to find something personalized to that person that you're speaking to and put it in the email. Say, "Hey, I read this blog post you recently read and it's really awesome." That will somehow make the outreach more effective. In my experience, I find that being enthusiastic trumps that every time. Even if you don't put much in the email that shows that you've read their site or that you've really tried to engage with them, rather just write an email that's awesome. Right? Take a leaf out of the SEOmoz newsletters that go out and so on. Put some personalization in there. Put some fun in there. Talk about maybe you're a really small company, maybe you're a startup, maybe you've got some exciting tools or content. Whatever it might be, tell people about that. Come across as genuine.

The trick here is that people control links. Websites don't link to people, people do. You want to reach out to people and make them like you. You really want to get on their good side. In my opinion, always write an enthusiastic email over a unique email. And what's your USP? Maybe you're more fun than people. Maybe you're more creative than another company. Many you're smaller. Maybe you have content that is more interesting. Whatever it might be, leverage those things when you are crafting the contact.

I'm going to switch over here, now, to the purple section. The other thing here is that when you are doing outreach, not everyone is going to respond to you. In fact, anyone who has actually tried outreach will know that not that many people respond to you, which is kind of unfortunate, but you want to make sure that anyone who does respond to you, even if they come back and say, "Ah, I'm not interested right now. You're content was okay, but it doesn't really fit with my audience." Really make sure that you follow up with those people. In the same way that you would have a sales channel and a sales funnel, make sure that you really cultivate these people. Go back to them and say, "Hey, why didn't you like it?" Or, "What can we do better next time?" Or, "Maybe next time we're doing this, we'll include you in the content that we're writing." So, really, anyone that responds to you, you really want to cultivate a relationship there. At the end of the day, outreach is all about getting relationships with people whether they have a blog, a forum, or they're just an influential Twitter account. You really want to create a relationship, because those relationships are worth so much more than the individual outreach that you're doing. They can be useful for future pieces of content that you're releasing. You can get them involved in things like surveys that you do and things like that.

If they do come back and they're really positive, then you still want to cultivate that relationship. If somebody comes back and says, "Great. Sure. I put it on my blog," don't end there. Find out if where else they blog, for example, is a great one. A lot of people that blog online will have multiple blogs. I think I have about 17 last time I counted, not all of which are recently updated. Do they have any friends? Find out who else they know in the blogging space that might also want to post your content. Anyone that responds to you, really, really go after them really strongly.

Then the final thing is hustle, which is a really hard thing to define. When we've been doing outreach, the most effective thing that we've done is just think laterally. It's all very well building the contact list, sending email to all these people, but actually, at the end of the day, the thing that gets you the results is usually either a random contact or it's leveraging some kind of hot news. Something like that. It's really hard to come up with a process that will get you those things. In my experience, there are a few things that you can do to give you a greater chance at success.

The first thing is, make sure you follow all of the Twitter and RSS feeds in that niche. A lot of people will think, this is a niche I'm engaging in. I'm doing research. I'm trying to find good bloggers. But they don't actually bother living and breathing the niche. You have to go in. You've got to actually engage these people. Read their blog posts. See what gets them riled. See what gets them hot. Really engage with them. That's where you can really win above and beyond just doing the kind of outreach. If you actually understand what this community is about, you'll have a much better chance at success. So, go through and actually follow a lot of these people, and actually see what makes them tick.

Watch forums as well. I think forums are massively underrated when you're doing outreach because that's where a lot of the people that are really passionate about the niche hang out. You can actually capture them in their natural environment so to speak. When you go to forums, you can actually see, you know, what do they chat about that's not in their niche? People are in that niche just chatting. Just shooting the breeze, right. See what they're interested in. See what they're passionate about. You might spot opportunities there that you might otherwise miss.

I find Alltop is a great way of very, very quickly and easily finding a particular niche and then looking at all of the top news in that niche. So, you kind find out what's hot. Alltop has kind of categories all over the place so that it kind of aggregates Twitter users and blogs in a particular niche. You can very quickly see if there is breaking news or if there is a hot topic. Alltop will show that up quite nicely. That's a great way of kind of artificially getting yourself embedded in a particular niche. At the end of the day, don't forget that this is where a lot of the success comes from is that kind of extraordinarily luck basically. You stumble across somebody talking about something or you happen to be doing outreach at the same time as some hot news. You need to give yourself the best chance of success with that kind of activity. These are some good tips to get that.

Those are my main tips. There is one thing here, which I have kind of put in very light blue that you probably can't read up here, which is that you need to manage expectations. Whenever you're doing outreach, there is a tendency to think that every single time you do outreach for content, you're going to get amazing results. That is simply not true. What you can do with outreach is even the failed outreach, even the outreach that you've done that resulted in zero links, that will still build your relationships. When you're doing this whole process again, when we come back to efficient contact gathering, don't forget the people that you've reached out to previously. Don't forget the people that you reached out to that were semi- lukewarm leads last time, but this time maybe it is a different piece of content. Or maybe you took in to account some of their feedback. Make sure that when you're doing outreach, even if you are not getting links, you're building relationships.

That's a great way of kind of managing expectations. Whether it is your boss, maybe you're an agency and you've got a client, when you're positioning the outreach work you're doing, don't just report on the links, also build a rapport on the relationships you've built. They can be really, really useful. This particularly applies when you're doing the really high- level outreach to people like journalists and your high-level bloggers. You're not going to get in the first time most of the time with these. You want to build a relationship, get an email conversation going, and then you can get some really great content that they're going to link to.

I think those are my main top tips. I've probably said, as I just said right now, about a million times, and again, because I am kind of new at this. But that's fine. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to learn more about link building, we're running some conferences in London and New Orleans in March. There will be a link so you can find out more details. Sign up to that. I'll see you there. Thanks, guys.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com