Whether you have gathered a list of websites through using Google search modifiers, industry lists, or by running backlink reports for your competitors, if you are going to turn that list into links, you have to connect with the people behind the websites and that starts by gathering their contact info. In this lesson we will give you some great strategies and discuss some awesome tools for getting connected.
Use a CRM and Marketing Automation
As part of your outreach effort is will be vitally important for you to reach out to new contacts, track your conversations, plan to follow up and set reminders, and track which sites have linked to you. Depending on your business and who you are contacting, these relationships could produce much more than just links… but for our purposes, we are going to keep this about getting links.
Here are a few tools that you should definitely look at for streamlining your link building process:
BuzzStream.com: This is one of the best. The tool includes a smart browser plugin that will automatically search for contact information on any page and allow you to add that contact information to your prospect list with a click of a button. BuzzStream will also help you track your outreach efforts, keep notes about each prospect and monitor your links.
Here is a video about using BuzzStream: http://youtu.be/wJd6doWdM-0
Link-Assistant.com: Link Assistant is a powerful tool for finding, scoring, prioritizing, reaching out to and tracking link opportunities.
Linkprospector.citationlabs.com: Link Prospector is a link building research tool designed to find and return lists of potential partner sites. Built for speed, the tool can return a huge amount of data link builders can sift through to find link building opportunities. The tool has a clean and simple interface and has the ability to export what it finds.
Here is a video about using Link Prospector: http://youtu.be/kaeJ8ePH-7M
ToutApp.com: This tool is really an add-on for using gmail for outreach, but it acts more like an incredibly agile CRM that helps you find information and track notes about prospects.
Here is the YouTube channel for ToutApp (Lots of great videos): https://www.youtube.com/user/toutappvideos
CRM: A Customer Relationship Management system or CRM is basically a address book with a built in calendar that tracks the history of your interactions, helps plan and schedule future interactions and typically can be set up to sore the quality of your leads based on interactions and automatically move those leads to different stages in the sales cycle. A few of the most recommended CRM solutions are:
- Salesforce
- Infusionsoft
- Podio
- NetSuite
- OnContact
- Act
- SugarCRM
- Maximizer CRM
- Zoho
- Daylite (mac only)
There are also many industry specific CRM solutions that are tailored to the particular needs of professionals in that industry.
Before choosing a CRM it is critically important to understand not only its capabilities, but also how it will integrate into your other systems such as your website, marketing automation software, social media management, bookkeeping and any other mission critical systems.
Marketing Automation: Marketing automation platforms typically control advanced email campaigns and utilize triggers that are embedded into your website to automatically send different emails when someone takes specific actions on your site. Your campaigns can be customized as you see fit. You can build out different campaigns based on customers inquiring about different products or services, signing up to receive information, automatically send follow up emails and specified intervals, etc… however, the true power of these systems is that they will track the interactions of a particular user with email opens, clicks and website actions and then give that person a score based on those cumulative actions. This is called lead scoring. When lead scoring is combined with list segmentation (automatically moving leads into different email campaigns based on their actions), you can turn your entire business into an automated money machine! We will discuss this in depth in a future course on Marketing Automation, however for our purposes in this link building course, you can use a Marketing Automation platform to automatically send link prospects a series of emails to build a relationship and ultimately ask them to link to your site.
- Pardot
- Infusionsoft
- SilverPop
- Marketo
- Integrate
- Act-On
- Hatchbuck
- MarcomCentral
- TargetEveryOne
There Is Nothing More Powerful Than
Good Person To Person Outreach!
Next However, in order for your outreach to be truly effective you have to have some savvy in the etiquette of outreach. In the next lesson you will receive the benefit of 15 years of fine tuning these processes so that you will know exactly .