If you are looking for opportunities to build links through strategies like guest posts, helpful info-graphics, promotional giveaways, interviews, etc. Building a defined list of influencer is the foundation of link building that can and will help you promote your content. I’ve defined an influencer as being well-known bloggers, competitors, or media organizations in a niche industry. In today’s day and age, everyone and their mom has something they all love to blog about. So how do you go about sorting through the saturated internet that is today, and find those that can help you build great links?
1. List Hunting
We are privileged to be living in an age of the internet in which there are webmasters who have aggregated and published list of outbound links. Searching Google for these lists of the niche topic couldn’t be easier and will give you a head start on your prospecting list for influencers. Here are some great examples of queries that have worked well for finding some of these list:
- List of [topic] websites
- List of [topic] blogs
- Top 10 [topic] websites
- Top 100 [topic] blogs
- Favorite [topic] blogs
- Best [topic] blogs
2. Prospecting Tools
There are a lot of different free tools that can help track and monitor influencers across multiple social networks. One these tools I would recommend is BuzzSumo, a search and analytics tool that makes building your influencer list much easier and more effective. The thing I like about BuzzSumo from the other sites is it ease user interface that allows for searches of top content and influencers by just typing in the topic in the search bar. This makes search for influencers a piece of cake, think of it like a search engine made for finding influencers and top content.
BuzzSumo
3. Blog Aggressor Sites
There are dedicated sites such as Technorati.com and Alltop.com that bring in the top stories and blog post all to one place. These sites are great for search niche topic and finding blog post that have been written for these topics. These are all great resources to building upon your list of influences.
Technorati.com
What are some of your ways of building out your list of influencers?
Works Cited
- Growing Popularity and Links. Rand Fishkin, Moz. 2014
- Technorati—the World’s Largest Blog Directory—is Gone. Orun Bhuiyan, Business2Community. June 16, 2014
