The Smart Way to Get Traffic and Links: Creating a Prospect List for Bloggers
You want links and traffic from some of the bigger bloggers in your niche. You desperately want to promote your content or business because you think you deserve a bigger audience. Perhaps you want to make money online and need all the referral traffic you can get to develop the critical mass needed for success.
The problem is you can’t seem to get anyone to drop you a link. The bloggers ignore your email pitches and don’t write back.
Maybe they are too busy and your content or proposition isn’t that great in the first place, or at least that’s what you tell yourself.
What you might not acknowledge is how you could have greatly improved your chances, if you were on personal and good terms with the blogger in question.
It’s not very difficult to get a link if you truly have something relevant and remarkable. On the other hand, it is also very much easier if you have prior contact and/or a close relationship with the blogger in question.
John Jantsch recently talked about the proper way to stalk a journalist:
You know you need to get your story told in the media, but you can’t seem to get anyone interested. The problem is you need to look at journalists as a target market - you need to get them to know, like and trust you just like you would a customer.
Here’s the thing, if you can prove yourself a reliable resource for a journalist you will be looked upon as a friend, until then, you’re just a pest to an overworked, often underpaid, reporter.
He explains that you should create a list of journalists who might be interested in you and after that, track their stories and subscribe to or comment on their blog while routinely pushing great content that is relevant to the articles they write.
I’ve written about the same process in my piece on how to influence powerful social media users and also wrote about the best way to pitch popular bloggers. Now I’ll like to talk about why and how you should build a bloggers prospect list and use it to develop favorable relationships that will benefit you.
Introduction: Creating Your Own Prospect List
Marketers define prospects as potential customers, clients, or purchasers. A valuable prospect is sometimes characterized by their loyalty, spending power or potential level of interest, as it relates to specific products or services.
When you are trying to promote your site to bloggers, you should be looking for prospects with the ability to build your brand while sending you targeted traffic. Because prospect development can be a tedious process, I suggest marketing to a core group of individuals, each with established circles of influence.
Instead of targeting a large number of bloggers, focus on the few that matter. You can’t please every single person (impossible endeavor) but you can easily win the favor of a few bloggers. Let them recommend you to their audience.
This is a lot easier, especially if you’re completely new to the industry or niche.
How to Build Up Your List of Prospects
Pick some keywords related to your website or niche and run a search on Technorati, which will give you results ordered according to Technorati authority and favorites.
This gives you a very rough indication of the popularity of a specific blog, which is determined according to the number of links it receives from other blogs. For example, here are search results for marketing and web design.
Another alternative would be to use niche specific ranking lists which rank sites according to specific factors such as the Technorati or Alexa Rank. You can also visit and browse around blog communities like Mybloglog, Bumpzee or BlogCatalog. Look for the active bloggers with a strong reputation on these sites.
After you’ve got a list of relevant blogs, subscribe to their RSS feeds. I would recommend putting them in a separate folder in your feed reader or using a start page to organize your prospects. More on this later.
Why You Should Maintain a Bloggers Prospect List
The primary reason for having a bloggers prospect list is to gradually get the blogger in question to send you qualified traffic or recommend you to his or her audience, thereby improving your business or personal brand.
A prospect list is an intentional system developed to help you enhance the ability to get a favorable response from specific bloggers on the list. You can determine the amount of time or energy to be spent on each prospect, according to its value as well as its relationship to you.
The second reason for maintaining a prospect list is reciprocation. A lot of the cross-promotion you see online is the result of intentional reciprocation; doing something for someone because he or she did something for you.
Reciprocation is a basic aspect of culture and society. It pervades all human relationships and influences it tremendously. We may do something for someone with the hope (conscious or not) that someone may repay the favor in the future.
Cialdini’s rule of reciprocity explains:
This rule requires that one person try to repay what another person has provided. By obligating the recipient to an act of repayment in the future–the rule for reciprocation allows one individual to give something to another with the confidence that it is not being lost.
The decision to comply with someone’s request is frequently based upon the Rule of Reciprocity. Again, a possible and profitable tactic to gain probable compliance would be to give something to someone before asking for a favor in return.
Keeping a prospect list helps you to systematically record and reciprocate favors done for you, which dramatically improves the quality of the relationship you have.
This will help you to gradually turn bloggers into friends and future assets you can leverage for your business/website.
Adopting the Right Mindset is Important
The prospect list is actionable. You should track your prospects with the attitude of wanting to act upon their content, along with the aim of building a personal and meaningful relationship.
The trick here is not to think of yourself as a yet another reader but as an avid supporter and evangelist. How are these mindsets different?
The first is passive, absorbing information and not fully acting on it. One fades into the crowd and does not stand out from the other readers. In this case, one seeks knowledge or entertainment from the blog and goes no further.
The latter is active, absorbing content, voicing opinions and then sharing or promoting it to everyone else whom one thinks might benefit from it. You react to the blogger’s content while using it as a platform to connect on a personal level.
The more visible you are, the better for your brand and the easier it is to build an advantageous connection.
How I Maintain and Develop a Prospect List
I’ve been maintaining a bloggers prospect list for a while and I thought it’ll be useful to share how I use it. My philosophy on online networking is simple: make more friends than enemies, avoid deceit and always seek a mutual win-win outcome.
Bloggers are just people with the same emotions. They warm up and react more positively to close friends or people they know well. This is only natural and something I do myself in everyday life.
Befriending and getting to know the person behind the blog is very important, so make use of direct communication channels like IM or even the phone, particularly after you’ve developed a visible profile within the blogger’s radar for some time.
I never forget a favor and I always try to reciprocate whenever possible, be it in the form of a vote, a link or a favorable mention to someone related. This is a personal principle I practice in life as I find that it does help me to achieve my personal goals.
Reciprocation is key to developing deeper relationships because it clearly shows your interest in not just benefiting yourself but the other person. It makes him or her more willing to invest time or resources on you.
1. Prospect List Management
I use a start-page like Netvibes to maintain my prospect list because I think it is the most efficient way to do so. While I still use Google Reader as my feed reader, I use Netvibes purely as a tool to develop my prospects.
After drafting up my list, I divide the bloggers into various tabs:
Here’s what the different names mean:
- New prospects. This contains blogs that require a lot more work and attention. The focus here is on relationship building, getting noticed and benefiting the blogger explicitly. Being visible is important here.
- Maintenance. These are bloggers I have established personal contact with. I know them personally and they know me too. Less work or attention is needed here and as the title suggests, maintenance of the relationship is key.
- Reciprocate. This includes people who have done several favors for me or who have clearly shown that they support me or my ventures. My focus here is to track their content and hopefully find a chance to reciprocate by linking, promoting it on social sites or recommending it to someone else.
- Friends. These include bloggers whom I have contact with for several months. We both have generally favorable opinions of each other and may even consider working together on some projects. Ideally, the bloggers listed in Maintenance should be moved to Friends after a period of time.
- Social Websites. This is a collection of feeds which track the submissions of stories by specific bloggers to social news sites. I follow this in order to vote up stories which I find interesting. It also includes a to-do list and notepad for me to scribble down actions to take.
2. Working on Your Prospects
After classifying your prospect list, there are several ways to act upon the content you are tracking. Here is what I do for my prospects on a regular basis.
- Submit their content to social websites. Whenever a new post is created, I make an effort to promote it via social sites like StumbleUpon or Sphinn. How often I do it depends on the prospect and the quality of the content.
- Collect articles for a link roundup. While the value of the content is still most important to me, I will pay extra attention on sites I have never linked to before. The articles from various blogs will be bookmarked via del.icio.us and I will reference them in blog posts.
- Write comments. Comments are a great networking tool and nowadays I try not to pitch any website unless I’ve commented on it several times. I’ll comment more on new prospects and I’ll often drop by friends’ sites for fun.
- Share links with others. Because I track a great amount of news, I usually share links to certain articles with other bloggers, when I don’t plan to write about it. This is a great way to become a helpful resource and to also show that you’re not just interested in pushing your own content all the time.
- Engage in Conversation. I occasionally do this with friends and engaging in conversation about a blogger’s article is a fantastic way to show that you’re paying attention. Or you can just choose to talk about a certain news topic or industry occurrence through email or IM. Casual conversation will work too.
I still do all these actions occasionally, although I stopped developing new prospects and greatly reduced my activity, due to a lack of time. Bear in mind you can use any platform or method you like, as long as you feel that you’re able to manage your prospect list effectively.
Networking is an important factor for success and anyone that has launched a new business (e.g. Blogrush) or website knows how important it is to have a steady group of supporters willing to give you attention from the onset.
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