Where to Find Link Partners

May.06, 2009 in Online money

I’ve talked before about how you should be using your email client to build links and how networking is a strong way to generate links for your site. The hardest part at times is finding other sites that can link to you.

Here are some methods to find blogs in your niche who can act as link partners for both one-way and reciprocal links. These methods are focused on finding real people to communicate with for links. These types of link requests are time intensive, but will provide you with some of your best links.

Search Engines

Perform a search in Google for all of your primary keywords. Work your way through the first 100 sites listed for each of these keywords. Identify potential link partners. Keep track of their name, site, keyword, email, and a brief note about them that you can use in your email so they know you’re legit.

You can find pages that are more targeted with the following searches

allintitle: <keyword>
allinanchor: <keyword>
allinurl: <keyword>
allintext: <keyword>

Blog Specific Search

In addition to looking for sites ranking for you keywords, we want to find bloggers writing about your keywords. Bloggers are heavy link givers and a great source to build your link profile. Here are a series of searches you should perform in the major search engines to find bloggers in your niche.

<keyword> blog
“keyword <keyword>”
intitle: blog <keyword>
inurl: blog <keyword>
“add comment” <keyword>
“post comment” <keyword>

Bloggers are great people to pitch for blogroll exchanges, 3 way links, in content exchanges, guest posting, and content swaps.

Blog Search Engines and Social Networks

Another place to find bloggers is by checking out blog specific sites and search engines. Google will show you who is already an authority in your niche, but these other sites will help you find blogs that aren’t ranking well. This doesn’t mean they’re bad link source. They may be bad at SEO, but they may still provide high PR related links.

Search these for your keywords.

Social Media Sites

I don’t talk about social media much, but these sites can be used to research link sources. Here you can find sites that are playing the social game instead of the search game. Since these sites can still be popular and have a lot of readers, they provide exposure in addition to links. Also, these guys are more likely to grow off linkbait. They may not have the best anchor text distribution, but may have thousands of links pushing pure juice to some of their pages.

Related Sites

Next you can search for sites related to your competition. Simply perform this search in Google to find sites that are related to your competition.

related:url.com

Blogs Linking to Competition

The last search looks at the blogs that are linking to your competition. When building links, you always want to look at getting links in the same place as the people who are already ranking. If you can identify bloggers who are already linking out about a topic, you can potentially earn a link yourself.

Simply use the following search in Google Blog Search

link:url.com

(using the url of your competition)

Pitching the Site Owner

Knowing what to say to a site owner is not always clear, so I do not recommend using the same canned approach for all sites. I would categorize each potential link partner by their value and difficulty to achieve. The low quality, low value, and easy links can be pitched with a form letter. These are about volume and are not as valuable, so crafting a unique letter is not always required.

If you’re looking to get a link from a solid blogger, it is valuable to take the time with that link request. Many times it is valuable for your first contact to not be request related. You may want to build a relationship with them first.

Either way, it is valuable to learn a bit about each webmaster so your email is natural. You should know their name, their site, their topic, and maybe their bias. Make sure they know you’re human and you’ve actually looked over their site.

Remember that the success rates on link requests are very low, so do not get discouraged. One solid in post link is worth more than hundreds of links from article marketing. Do not be surprised if you only see a 1% to 10% success rates with these link partner requests.

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