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Link Building Opportunities with Blog Round Ups

Congratulations on that new piece of content.

I bet you’re wondering why that “great content” mantra that every successful blogger and his dog are talking about just isn’t working out for you. Well quite simply nobody knows who you are.

There are lots of great ways that you can get on the radar and I’m going to fire off a quick post on a tactic that I like to use with my clients that can help you get those all important “quality” links and traffic to your website.

Link round ups.

What are Link Round up posts?

Links posts or link round ups are quite a common type of post used by bloggers. It is quite common for a blogger to review a selection of posts within their niche that have caught their attention recently.  Some bloggers only do link posts on an ad hoc basis, while other bloggers have them on a regular basis, such as daily, weekly or monthly. As we approach the end of the year there will no doubt be a larger number of “link round up” posts as bloggers feature their favourite content of the year from across the web.

In order to be featured in these types of post you need to be providing content of a very high standard that will be of interest to bloggers. Your writing will need to be entertaining, informative or controversial in order for it to gain any links – those boring articles on your company blog about your factory being compliant with the latest health and safety standards, just aren’t going to cut it.

How do you find Link Roundups in your Niche

The first step I take is to do a quick Google search (or Google Blog Search) to find blog posts which contain round-up or roundup in their URL along with my keywords.

link operator for finding link opportunities

I also like to use other words to expand on this search such as weekly, week, month or monthly to find as many opportunities as possible. In the below search I was looking for weekly SEO blog roundups:

locating link building round up opportunities

Now armed with your web scraper of choice you want to capture as many of these results as possible. You can run similar searches through Google Reader using your keywords and “round up” to find more opportunities.

run your ideas through google reader

As you can imagine in a field that has a very large blogging population such as SEO it can be easy to find these types of link building opportunities, however by broadening your search queries you can find some quite popular bloggers who publish link round ups on more general topics such as business, marketing or design that might be happy to include a link to your latest post in their next round up.

Get your Outreach on

Now for the hard part.

I know it’s daunting the first few times that you contact people asking for links, but trust me the more you do it the better you get at it and the more comfortable you will feel. Using your link building weapon of choice begin to make contact with the blogger and build a relationship with them before you make your pitch. I find my success rate greatly increases if I can get on their radar before I ask them for that all important link to my site.

I can honestly say there isn’t one perfect outreach email template that I can suggest to you for this. Ultimately every person you pitch your content to is different. But, if you really need an idea of an email I might use with a blogger I have communicated with recently I might use something like this:

Subject: I’ve got a new post on (topic) I think your readers might like…

Hi <Blogger Name >,

I hope you are well I’m getting in touch because I have just published this article over on my site. You can review the article at <URL>. I thought it would be interesting to you and your readers as it covers <benefits of your article>.

If you enjoy the article and think that it will be of value to your readers, I’d appreciate it if you could add it to your next <daily/weekly> link round up post or share it with your readers at your discretion.

If you have any questions, or any recommendations as to how I could improve on the post, please feel free to give me a call or drop me an email as I would really value your input.

Thanks again,

<Name>

<contact info>

As you can see I followed all the best practises the email was brief and to the point, offered the benefits to the blogger and their readers, massaged their ego a little by asking for their opinion and included my contact information for follow up. If you want some more advice on crafting great pitches then I suggest you read this great post by Anthony Nelson or this one from Eric Ward.

Without a doubt, you’ll encounter lots of failures along the way.

So what are you waiting for?

Go and get them Links!

A little bit about Chris:

chris dysonChris is well repsected within the industry as a link building specialist and being generous with his time and knowledge. If you want to read more of Chris’ posts you can do so over at tripleseo – his personal blog. If you want to find out more about his drinking habits you can do so in this post – if you want to hear him talk more seriously about the business of SEO consulting I heartily recommend this post.

Chris recently curated this excellent post ‘An Open Discussion on the Current State of Link Building’ and penned ‘Optimize Your Link Building with Twitter‘ over at PointBlankSEO – he has also been very generous with his answers on Quora.

Connect with Chris on Twitter or if you are that way inclined on Google+

Boom Online

Boom Online

Boom was founded in 2010 as an eCommerce specialist digital marketing agency. Our specialism is in the home retail sector, where we've managed SEO, PPC and Digital PR for both household brands and local businesses.View Author posts

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