Hey guys, Brian Dean here, and welcome to lesson 3. In the last lesson you learned that most people fail to get backlinks because they create content for the wrong audience. Instead, I showed you why creating content for your Linkreators is the KEY to success with SEO and content marketing. Why?
Because your Linkreators are the only people that can actually link to you! And now it’s time to get into the nitty gritty. Specifically, in this video I’m going to show you how to identify and find your Linkreators, step-by-step. Then, starting in Module 2, you’ll learn how to create content that appeals directly to them.
But first, I want to show you some interesting data to demonstrate why creating content for your Linkreators is so important for generating backlinks. A few years ago I teamed up with BuzzSumo to analyze 900 million articles. Specifically, we looked at the relationship between social shares – like Facebook likes and Tweets – and backlinks.
So what did we find? To quote the study: We found virtually no correlation between backlinks and social shares. This suggests that there’s little crossover between highly-shareable content and content that people link to. That’s right: NO correlation. Now, a lot of people were surprised by the results from this study. But I wasn’t. From doing SEO for YEARS in some of the most competitive industries on the planet, I saw firsthand that there’s a BIG difference between content that gets shared on social media and content that gets linked to. So what’s going on here?
As BuzzSumo founder Steve Rayson put it: “Everyone can share content...but content has to work much harder to acquire links.” What Steve is saying is: if you create content for the masses, you might get a few social shares but you won’t get any links. And yeah, I’ll take a Facebook like or a tweet when I can get it. But I also understand that these social shares won’t impact my rankings. In fact, Google has come out and said that they don’t use social signals in their algorithm.
So if you create content for the average Joe or your target customer, you’re not going to get any links. And without links, you have very little chance of ranking on Google’s first page. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to get around this problem – create content for your Linkreators. And now it’s time for me to show you how to find your Linkreators. Here’s the 3-step Linkreator discovery process: Linkreator Discovery Process
Step #1: Find Linkreators in Google
Step #2: “Best of…” Listsm
Step #3: Who Links to Linkreators (Optional)
Let’s dive right in.
Step #1 is to find Linkreators using Google search. Google may not be a fancy new SEO tool, but it’s the best place to find Linkreators in any industry. Here’s why: When you search for a keyword in Google you know right off the bat that the results are popular and respected sites in your niche. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t rank in Google. In other words, when you search for keywords related to your industry, the sites that show up in Google are your Linkreators!
With that, here’s how to use Google to find your Linkreators: First, search for a broad keyword that someone would use to find content about your site’s topic. For example, let’s say you run a site that does nutrition consulting for people on low carb diets. What would someone looking for content about low carb diets search for? They’d search for things like: “low carb diet tips” “best low carb snacks” “sugar free desserts” “Is Paleo low carb?” Another example: let’s say you run an ecommerce site that sells bird cages.
In this case you’d search for things like: “How to clean a birdcage” “Best bird food for parakeets” “How to get your Parrot to talk” Notice how I don’t recommend searching for commercial keywords like “nutrition consulting” or “cheap bird cages”.
Why? These keywords are going to bring up direct competitors, which obviously aren’t going to be good Linkreators. Instead, you want to search using informational keywords, which tend to bring up content from news sites and blogs. For example, take a look at Backlinko. As you know, Backlinko is an SEO training company that sells online courses.
So when I search for my Linkreators, I don’t search for keywords like “SEO training” or “SEO courses”. These keywords are only going to bring up my direct competitors. Instead, I find my Linkreators by searching for terms like: “SEO techniques” “SEO tools” “Link building tips” These search strings bring up SEO blogs and news websites, which are ideal Linkreators. Make sense? Good. So after you search for a keyword, all you need to do is go one-by-one through the top 20 results.
Then, add any quality sites that you find to your list of Linkreators. To help you with this process, I’ve included a worksheet below this video. This worksheet contains some extra tips and advice. It also has fields that you can fill in to create your list of Linkreators. And once you’ve finished with one keyword, try another keyword. That will bring up a whole new set of potential Linkreators. Repeat the process until you’ve identified around 10 Linkreators.
Now you might be wondering: what if you or your client is in an obscure or boring niche? In other words, what if there aren’t that many blogs or news sites that cover your topic? What should you search for? This is a common issue that people run into. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution to this problem: Shoulder Niches. What’s a shoulder niche?
A shoulder niche is a niche that is closely related to your site’s main topic. For example, Mike Bonadio runs an SEO agency in New York City. And when Mike signed on his latest client, a pest control service, he knew searching for “pest control” wasn’t going to bring up any Linkreators only the competition. Needless to say, there weren’t too many pest control blogs out there either. Or as Mike put it: “Coming up with content for this client was a big challenge.
Their niche is incredibly boring and has little tradition of content distribution, community or linking. Bugs? Who cares, just get rid of them!” So Mike came up with a bunch of related Shoulder Niches that had anything to do with pest control. And when he searched for keywords like “garden pests”, Mike noticed that there was a sizable group of Linkreators (garden bloggers) that talked about eliminating garden pests and bugs.
So Mike added those gardening blogs to his list of Linkreators. And just like that he had a solid list of Linkreators to work with. Now it’s time for our second step, finding Linkreators in “best of” blog posts. Fortunately, when it comes to finding high-quality bloggers and influencers in your industry, people have already done a lot of the hard work for you.
What am I talking about? Best of blog posts. You’ve probably seen Best of blog posts before. They’re blog posts that, instead of tips, they list some of the best blogs in a given niche. And when you find these lists, you have a gold mine of Linkreators staring you right in the face. To find best of blog lists, simply use these search strings in Google: [keyword] blogs to follow best [keyword] blogs best [keyword] posts [year] top [keyword] blogs to follow + [year] Don’t worry about writing these down.
I have all of these search strings listed in the worksheet for this lesson. For example, let’s say that you’re looking for Linkreators in the pet space. All you need to do is search in Google using one of the search strings I just showed you. And you’ll find lots of “Best of” Blog Posts that list out high-quality blogs in the pet niche. Needless to say, the sites listed in “Best of” Blog Posts make great Linkreators to add to your list. Our last step is to see who links to the sites you just found in steps #1 and 2.
Let me point something out: this is a completely optional step. Most of the time you’ll find PLENTY of Linkreators using the previous first steps. But if you want to find MORE Linkreators, this strategy can help. Specifically, this strategy reveals Linkreators who may not be ranking for the particular keywords you searched for.
And they may not be on any of the best of blog lists that you saw. But because they link out to content in your industry, they make PERFECT Linkreators. Think about it: these people are linking to content in your niche. They’re literally creating links which makes them, by definition, Linkreators. Here’s how to find sites that link to content in your industry. First, take a site that you found in the last step and pop it into a link analysis tool like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz… or any other tool out there. Next, click on “Backlinks”.
That will show you the sites that link to the site you just put into the tool. In other words, Linkreators. Finally, add any quality sites that seem like a good fit to your list of Linkreators. In total you should aim to add around 5-10 sites from this process to your list of Linkreators. For example, when I searched for “on page SEO tips” in step #1 (Find Linkreators in Google), I found Coschedule.com.
They’re a high quality site in my niche, so I added them to my list Linkreators. So for this step I put the CoSchedule homepage into Ahrefs. And they showed me all the sites that link to CoSchedule.com. And I quickly found lots of great Linkreators, like Hubspot, SproutSocial and CopyHackers. Now, I’ll show you how to find a Linkreator-focused topic in the next lesson.
But before we get into that step, I want to quickly show you an example of how well content built for Linkreators can perform. Remember the post I mentioned in the last lesson? Like I mentioned, that post was designed strictly for the Linkreators in my industry. Before writing this post, I searched for keywords like “link building” and “SEO tips”. And I found lots of Linkreators (SEO blogs).
And after executing the steps from the next lesson, I noticed that, at the time, lots of my Linkreators were talking about broken link building. So I decided to include a tip on how to use Wikipedia for broken link building in that post. Now I knew that most people reading my post wouldn’t know what broken link building was or how to even use the Wikipedia tip. But I decided against an explanation, because I knew that would alienate my Linkreators, who prefer straight tactics without a long explanation.
In fact, I got a lot of comments from people that didn’t understand how the technique worked. And while I was tempted to break it down for people that weren’t SEO bloggers, I knew that my linkreators came first. So, how did the post do? To date the page has backlinks from over a thousand different domains. And it ranks in the top 3 for the keyword “SEO Techniques” above big brand sites like Moz, Search Engine Land and Entrepreneur.com. Of course, there’s more to the story here like the Content Framework that this piece of content is built around. And the promotional strategies that I used to build links to it. But the foundation was a Linkreator-focused piece of content. And the first step in that process was me identifying my Linkreators.
So, what’s next? Well you just identified your Linkreators. And in the next lesson I’m going to help you answer the question: what specific topics do my linkreators tend to link to? In other words, I’ll help you find topics that your Linkreators are likely to share (and not share) with their audience. But before you move onto the next lesson, make sure to download the worksheet below this video.
In that worksheet I’ll show you, in detail, exactly how to find your Linkreators. A fair warning: this worksheet might be a little tough to complete at first. If it is, don’t get discouraged. Just do the best you can. As you continue on in this training and everything becomes super clear, you’ll be able to go back and work through these worksheets again if you need to.
So download the worksheet and give it your best shot before moving onto the next lesson, where I’ll help you find proven topics for your content. And I’ll see you in the next video.
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