How to build relevant and targeted links using bloggers part two: filtering your results

written by MO.com Subject Matter Resource Max Holloway

Read part one where I showed you how to build a list of relevant websites using Wordtracker’s Keyword Tool.

Preparing your list

Now you need to get your list ready to capture all the information you need.

1. Remove the columns; Top links, Co-link count and Targeted

2. Add columns for “Email” and “Name”

You should have something that looks like this:

Filtering your list

This part generally takes the most time and can be quite boring, so if you have an aspiring intern or assistant now’s the time to get them in!

If not put on some good tunes and get ready to spend some quality time with Excel.

You need to remove websites that are irrelevant or not blogs/websites that will accept guest content.

Some sites you can delete straight away such as;

• Sites with a foreign country code Top Level Domains i.e. www.example.jp www.example.de www.example.fr etc..

• Huge websites like; Wikipedia, squidoo, feedburner, blogger

• Sites with less than 100 linking domains (you can adjust this depending on the size of your list)

Now you have to visit some websites. Get ready to find some amazing sites, along with witnessing some of the greatest crimes in web design along the way!

How to tell if it is a good website

1. The website should be about your subject, in this case entrepreneurs or closely related e.g. Start-up advice or business advice

2. The site should have some recent content, from within the last month. This lets you know someone’s still home!

3. The site should regularly post content, once a week is good, once a day is great.

4. Their content should be of a good quality.

5. You should be able to contribute something to this website, be it interviews, guest posts, advice or other content.

Once you’ve met all of those criteria you can start to get some contact information.

Collecting names and emails

Sometimes these can be extremely hard to find. What you really want is the name and email address of the editor, blogger or journalist who has actually written the content on the website, however you may have to settle for a generic info@ email or contact form.

Most websites have a contact us page or an about us page and 80% of the time there is some kind of email there.

If not you can go to the home page, press CTRL + F on your keyboard and search the page for words like “contact” “get in touch” “email” and so on.

You can even Google the person’s name to see if they have their own site, there will usually be an email or contact form there.

It is important for you to collect the name too! I will never forget the young webmaster who replied to one of my more generic emails with something along the lines of

“I would have happily worked with you for some guest blogging, however you did not address me by my name. So I shant!”

And that was that.