You have to be on the ball when it comes to link building opportunities. There is no better way to increase visibility on a web so saturated with information than to be able to direct others to your site from trusted sourced. But finding those sources is so frustrating and time consuming that you can be excused for deeming it a waste of effort.
For a long time, I thought the same. I would manually trudge through endless social media mentions, groups, websites, Google searches and blog networking sites trying to get a little nibble. I would always manage to find something, but the payoff was so minimal most the time that I might as well have skipped the aggravation.
Web alerts really changed that for me. I had a ‘eureka!’ moment when I realized how stupid I have been to overlook the tool in the first place. After all, I was already using it for industry notifications, blog mentions, and even had a social media dashboard for reputation monitoring.
But if you think about it, it makes complete sense to use alerts to find link building opportunities. First of all, you can easily set alerts up to let you know whenever someone mentions that they are looking for guest posters who work within specific industry’s. As soon as Google indexes the page, you will get a notification.
Next, you can find out whenever someone mentions you on their website. It happens more often than you might think, and often bloggers write reviews or experiences without mentioning to the people in question that they have done so.
You can also get alerts on mentions of competitors on blogs. Sometimes, bloggers will allow guest posters from other brands to come on and promote their own, for the sake of fairness. Or, you can catch negative mentions of competitors and offer to make things right yourself.
I usually prefer to use Google Alerts for this. Which is the preference for everyone I have ever spoken to on the subject, so I doubt you will be surprised to hear that. But for social media catches, which is another important part of finding linking opportunities, I use a dashboard software. Specifically, I use Hootsuite, but others like TweetDeck or the dozens of others out there.
When I get the Google Alerts, I also like getting them in an RSS feed. This lets me go through them at my leisure, seeing what catches my eye on a day to day basis. It saves time and allows me to quickly filter out non-relevant or useful results. It works better for me than emailed alerts, though you might feel differently.
In the end, using web alerts to monitor activity and find potential link building opportunities is a fantastic way of cutting out the time and effort of doing it manually. You can see the web at large, as well as social media sites. It is quick, painless and lets you focus on more important tasks.
To supercharge your link building, use our Link Tracking utility that makes sure that all your hard-earned backlinks are up and running!
Image Credit: 1.
