The most common mistake internet marketers make is publishing content in hopes that people will find it. A typical content marketing strategy involves sharing a published article on social media and maybe sending out a mailer. That’s it. This typically does not work well, as you may have already experienced, so what most people do is compensate by increasing the volume of articles they publish. If one new article per week brings a little exposure than five new articles will bring a little more. But ultimately, nobody truly influential is finding your content, nobody who is perfectly suited for your content who also has a large following of readers to re- share it with. These are the people you need if you want your content to go viral.

Get To Know The Linkerati In Your Market

Linkerati, as defined by Techopedia, is a term used to describe Internet users who are most likely to become the target of a link bait campaign. Linkerati have the capability to make an impact on website traffic flow due to their enthusiasm to generate and share links. They usually generate quality links that help websites to gain higher rankings in the search engines results. In doing so, they help websites boost their traffic, which can be redirected to more earnings via marketing products or services, selling promotion spots, or simply pointing links to information on other websites.

If you write your content to appeal specifically to the linkerati in your market then there is a good chance they will share it with their following once you publish. This process alone will put you ahead of the vast majority of all internet marketers in your industry.

The important thing to understand, however, is linkerati are contacted all the time by everyone looking for exposure. This means you will need to be patient in your attempts to reach them and will need to get on their radar before asking for links or shares. Instructions on how to do this will be discussed later in this course.

How to Find Linkerati in Your Industry

Buzzsumo.com – Buzzsumo allows you to search for articles on any topic and returns them in order of popularity based on social shares.

Alltop.com – Alltop is like a directory for popular blogs. You can search for blogs covering a number of different industries to find potential linkerati for your Power Pages. Big blogs like to link to other big blogs, so be sure to go through all of their links to find more linkerati to add to your list.

Link Profiles – Looking through the most valuable backlinks other sites have is a great way to uncover new linkerati sources. To do this you can use an SEO tool like Ahrefs.com. Simply enter the URL of a big site in your industry to see all of the best sites linking to them. You can then go through this list to find potential linkerati sources.

Google – Google is an invaluable tool for finding great linkerati sources. The important thing is to think past the top ten. When searching Google be sure to look at least five pages deep to find linkerati sources. Many industries have top ten rankings dominated by large corporate websites, so it’s sometimes necessary to dig deeper to find your linkerati.

How to Find the Content that Interests Linkerati

The best way to find the favorite topic of any linkerati is to spend time looking through all of their recent content to get a feel for what they like to link to. Pay more attention to what they link to from within their articles than the topic of the articles themselves. You’re not asking them to publish your content, you simply want them to link to your Power Page from within their content.

To expand your research, or to get a birds-eye view of what linkerati link to most, you can use Ahrefs.com. It has a tool that shows you all outbound links, ranked by value.

How to Contact Linkerati

As mentioned earlier, you will want to take a couple of extra steps before contacting linkerati so that you’re on their radar once you do. The best way to do this is to comment on a couple of their blog posts and share some of their content on your social accounts. You can also re-share content they’ve shared and can even send them a quick email just to comment on one of their articles or to offer compliments on their work. By doing this, by the time you email them to ask for a link they will already be familiar with who you are.

Shortly after you take these initial steps to contact them it will be time to start sharing your Power Page. The best way to do this is by emailing them twice, first to simply share your content with them and second to ask for a link.

Email Templates

Linkerati Initial Contact

Subject: About your {!Topic} article

Hi {!Name},

I’ve always enjoyed {!Site Name}, I recently shared one of your articles on Twitter, I also commented on {!Article Name}.

Actually, that’s why I’m writing. I just published an in-depth article about {!Topic} called {!Article Name}. Because you’ve published similar articles like this one I really liked at {!URL}, I thought you might be interested.

My article is at: {!URL}

Just wanted to share it with you and to thank you for making {!Site Name} such a great resource.

Thanks! {!Your Name}

Linkerati Follow up Email

Subject: Question about {!Site Name}

Hi again,

I emailed you about a week ago just to say hi and to share an article of mine that I thought you would like. It’s similar to your article ‘{!Their Article Name}’, mine is ‘{! Your Article Name}’. You can find it here: {!URL}

If you think your readers might find it as useful as mine have, feel free to share it with them either on social media or on {!Site Name}. I will be happy to share yours as well.

Thanks, {!Your Name}

Outreach is a Numbers Game

One last note on outreach, i.e. emailing people to share your content: it’s a numbers game. The more people you reach out to the more links and shares you will get. It is common to get one reply for every ten people you email. If your industry is more competitive, one reply for every twenty may be common. This means you will need to research and contact potentially hundreds of websites to result in enough links and shares to rank well.

The important thing to remember is to not get discouraged. Approach your outreach with this in mind. Understand that you will need to contact quite a few sites over a period of time before you can expect results. But also understand that the results will come. This is a proven method that can work for every website in every industry. Creating useful Power Pages that will appeal directly to the people you will share them with is a powerful strategy that will propel your website up the search engines, past your competition. It may take some time and effort, but it is a proven formula that works.

Organize Your Outreach

To keep track of every site you email, who replied and what they said you will need to create an outreach spreadsheet. Your spreadsheet should contain the URL, contact name, contact information and everything else necessary to keep track of every email.

Use Yesware To Manage Outreach

A popular tool for conducting email outreach is http://www.yesware.com/, an extension for Gmail that allows you to track email events such as when they’re received, opened and clicked on. It also allows you to create email templates and tracks the performance of each to help you improve your email conversion ratios. One of the most useful features is the scheduler which allows you to schedule when you want emails sent so that they’re most likely to be seen and read. For example, an ideal time for sending outreach emails is Tuesday through Friday between 11am and 4pm.