Identifying Your Target Audience for Links
Identifying Your Target Audience for Links
Once you have your idea mapped out, it shouldn’t be too hard to find out who will fall within your target audience. Generally, you just need to brainstorm subjects related to your content. Let’s take a look at an example.Imagine you are putting together a piece of content entitled, The Definitive Guide to Baking the Perfect Cupcakes. You are producing this content because you own a local bakery which sells cupcakes as well as lots of other lovely things.
Who would be interested in this guide?Food bloggers: the obvious choice!Parent bloggers: they may want to teach their kids how to make cupcakes and your guide will show them how to do thisRecipe websites: because your guide will contain lots of great recipes for different types of cupcakesParty websites: no party is complete without a plate of cupcakes
With just a minute or two of thinking, we’ve easily come up with four types of websites that may be interested in our cupcake guide. Now we can start researching these in more detail to get a better idea of whether or not we stand a good chance of getting a link from them.
Techniques For Finding Link TargetsIn this section I will outline a few simple techniques that you can use to turn your idea of “food bloggers” into a full list of websites that you can contact.
Find Lists of Bloggers
By far the most simple place to start is a search on Google like this:
This single search gave me lots and lots of great lists to search through. The big advantage of using this technique is that someone else has already done the hard work for you by curating the list.
You can then copy the list into Google Docs or your own spreadsheet. From here, you can copy and paste all the URLs into a tool like URL opener, which will open all the URLs for you with one click. You can then go through them all, find out if they’re relevant to your content, and if so, find their contact details.
Find Bloggers on Twitter
Followerwonk is a fantastic tool that is part of the Moz tools, and if you have a Moz Pro subscription you can use it for free. It allows you to do all kinds of cool stuff with your Twitter account, but the feature that we’re interested in allows you to search Twitter bios. We are going to search it for “cupcake blogger” to see if we can find anyone on Twitter who mentioned “cupcake blogger” in their bio:
You can select more options such as number of followers and location, but for now we want to keep the search quite broad. This search resulted in 12 people on Twitter being found:You can then download these results into a spreadsheet which makes them easier to sort through. It will also tell us if they have a website or not:
Not a bad result for a few minutes’ work! These are also super-relevant to our content, so we know that we have a good chance of getting a link or, at the very least, getting some good feedback from the blogger.