How to Find Your Seed Prospects - 2.1. Link Building Course

Hey, it's Sam Oh, and welcome to the second module, which is all about link prospecting. Now, I've structured this module in three lessons, where each lesson represents a step in creating personalized and scalable link building campaigns. Step one is to find your seed prospects, which is what this lesson is all about. Step two is to find lookalike prospects based on your seeds, which will broaden the scope of your link building campaign. And step three is to segment your prospects, which will help you scale your campaigns in a personalized way. So let's get started with finding seed prospects. Seed prospects are simply people who link to a page for a specific reason. For example, did they link because of a specific point that was made in the content? Is it because they like the brand or was it something else? Now, finding seed prospects is important because it'll do two things for you. Number one, you'll understand why people are linking to a page. And number two, because you know why, you'll know how to approach them in your outreach pitch. And we'll get into some examples in a bit. Now, the most important skill for a prospector to have when it comes to finding seed prospects is the ability to identify patterns. And by pattern, I'm referring to common reasons for linking or a commonality among linking pages. Now, we've already gone through a couple of examples in the previous module, but I want to talk about how you can find opportunities for your own site. And it's really just about looking for patterns in three places when analyzing a competing page's link profile. And these places are the context of the backlinks, which help you understand why people are linking to a page, and we'll specifically be looking at anchors and surrounding text, the referring page's titles, which tells you where their links are coming from and or the types of pages they're coming from, and the actual content, which tells you what your email pitch will be based on. So let's start off by looking at the context of links to a competing page. Just as I showed you in lesson 1.2, studying the anchors of a competing page's backlinks can help you understand why people link to a page. And these whys can often be considered as linkable points. For example, when we created our SEO stats page, we looked at the anchor's profile for top-ranking pages. And we immediately noticed that the majority of links were attributable to specific stats that were mentioned. This is a pattern. Now, if we click on the 93% anchor, it'll open up the backlinks report with that anchor set in the filters. And as you can see, the context of the link is 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Now, this stat alone doesn't help with a pitch angle. You have to look for a pitch angle that's related to the stat. And it was pretty easy for us to come up with one because if you click through to that page, you'll see that 93% isn't even mentioned on it. Plus, the stat was around a decade old, meaning it's completely irrelevant today because the way we use the internet has changed a lot. So as a pitch angle, we could say something like, hey, you mentioned this stat, but where'd you get that from? The page you're linking to doesn't say that. Plus, recent stats show that 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Blah, blah, blah. Alright, let's move on to the second place to look, and that's the referring page titles of a competing page's backlinks. In the previous module, we discovered some pages that are linking to a link building guide. And the reason for them linking is because that guide used to have an ebook. So as you can see from the anchors, the linking pages are saying to go and download an ebook. Now, seeing as there's really only a few good linking pages, it wouldn't be worth creating an ebook to maybe get a few links. We need to look for a commonality that can potentially expand our pool of prospects. And that commonality is in the titles of referring pages. As you can see, all of the titles are listicles on free SEO ebooks. So our seed prospects are listicles on SEO ebooks. As for the pitch angle, we can simply pitch a free ebook without any kind of opt-in, which many of their recommendations use. Not a great benefit-packed pitch, but it's a good starting point. Alright, the third place to look for patterns is the actual content itself. And the easiest thing you can look for is incorrect, dangerous, or outdated recommendations. Now, this one is quite situational, but nevertheless, it's something worth paying attention to because it works pretty well. I'll give you an example in the SEO industry. So this page on LSI keywords has over 500 referring domains. But there's no such thing as LSI keywords. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. And in short, it's an indexing method and has nothing to do with keywords. Now, today, this page explains that LSI keywords aren't really a thing. But when it was first published, it was a full-blown guide on how to use these quote-unquote LSI keywords. Meaning everyone who linked to the page prior to the update was linking to inaccurate information. So our seed prospects are anyone who's linking to this guide prior to it being updated. Or anyone who's recommending their readers to use LSI keywords. As for the pitch, we could just tell them that there's no such thing as LSI keywords and recommend our content, which explains what LSI is, how it actually works, and also mention that we talk about whether using related words, phrases, and entities actually help to rank higher in Google. Meaning, we address the reason why they recommended using these so-called LSI keywords in the first place. Now, these are just a few places to look that can help surface some unique prospecting opportunities. But you don't need to limit yourself to these because then you're just stuck in the box of sand. The point of this lesson is to show you how finding a pattern or footprint that has a pitch angle baked into it can be the foundation for link outreach campaigns. This is a skill that I highly recommend working on because it's what you'll need to find seed prospects. From there, it's just about following that footprint to find more prospects like your seeds. And in the next lesson, we're going to talk about using your seeds to expand your list of prospects as well as the tools you can use. I'll see you there.