5 Ways to Find Link Prospects, Not Just Keywords

Let's talk about prospecting. So, prospecting is basically finding the website that you want to get a link from. And prospecting doesn't have to happen later in your process of setting up a campaign or building links. You can actually use prospecting as the starting point of your link building, because maybe you want to see which type of prospect link out a lot around a topic that's relevant to your audience. So how do you find these link prospects? Well, I like to use different prospecting angles. What I mean with angles is, let's say your link building landscape is a 20-sided dice.

A 20-sided dice is something we use in Dungeons and Dragons. Anyway, so this dice has a lot of different sides or facets to it. Now, your link building can be based on only one prospecting angle, which is totally fine. But if you're aware that there are more angles you can use to find different sets of prospects, you open up your perspective so much more, and you usually tend to find different websites to get your links from than your competitors would, or different areas where your audience is hanging out. So let's talk about a couple of different prospecting angles.

Of course, the most obvious one is keywords, keywords that you want to rank on or keywords that are related to your products and services, etc. Then you want to find sites that rank on those keywords and get links from them. Another prospecting angle, of course, is competitor backlinks. So you set up a competitor backlink campaign and that way you can get some really good links that your competitors have. Actually, one of the best links you can get, that's something else, is from a competitor because they're trying to rank on the same keywords.

Another example of prospecting angle is around pain points. So the pain points that your audience have, you find sites that talk about those pain points and you try to get links from them. Or maybe there are companies that operate in the same realm as you are with the same audience or overlap, but they're not competing with you. That's a great opportunity to collaborate with other companies that are very willing to link to you because you have something that's useful for their audience. The last prospecting angle example is correlated interest.

Here, the relevancy gets stretched a little bit more, but basically it's an interest that correlates with the same audience that's not necessarily related to your product or services. So for instance, cybersecurity professionals, a large portion of them is actually interested in gaming, so it's a correlated interest. So let's look at how these different prospecting angles work in finding link prospects for the example websites.