4 Email Alerts For Finding Link Earning Opportunities

I often hear people say link building is “hard”, “time consuming”, or “expensive”.

But what if I told you that instead of spending lots of time trying to get people to link to your website, that instead you get an email in your inbox when a linking opportunity arises!

By creating alerts, it is like you hire a FREE intern who’s only job is to search the internet 24/7 looking for opportunities to harvest links.

Today I will show you 4 alerts that will automatically send link opportunities to your inbox.

1. Interview Alerts

The first alert I like to set up is for finding interview opportunities. Journalists are always looking for quality sources to use in their publications. Why can’t your client be the source?

There are a few popular websites that are used to help connect journalists with sources for their stories.

• Help A Reporter Out (HARO) – Free
• Pitch Rate – Free
• Source Bottle – Free
• Prof Net – Paid

The free services can still have great opportunities but you may need to filter through more listings.

Be sure to use the filters that the platform provides to ensure you only get alerts that would make a good opportunity.

I also create a second filter within gmail so that I only see this alert if they contain specific key terms like “SEO” or “Content Marketing”.

Alert Tips:

• Timing is key! Journalists are looking for sources now, if you put it off a couple of days it will be too late.
• Create a pitch template so when an opportunity arrives you can quickly reply without spending too much time.

2. Company Mention Alerts

Often times a company does not know what people are writing about them. If a journalist is talking about your company at all that is great news!

If you can get a journalist who is talking about you to link to your website that is even better.

Company mention alerts are really easy to set up. Basically take your;

• Brand Name
• Brand Name Mispellings
• Domain Name
• Domain Name Mispellings
• Executive Names
• Product Names

Alert Tips:

• Timing is key! Journalists are more likely to update a link to a story if it’s very recent. Anything over a couple weeks is highly unlikely
• Don’t be too pushy on trying to get a link from that article. It is far better to build a relationship with the writer so you can be included in the next article.

3. Review Alerts

If you have a service or product allowing influencers who share your customers can be great for gaining new customers while building authority back to your site at the same time.

To get alerted of these opportunities test using some of these queries in a Google Alert.

• “Submit A Product Review”
• [keyword] intitle:”product review”
• “[your service] giveaway”
• “[your service] review”

Alert Tip:

Create an email template to scale getting in contact with these opportunities

4. Image Alerts

Images can be great for earning links, especially infographics. The problem is finding when people use your images without citing you as a source.

To set up an alert for this I use a tool called Image Raider, which alerts you when it finds your images are used online for free. If you want an in depth tutorial on how to set up these alerts check out this post on building links with images.

Below is an example of how I have it set up to monitor the infographics that SolarWinds creates:

Alert Tips:

• Thank people for using your image before asking them to link to the source.
• If the post is older than a year it can be hard to get.

Conclusion

These alerts are just some of the ways of the ways that I’ve found to automate finding linkbuilding opportunities for clients. If you are interested in more ways to easily build links check out my Link Harvesting course.

What alerts do you use? Please let me know in the comments.

More Resources:

• SEER PR & Media Linkbuilding
• Linkbuilding with Google Alerts
• Ultimate List of IFTTT Recipes for Marketers

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.