Posted by Ethan Lyon
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
For a long time I’ve been pulling an RSS feed from Twitter for the query: “guest post” OR “guest author” [TOPIC] into my Google Reader. Every morning I would check it, blaze through 15-20 URLs — most of which were the same URL being tweeted. Then, I'd record the best guest post opportunities, reach out to bloggers, publish a guest post and get links. It was a great strategy and resulted in a lot of guest post links.
Although having an RSS feed was a bit more efficient than performing a Twitter search every day, it was boring, time consuming and I just really didn’t like doing it. Things you don’t like, don’t last.
So, I made a tool that does all the heavy lifting. This tool pulls the same RSS feed that I had in my Google Reader into Google Docs, finds all of the t.co URLs, enlarges them, eliminates duplicates based on domain, and presents them in a nice package.
Because it has helped me tremendously, I thought it could also help out other agency SEOs and small business marketers / owners.
How to use it
1. Go to http://ow.ly/8x9gF.
2. Make a copy of the sheet.
3. Type a one word topic that most describes your client / niche in cell B1.
You’ve likely chosen a topic too narrow if you’re seeing an error.
4. You’ll notice a bunch of t.co links populating cell A2. Wait five seconds (I know, tough, right?) and they will change into unique URLs.
5. Copy 5-6 URLs:
6. Paste them into Ontolo’s Link Reviewer: http://ontolo.com/link-building-url-reviewer
7. Click “Review URLs” and watch all of the URLs open in new tabs in your browser:
8. When you find a viable linking opportunity, paste the URL in column D:
9. Because no one expects you to remember all of the linking prospects in column D, it will tell you if there’s a duplicate in column F:
10. Now, add your link prospect’s contact info in column G.
11. Go to your calendar, create an event about an hour after you wake up that says, “Find Guest Posts Via Twitter” and add this link: http://ow.ly/8x9gF in the event. Set it to repeat every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
12. Lastly, perform outreach. Use John Doherty's Twitter outreach article as a base and start building links!
Parting Remarks
Because the guest post opportunities are curated by Twitter users, it could pick up posts that might not explicitly say guest post in the title or even in the body of the article, yet be a guest post. So it should help you uncover some gems that you might not find via Google.
Next Versions
In next versions, expect to see Google Blog Search, multiple queries and URL analysis. That’s what I had in mind but I’d love to hear what you would like to see in the next version of this tool.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post / watch the video and hopefully you can benefit as much as I have. Looking forward to your thoughts!
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