Cool New Link Tools And… SEO Discounts!

I’ve come across some cool tools to use in your link building efforts and have a handful of discounts I wanted to share so let’s get right to it!

Groundswell profile tool

All link building tactics have one thing in common—they need relevant pages to secure the links from.  Notice I didn’t say “authority pages” or “high PageRank pages” but “relevant pages”.  Why?  Because your demographic doesn’t always hang out on high authority or high PageRank pages.  People push content, not pages so it’s important to find sites where large numbers of “your people”   visit and work hard to get links from those pages.

The key is finding those relevant pages.  Here’s where this cool tool called The Social Technology Profile Tool from Groundswell can help.

Using profiles from the popular Groundswell book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, this tool creates an outline and classifies people according to how they use social media.  You provide age ranges, Country and gender and the tool will tell you what social profile they fit.

For example, I’m working with a company who’s primary demographic is young,  male and based in the USA. According to the Groundswell tool, this group reads blogs, watch videos, download podcasts, participates in forums and reads/provides customer reviews.  This is good information to have and can help guide you when creating elements for a website and also when looking for sites to secure links from.

Another little gem from the site is Forrester’s Groundswell Awards program which “recognizes excellence in accomplishing business goals with social applications.”  That’s fancy speak for how companies use real-time social media platforms to promote themselves.  What makes this awards program a gem is the list of participants.  Check out the couple hundred sites from this year and last who participated and take note of their private/public forums and communities.  Many of these never show up in searches or have visible PageRank but all are extremely relevant. These forums host brand passionista’s making them highly desirable vehicles to get involved with.    Remember… people push content, not pages.

WildVoice

You know all those articles you’ve been writing and distributing all over the Web? Use them again to secure more links by:

•  Creating a podcast of each article
•  Use a free service like WildVoice to create the podcast
• Add the new podcasts to all the podcast directories.

WildVoice members (free easy sign-up) can “create, personalize, publish and share Podcasts and other media online …without the need for complicated software or expensive sound equipment.”  Sounds good to me especially if you’ve never done a podcast or aren’t sure you want to invest the time and money into a professional set up.

In addition, you can record anything you’ve written and/or published such as blog posts, FAQ’s and tutorials.  Read the content, discuss for five minutes, include a take away and you have an informative podcast.  And said in my best Ronco announcer voice:  But wait: there’s more!

Once you have a good number of podcasts and have added them to the podcast directories you can:

• Create a new section on your site to house them
• Issue a press release announcing the new resource and your recordings
• Create an RSS feed for the page and add to RSS directories
   

BackType Alerts

BackType Alerts is an alert service focused on retrieving keywords from blog comments and comments found on social media sites such as Digg, Reddit and Twitter. It has four unique features:

•  You can set the service to return (via email) comments being left by individual bloggers—you’ll see their comments and where (the URL) they were left 
•  You can search their database for a specific blogger to see where they’re commenting and what’s being said 
•  You can watch an URL and see all of the “conversation surrounding the post or article”
•  BackType searches for links on Twitter even those using URL shorteners

I love these alert services for the small gems they uncover and the edge they provide in securing links quickly and early.  I’m not a fan of comment link dropping but I am a huge supporter of joining in where it makes sense.  This type of tool is also handy in pushing time sensitive material or dropping in with special offers when the conversation touches on your products.  Sometimes, it’s just about being first.

WhosTalkin  is similar to BackType. I always run a couple tools at a time to be sure I’m finding everything out there.

Discounts!

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing about the recession, swine flu and Chrysler.  It seems we’re all sick, broke and fueling private planes. I thought it was time to hear about something fun so I went begging and got a handful of discounts on some very cool tools.  I’ll list a couple here and then point you over to my new and improved blog (Link Spiel) for the rest.  Hey sorry but I need some traffic to the new blog!

Aaron Wall of SEOBook fame is offering a 25% discount for new members off a first month membership to the SEOBook training program which includes the training program, exclusive SEO tools and the cutting-edge SEO Community Forum.  Discount URL: https://www.seobook.com/debra-mastaler-rocks Discount ends: May 31, 2009.

URLWire, owned by fellow Link Week columnist Eric Ward, is a highly regarded news service for announcing meritorious Web content to the right people.  The mission of URLwire is to help your high quality content attract high quality links from trustworthy sources, like online site reviewers, bloggers, editors, writers, vertical web guides and social linkers. Discount offered:  Second announcement at no charge  Promo code:  LSUW  Discount expires August 31, 2009.

Best Of The Web is pleased to offer all Link Week/Link Spiel readers an exclusive 15% discount on BOTW directory submissions.  SAVE 15% on All new directory submissions in the Best of the Web Directory and BOTW Blog Directory from now until May 31, 2009.  Promo code:  BOTW15  Note:  Discount code available for their UK directory as well.

RubberStamped Directory Pay for one listing in Rubberstamped.org and get a free listing in BangDrum.com. Email [email protected] following your submission at Rubberstamped for instuctions/code to BangDrum.  Discount expires June 31, 2009

That’s it!  Pop over to The LinkSpiel  for the rest of the directory discounts.  Until next time – happy linking!