When I get stuck on coming up with target sites, content ideas or both, I sometimes turn to Yasiv. It’s useful for many link building purposes—if you’re working in the e-commerce sector, it shows you what kind of products people are buying along with your product. You can also couple it with other tools to do competitor analysis, pitch products for reviews to relevant sites, or use it to just see how your product is doing in general.
Find links between products purchased together to generate content and target site ideas for links. [tweet this]
Yasiv pulls its data from Amazon, so it’s pretty indicative of what people are buying. I’ll note that it has a few bugs because it’s a rapidly evolving service, but it works nicely for our purposes.
All of that is great, but I want to talk about target sites and content ideas.
When the Yasiv team describes their service they say:
“We often decide what to buy based on what others are buying, and that’s no bad thing, after all. If something is bought by many of our friends there has to be a reason. Maybe it’s a good product and worth the money? This is where Yasiv steps in; it shows you what people are buying along with other products. A link between the two products means that they are often bought together. By simply observing the network of products one can guess at what is popular and what isn’t.”
See the “l” word up there? Link! We’re on the same page.
Let’s start with the content part first, since it’s self-contained.
Content: Just for fun, let’s say I run a site that specializes in wireless dog fences. So we do a Yasiv search for “wireless dog fence.” A quick search reveals that people buy those fences along with batteries, pet doors, bark collars, fence accessories and installation gear (wires, staples, splices, extra collars, lights, waterproofing, etc.).
That gives me some great ideas—I could write about smart dog doors, what kind of batteries to use with my fences or collars, installing or uninstalling a fence with proper products, the ethics of bark collars (I’m against them, BTW, but it’s an interesting topic!), etc. That’s a huge flood of ideas and it took less than 10 seconds.
Target sites: Okay, so we have the content down. For target sites, we’re going to take one of those products or product categories we found (even if it’s our competitor’s product) and plug it in to Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer. We get a big list of sites.
Naturally, you have to do some manual digging and sorting to get those target sites, but there they are. If someone has written about bark collars, dog doors, dog fences or anything related, then it’s a relevant site.
If one of your content ideas fits, you don’t suck at writing and you’re decent at writing an email, you have a quality spot for a guest post.
This isn’t something I do all the time (I don’t build too many links these days), but it helps me out when I’m stuck. It’s especially useful when I feel like I’ve reached the end of the internet, or I’ve exhausted every possible topic for relevant content—those are just mental restrictions I put on myself, and this helps me break through those restrictions. Using this tactic helps me think productively and make progress again.
Note: Thanks to link building genius Nicholas Chimonas for the inspiration.
This tip, and 19 more, can be downloaded in one PDF.